noah | October 19, 2007 4:20 am

If you read just one response to Sasha Frere-Jones’ attempt to ramp up his Google Blog Search hits, make it Carl Wilson’s argument in Slate that the problem facing indie–aside from the fact that it’s a “genre” with boundaries that are seemingly defined by the biases and record collections of whoever’s doing the defining at the time, ahem–isn’t rooted in race as much as it is in class. A sample: “With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded ‘creative’ college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young ‘knowledge workers’ in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.” [Slate]