Watching Sleigh Bells perform last night on Saturday Night Live, we came to a great truth about something we’ve been trying to put our finger on for a while now.  Let’s call it The Problem With Current Music, or more specifically, The Problem With Current White Music.  Hear us out on this one.  Basically since the advent of recorded music, and especially since the 1950s, the most significant things white people have done musically have been directly influenced by or straight up stolen from what black American artists were doing.  From Elvis, to the Beatles, to the Stones, to Zeppelin and beyond, few white artists were immune.  Even Bing Crosby was heavily indebted to black American jazz singers and musicians.  That’s not to say that they didn’t add anything important to the music.  We’ve already argued in these pages that the Beatles are incontrovertibly the greatest band of all time.  And, that’s not to say that there haven’t been exceptions to the rule.  Surely not every white artist stole from black artists.  But, by and large, the last hundred or so years of popular music wouldn’t exist without black American musical ingenuity.  This is not a racial diatribe; this is simple fact.

The problem is that about twenty years ago, hip-hop took over the world.  Hip-hop, like its jazz predecessor bebop, is something that most white artists simply can’t do.  But, unlike bebop, which remained a niche genre, hip-hop became the monolithic musical movement of its generation.  What rock & roll was to the ’60s, hip-hop was to the ’90s (it started in the ’80s, but didn’t really achieve cultural dominance until the early-’90s).  When this happened, white artists were mostly unable to incorporate hip-hop into what they were doing.  They still can’t quite get it.  It remains the only major black musical creation of the 20th century that wasn’t ever co-opted by white artists.

So what happened?  Hip-hop continued to maintain its dominance, and still does.  Lacking something new and fresh to build from, white artists (again, with notable exceptions) kept drawing from the pool of rock & roll/punk.  Their influences became increasingly inbred.  The result–like the result of all inbreeding– was a spineless, sexless progeny.  Critics called it indie rock, and it dominated white music in the first decade of the new century.  Death Cab For Cutie, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, The Shins — music even your grandmother would fine tame.  That’s not to say it lacks merit.  But if you can successfully argue that any of those bands have a spine or understand the importance of rhythm (sex) in music, then we’ll let you run Thriller from now on.

Here’s how Sleigh Bells fits into all of this.  The world of music tastemakers (see our Pitchfork review reviews!) is still largely a white world.  Lacking any sort of real authority to speak about hip-hop, or to make or break hip-hop reputations, they begin touting bands like Sleigh Bells (or Death Cab, or Fleet Foxes, etc).  No matter that on Sleigh Bells’ SNL performance, they looked and sounded, quite frankly, like those two douchey guys who lived on your floor in the freshmen dorm who both played guitar and knew a girl who could kind of sing and figured that’s all they needed to start a band.  But this isn’t a dorm room.  This is, all of a sudden, the musical vanguard.

So, here’s the nut, to use a journalistic term:  Lacking any new inspiration, the vanguard of white music has become completely lost.  Its head has been up its ass for a long time.  Sleigh Bells might as well be the vanguard’s poster children.

Oh, and one more thing.  Sleigh Bells started in Brooklyn, adding yet another in a long, long line of mediocre bands from Brooklyn that become critical darlings.