The Go! Team are a multicultural gang who chuck everything in; old school hip-hop, indie guitar, Japanese pop, cheerleader chants, Charlie Brown piano etc, etc. It sounds like a GCSE music project on the verge of collapse, but it's done with such innocent, youthful gusto that you can't help but cheer them on. Their first album is highly recommended; it'll take years off you.

There are probably more black people in indie than ever before: Kele from Bloc Party, Tunde from TV On The Radio, Murray Lightburn of The Dears, Lightspeed Champion. And while none of them make particularly black-influenced music, that's to miss the point of the article. Because, unlike 70s rock, indie's never been particularly black-influenced, taking most of its cues from the Velvets and the Byrds. And as for where the sexiness went: was it ever there in indie music?

Sorry, I haven't read the article but... The only relationship between indie and MOBO that I can recall now was that in the 1980s former indie bands would embrace soul music as a way of displaying maturity and getting out of the indie rut they thought they were in. Examples: Orange Juice in their second album (having a black funky drummer helped), Scritti Politti and I suppose Paul Weller by disbanding The Jam (an indie-before-indie band) did by getting funky with the Style Council.

Sexiness exists in indie still, more than ever in fact, especially if you regard artists like Franz F, Interpol, Pete Doherty, Strokes as 'indie'.

We're seeing it again. Why take apart Indie music? Instead, let's take a long look at the creative, moral and social bankruptcy that the current "Black" music scene foists upon it's audience.
Who said it was Indie Musics responsibility to carry "soul" to their white audience? I don't hear many black artists espousing the ethos and political commitment of Fugazi!

The Decemberists don't have "Soul"?
Haven't we progressed beyond this?

You right! Huzzah! Here's a merit!

I often thought that ''Arcade Fire'' has something of the Nazis about them.
They are straight laced, puritanical Aryan folk. I know that they try to fabricate a heretic nature within there lyrics, but we know that behind closed doors there flying the Confederate flag with exultant pride.

Probably kiss each page of ''Mein Kampf'' too.

I thought Green of Scritti Politti summed up Arcade Fire quite well in the Guardian a couple of months ago:

"People who enjoy this album may think I'm cloth-eared and unperceptive, and I accept it's the result of my personal shortcomings, but what I hear in Arcade Fire is an agglomeration of mannerisms, cliches and devices. I find it solidly unattractive, texturally nasty, a bit harmonically and melodically dull, bombastic and melodramatic, and the rhythms are pedestrian. It's monotonous in its textures and in the old-fashioned, nasty, clunky 80s rhythms and eighth-note basslines. It isn't, as people are suggesting, richly rewarding and inventive. The melodies stick too closely to the chord changes. Win Butler's voice uses certain stylistic devices - it goes wobbly and shouty, then whispery - and I guess people like wobbly and shouty going to whispery, they think it signifies real feeling. It's some people's idea of unmediated emotion. I can imagine Jeremy Clarkson liking it; it's for people in cars. It's rather flat and unlovely. The album and the response to it represent a bunch of beliefs about expression and truth that I don't share. The battle against unreconstructed rock music continues."

That usually gets a reaction!

The all-consuming vocals can get wearing on the ears, and prompt recollection of the beleaguered growl of Supremacist rallying.

Once attended one of these functions in days of yore, and the vehement crys are the same as Wins. Though, turning this round and relating to the original subject...Winehouse is an obvious cross-over artist, along with The Go! Team and Admin Franks. So black/white that there almost a grey baby.

P.s. Attended for observation, not advocation.

is about a (fairly drunken) theory of mine that all rock/pop music of worth has an audible Black root, whether it's blues, soul or jazz (excepting indigenous folk musics, obviously). Basically it has to swing to work (ducks head, and reaches for tin hat now).

Grant; hip hop (and Black music)'s moral bankruptcy is an interesting topic - the most popular hip hop at the moment is, by and large, lyrically bereft and musically moronic. But, I'd suggest that an awfully large amount of 50's and 60's R n B and early rock n roll was also fairly stupid ('Come on Let's Turkey Hop', anyone?) The hip hop that, in twenty years time, people will remember, artists like Little Brother, Kids In The Hall, Saigon, and yes, probably Kanye West, has a bit more substance than the latest gangsta shoot 'em up.

Although I don't agree with Jones's examples, I do think he's got a good point here. Black music has traditionally tended to be about the human voice. "Indie" (God, what a preposterous term that is) on the other hand is all about the attitude. You could swap the singers of most of the bands playing night time Radio One and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. And Green's very good, isn't he? Makes me realise why I like the Arcade Fire in short blasts. 

This same debate is raging in the NME office...but it has manifested itself in the form of ''grindie'' band Hadouken!. The lead singers grime star aspirations and inner city sensibilities (acquired from a copy of ''Haster Magazine'' borrowed from a boy he shares the Squash courts with) have made old milk-bottle arms a source of ridicule amongst ''yoofs''.

The new-rave equivalent of a death-metal ephemerist getting a Viking Warrior tattooed on his emaciated back.

Talk about bald(ing) rock stars reminded me of a quote from Brian Eno's diary of 1995 - A Year with Swollen Appendices:

21 December:
‘…At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly."'