Two critics

First the sublime:

On the flowering of classical-music blogs, though it is true about so many other things, many of them not rhyming with "Ron Paul":

Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the "Snakes on a Plane" rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world.

-- Alex Ross, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Now the ridiculous:

A protege of Dr. Dre's who spent part of his youth in Detroit, [Eminem] had to be better than the local black competition simply in order to be accepted - a fascinating inversion of the racism that many blacks have encountered in the workplace.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Here is a man going out of his way to tell you that he finds the obvious to be fascinating.  A fascinating inversion!  What on earth could be fascinating about something so ordinary?  And savor the rest of that sentence:  "that many blacks have encountered in the workplace."  The days are gone when you'd tack on something like that as a result of a query from Mr. Shawn, concerned that the reader might not be familiar with the problem.  No, I feel like Mr. Frere-Jones is one drink away from telling me that you know, just because Diahann Carroll got her own show doesn't mean that racism's a settled question in this country.

This is a person who's decided he's up to the task of explaining that it's okay to dislike the Arcade Fire and Pavement because they didn't listen to enough of what the radio stations used to call race music.  (You're not going to hear any mention of Stephin Merritt, but you knew that.)

This is a person who name-checks the Decemberists and then, not long after, cries, "Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience - to entertain?"  God in heaven.  You can say any number of bad things about the Decemberists (or the Arcade Fire, for that matter), but if you think they're not trying to reach out to and entertain an audience, you're dumber than I've already alleged you to be.

Just as a rule of thumb:  if your entire corpus of public works is deracinated and etiolated (and no, liking Kanye West does not suffice), you probably should reconsider the wisdom of publicly attacking people for for being too white. 

And for God's sake, you shouldn't close your argument like this:

Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake.  If you've forgotten where the term comes from, look it up.  There's a reason the lights were off.

Or to put it in the terms of one of Frere-Jones's heroes:  "White girls they're pretty funny/sometimes they drive me mad/black girls just want get fucked all night."