First watch this.
So we're in a weird spot now, Black Keys. It took me a little while, but I got over the fact that you're two white guys from Ohio channeling Muddy Waters. The history of pop music is the history of racial appropriation, and by the time you guys got to the blues it couldn't have been about the money. So fine. Fine, too, that your version of appropriation has none of the ironic distance of, say, Jon Spencer. You're a straight up tribute act. Fine. And you want to take on the blues, the musical form most overtly about racial dispossession, slavery, and suffering. Okay. I'll look past it. Because you're a pretty good straight up tribute act.
But this video: I'm sorry, flag on the play. First appropriation, now ventriloquy. First, you gave us the incongruity of white hipsters playing pretty good blues; now you give us white hipster blues being lip-synched by a black guy for a mostly white viewership. It's all a little... minstrel-like, isn't it?
I'm beginning to think you guys are the most insidious band in America. You are the liberal, post-racial utopia that NPR listeners think they live in.
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