Does anyone else find it odd that the New York Times story about Stephin Merritt’s rockism/racism [nyt] mentions his appearance at last month’s EMP pop music conference (his endorsement of “Zippity Do-Dah” as a song that is both good and happy) but leaves out his comments about production and authenticity?

In the weirdest exchange of the already strange panel discussion, Merritt suggested that white audiences don’t notice the intense amount of production that acts like Belle & Sebastian [?] or Celine Dion use to shape their sound and are still able to view the music as authentic. In contrast, he claimed that these same audiences expect “non-white” artists to be entertainers whose work is unfiltered performance — emotion without production. The whole discussion quickly became very confusing, particularly because it rapidly became unclear whether the panelists considered Celine Dion to be “white”.

Later, a well-intentioned lady in front of us tried to make sense of the arguments by explaining that in the olden days Quebecois suffered extreme discrimination; so maybe the onstage identity mix-up was not an error. Perhaps this is why the discussion didn’t make it into the NYT story — no one else was able to make sense of it either?

(NYT story via the stranger [slog])