ALBUMS (descending points)
1. Crime Mob - Hated On Mostly
2. Against Me! - New Wave
3. Young Jeezy - The Inspiration
4. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
5. Little Big Town - A Place to Land
6. Miranda Lambert - Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
7. Flynnville Train - Flynnville Train
8. Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High
9. M.I.A. - Kala
10. v/a - Hyphy Hitz

TRACKS
1. Miranda Lambert - Famous in a Small Town
2. J. Holiday - Bed
3. Little Big Town - Novocaine
4. Feist - 1234
5. Rihanna feat. Jay Z - Umbrella
6. Spoon - The Underdog
7. Foo Fighters - Long Road to Ruin
8. White Stripes - Icky Thump
9. Bruce Springsteen - Livin' in the Future
10. Little Big Town - Fine Line

REISSUES
1. DJ Rumor - Fania Live 01: The Meat Market
2. v/a - Fill Your Head With Prog

ARTISTS
1. Fania Records
2. The-Dream
3. T-Pain
4. Akon
5. Lil' Wayne

COMMENTS
I'm a straight white American male, probably rockist, 30, married with a kid. Work primarily in the secure and lucrative fields of music retail and church music.

I don't know about you guys, but all this talk of miscegenation is making me hungry! I pity the poor Arcade Fire, whose tireless grooves briefly made them the poster kids for soulless, bluesless, reggaeless, funkless indie rock in a little-read Sasha Frere-Jones article. Look, when I finally burned "Neon Bible" to CD, I filled out the disc with a bunch of other "A" artists that had been sitting in my hard drive. So now, after the Fire, I get to hear the Hot Productions disco of Arpeggio's "Love and Desire," as well as a bunch of old psych foisted on me by a psych-collecting buddy. (We've all got one.) Angel Pavement! Apple! Ars Nova! They have beautiful diction and I think I heard harpsichords. My startling discovery? Many years ago, there was another indie rock subculture that had very little to do with African-American popular music.

I pity the Arcades because it makes little sense to group them into the same category and because, you know, they try hard. I could understand if Sasha had gone after the couple on the "Once" soundtrack, but the AF are obviously a groove band, and have for their biggest hit AN ACTUAL BLUES. ("Keep the Car Running" was a #32 Hot Modern Rock Track!) Maybe they didn't play it at the concert where Sasha heard no audible trace of blues. Or maybe he considers deep structural elements merely "philosophical." But what's his preferred incorporation of black musical elements? Superficially aping stylistic signifiers like bass sound and singing technique? (I refer, of course, to Of Montreal's white soul classic "Faberge Falls For Shuggie.") Or running with black music's gifts to the world that you can actually use without feeling silly, like a backbeat and blues changes? I mean, the Arcade Fire are French Canadian, what are they gonna do? And who, other than Stephin Merritt, expects French Canadians to be black? (Sorry.)

Before I read "A Paler Shade of White," I was basing my life on two incorrect assumptions: that Sasha Frere-Jones was black, and that everybody loved Arcade Fire because they had better beats than all the other indie-rock bands. In fact, the band they've always reminded me most of is not the E-Streets (good beats there, nonetheless), but the disco Canucks in Lime. This is for superficial reasons of Canadianism and the fact that there's a husband and wife involved in both groups, but musically the connection is there. They both use long, steady grooves to frame haunting and repetitive melodies, and the female singers bear a sort of squeaky/shrieky resemblance to one another. I doubt they sing about the same stuff, but I rarely listen to lyrics. Of course, Lime were white as Jim Jarmusch's hair, but they made music that sounds an awful lot like the certifiably black Arpeggio's "Love and Desire." So anyway, this is not so much an attack on Sasha's premise as an entreaty to lay off my homies. Confidential to Sasha: nobody expects you to sing like a black guy. Just try to get away with whatever you can.