Liberation, Freedom, and Goodness
Reviews
By Sam Hockley-Smith
I think I learned about hashtags from Sasha Frere-Jones. It was in those early days of Twitter when magazine people were just discovering that the platform could do more than just be a vehicle for people to type “At the Dallas airport, any tweeples here?” He put up, as I remember it, a tweet explaining that a hashtag was a way to congregate around a theme or idea. Basically, he said it was a way to find a discussion and then join that discussion. I can’t verify this memory exactly, but I remember feeling excitement, as if a whole door to possibility was being unlocked. That Frere-Jones was literally just describing talking on the internet is not lost on me—it’s a pretty basic concept. But as a writer and a thinker, he has an ability to communicate an infectious enthusiasm for ideas that gives us permission to examine our own opinions and stretch the boundaries of our own understanding of art and culture. He is the kind of writer who will write so incisively about a book you thought you had no interest in, that you will suddenly have a deep, immediate need to go out and purchase said book and read it right away. Sasha Frere-Jones believes in the power art holds over the human spirit.
In 2009, Frere-Jones wrote a maligned and misunderstood piece for the New Yorker that sort of declared it was the year when hip-hop had died. This was plainly wrong, but also not really his point. What he was really saying was that the paradigms of the genre had shifted and that in the years to come what we would call hip-hop might bear little resemblance to the roots of the genre. This was correct, but it happened in a more diffuse, elasticized way than anyone could have predicted. I don’t know if people remember that essay today, but at the time of its release, it shook up the discourse, emphasizing how ridiculous it would be in the twenty-first century to declare any genre of music dead. There was simply too much being made, too much expansion. If something never stops moving, can it ever die?
In a response to Frere-Jones’s New Yorker piece, the critic Simon Reynolds wrote in the Guardian: “Pundits who deem something to be in decline are invariably accused of nostalgia, so another angle of retort was that Frere-Jones was pining for the Lost Golden Age: the late 80s/early 90s, rap in its first flush of artistic maturity, but still a genre primarily oriented around samples and breakbeats.” This angle, which Reynolds himself seems skeptical of, is probably closer to the truth, but still doesn’t quite hit the mark: Frere-Jones was invariably somewhat nostalgic for his own personal apex of rap, which is viewed through the prism of his own experience—grand statements aren’t really Frere-Jones’s thing, but because he was making them in the New Yorker, personal proclamations could feel like an attempt at universal truth, even when they weren’t.
It’s helpful to frame his new book, Earlier (Semiotext(e), 2023), in this manner. Frere-Jones is not interested in defining culture so much as he’s interested in working his fingers into its contours, examining how connection to art via quiet revelation can inform our own practices and points of view. What he was not explicitly saying in many of those New Yorker columns was: My job is to describe, as best as I can, how this specific art has impacted me. Maybe it will connect with you, but if it doesn’t, that doesn’t make me right and you wrong—it just makes our experiences different. Presumably this point of view would be a little easier to understand now that monoculture is mostly dead.
Frere-Jones’s ability to capture the power of art, and in particular music, is what helped him make the jump from musician-writer to New Yorker pop critic, where he wrote regularly from 2004 to 2015. He had some other writing jobs in the years after he left the magazine, but that exciting, exploratory magic—that stretching out—could not be recaptured (it’s worth noting, though, that his newsletter on the Substack platform captures a version of that exploration, just in smaller doses). Reading deep thoughts about difficult art was, sadly, not really what the internet wanted anymore. Luckily for us, Frere-Jones was able to transmute this enthusiasm into Earlier, a too-brief book of elliptical, nonlinear fragments that track how music, death, milestones, love, change, mistakes, false starts, and near misses add up to make a life.
It is not, strictly speaking, a music book, though you will come away with new anecdotes about Prince as well as smart insights about Sonic Youth, the Gap Band, and the difference between playing in a band and playing as a band, which Frere-Jones writes about with such precision that I am pretty sure he has exactly captured the endearing and universally frustrating experience of trying to make music with teens when you are also a teen: “It is obvious when we start playing that we think playing riffs, individually, will cause the other guys in the band to fill out the song as it goes, as if riffs are generative pairs that have the DNA of an entire song built into them. Maybe if we push them together, like magnets, a form will appear. But, no, you all have to agree on what you are going to do and when, and how long the parts will last. As a job for hyperactive thirteen-year-olds, alignment is out of the question.” But even this failed session has value for the life story that Frere-Jones is jigsawing together.
Earlier is a book about how music informs life decisions—how an almost primal obsession with an art form can be the thing that carries you through hard moments or puts you in sticky situations. There’s an element of quiet wisdom to it, too. This book could only be written by someone who is deeply entrenched in the business of life: Frere-Jones now has adult children, he’s lived in New York and LA and New York again (the book does not bifurcate these life phases as much as it submits to them), he’s spent some time in a psych ward, he’s sober, he’s in a new band and his old band is in its reissue phase, and Deborah, his first wife, died from the effects of pancreatic cancer on January 4, 2021.
There’s a level of confident, generous, earned wisdom in Frere-Jones’s prose that feels at once nuanced and impossibly direct. His confidence, in the context of this book, largely ends up reading as enthusiasm, and there’s quite possibly no one better at conveying enthusiasm for the power of music. His description of listening to the radio station Hot 97 in the year 1990 made me desperate to listen to Hot 97 in the year 1990: “I can’t really overstress how good popular music is in 1990, or how ecumenical and weird Hot 97 is, a station that hovers around dance and R&B and hip-hop and pop and never makes up its mind: a perfect approach” (elsewhere in the book, Frere-Jones writes that 1990 was the last year he listened regularly to the radio). His experience listening to Madonna and Kid Creole and the Coconuts on his fire escape in the early ’80s is bursting with the promise of unfettered autonomy: “You can climb all of yourself into the unusually big outdoor space between the window opening and the grate. I squinch into that space and smoke while listening to Madonna and Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ Wise Guy. The stereo is playing but I am not technically visible, so if you opened the door, you would think me gone. This is liberation, freedom, and goodness. This will lead somewhere. I will produce these records, play bass on them, something. This music is where something is.” A few years later, he’s seeing Sonic Youth live at CBGB for the first time: “Kim Gordon drops down into a whisper for ‘Shadow of a Doubt.’ My tiny brain rumbles into popcorn and wafts away. . . . This is the part of the eighties when something cracks and all of this misshapen orphan music flows out of New York like lava, all the bands that didn’t want to play barre-chord bash bash bash. (Liquid Liquid and DNA are part of this seven-year pitch.) Everything is wide and light and unnamed.”
In a recent article in the Washington Post, the author Jennifer Egan was interviewed about her voluminous library. She talked about her obsession with 1950s crime fiction, and how the appeal for her lies in the way that “fiction contains more compressed information about an era than anything else. . . . If you’re looking for the maximum quantity of information, you can’t beat it, because it contains all the things that went without saying. History is all about saying what needs to be said; fiction tells a story, and then it tells the story the writer didn’t know they were telling—didn’t know they had to tell.” Frere-Jones’s book is not fiction, but it utilizes a similar technique: it is a portrait of a man in New York, but it’s also a portrait of New York itself—its music, its art, its ability to grind a person down and build them back up simultaneously. The disparate musical milestones find connection through interpretation that would otherwise feel disconnected and diffuse.
In October, the New York Review of Books published an excerpt from Frere-Jones’s book titled “Intentionality.” It’s one of the longer chapters, and it uses Joe Brainard’s experimental 1970s memoir I Remember as a framework for his own history. Frere-Jones deftly weaves together patchworked glimpses of a small life growing bigger: “I remember starting a vocabulary list with John Cullum and adding new words to an onionskin sheet with the typewriter and thinking I should read Pynchon since all of John’s words seemed to come from Gravity’s Rainbow. I remember winning the first Bad Brains ROIR tape from WNYU and it taking weeks and weeks to arrive in the mail. I remember being a messenger in the summer of 1983 and listening to Crash Crew on my Walkman and hoping I would get a delivery on the West Side or Queens so I could take the F and get some AC. I remember buying Bits & Pieces by Big Apple Production and wondering if they were in the Yellow Pages. I remember wanting to write more plays and be in more plays.”
This excerpt is as good an example as any from the chapter, but I picked it for the way he breathlessly moves from the excitement of discovering new ways language could work, to the interminable wait for music you knew you’d love, to the desire bordering on compulsion to create something and make a mark. Frere-Jones doesn’t explicitly utilize the I Remember framework for the rest of the book, but he does take its general approach: fragmentary memories connected by invisible tissue, cohering into a whole that echoes the dips and turns of life itself, but doesn’t resolve so much as pulse indefinitely. Frere-Jones jumps back and forth within his own timeline, giving equal weight to records he bought that made an impact on him and, say, September 11, 2001, which gets its own chapter and reads, in its entirety: “September 11 (2001) 9/11.”
Mortality looms over the whole book—Frere-Jones’s own, his first wife’s, the exciting years of downtown New York, our collective mortality (see the September 11 chapter)—but it also serves as justification for the book itself. Frere-Jones didn’t exactly live a Zelig-like life, but he was around for a lot of crucial cultural events in decades when ideas about music were being defined and cemented, and his willingness to tap into these moments alongside the personal ones—teenage confusion, mistakes, childbirth, aging, frustration—are all fodder for a life of perpetual searching and a meditation on the malleability of memory.
At one point, he gives away the game. From “Heroes (2017)”: “Our marriage ends and the college boyfriend returns, eventually marrying Deborah. Because Deborah’s memory had overwritten my own—had become mine—I realize that there could be no accurate version of remembering. There is no such thing.” He’s referring to a memory Deborah had of a romantic trip to Poland she took in college with a boyfriend. They leave each other there, soundtracked by David Bowie’s “Heroes.” After that, the song always makes her cry. It becomes his memory too. The song makes him cry too. This is the product of intertwined lives, of the accumulation of history, and the way our brains condense and mutate memories to make room for new ones. When you can’t verify reality, memory becomes reality, and Earlier is an attempt to verify at least one version of reality: Frere-Jones’s memories.
The book ends with a chapter set in 1988. Frere-Jones is in the midst of purchasing the first and then second De La Soul singles, which he is compelled and confused by. Suddenly, after a brief meditation on the accessibility of artist and composer Christian Marclay, we’re in 1989. Frere-Jones is at work. He’s thinking about forming a band. He meets Deborah for the first time. The end. Except not really.
Earlier was finished at Deborah’s request. It was published about two years after she died. She is the center around which all of Frere-Jones’s experiences in the book orbit, including the ones that happened decades before he met her and the ones that happened after she died. This is a book for her, but it’s a book about him because individual life is built from collective experience. We can’t separate what is ours from what is everyone else’s, but why would we want to? That’s like playing in a band instead of playing as a band.
Sam Hockley-Smith is a writer, editor, and radio host based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the FADER, Pitchfork, NPR, SSENSE, Bandcamp, Vulture, and more. His radio show, New Environments, airs monthly on Dublab. He spends his spare time reading.
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