Infinite playlist

Earlier and the passion of Sasha Frere-Jones

Earlier
Sasha Frere-Jones
Semiotext(e), 2023

Sasha Frere-Jones used to be a punchline among music writers, hated and envied in equal measure. From his perch at The New Yorker, he was the blue-blood Ivy Leaguer proclaiming hip-hop’s demise. After landing an even cushier gig at the L.A. Times, he was axed for expensing $5,000 at a strip club and lying about it. This is a man named Alexander Roger Wallace Jones who goes by “Sasha Frere-Jones.” His brother, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather have Wikipedia entries.

I guess that’s the review, but I sought out his memoir Earlier anyway. There was a vicarious thrill about Frere-Jones’s downfall, this dork who got so amped up on stimulants and Def Jam PR he thought he was living in a Hype Williams video. For a white rap blogger, that was the dream! He laid low for a while, re-emerging an advocate for leftist causes: he speaks eloquently about addiction, and gets arrested at pro-Palestine demonstrations. I’d be charmed were it not for the robust entry next to his name on the Shitty Media Men list. I’ve spent most of the last three years in Fort Greene, where Frere-Jones grew up, and thought Earlier might be worthwhile reference material. Mostly, I was curious to see how an asshole accounts for himself.

Earlier is a man floating through his life. There’s little agency or reflection on the narrator’s part: bands, women, drugs, and jobs just happen to him. Frere-Jones is a product of his environment, and the environment is rad. His prep school, St. Ann’s, is a progressive utopia, where students try on identities as they please. There’s time and space to create art, and better yet, to consider it. Violence and poverty keep to the other side of Fulton Street — if New York bottomed out in the seventies and eighties, you’d never know it from these pages. Frere-Jones gets kicked out of Brown and lands, horror of horrors, at Columbia.

There’s plenty of name-dropping — Frere-Jones rubs elbows with the Beastie Boys, and dozens of actors and musicians I’d never heard of — but he’s tactful enough to do it in an aw-shucks way. If the humility is false, Frere-Jones knows he lived through a remarkable era. At its best, Earlier reminds me of The Basketball Diaries, which is set two decades prior and two miles north. (One passage, in which Frere-Jones recounts sneaking into his teenage bedroom after a night of partying, sent me leafing through my old Carroll paperback.) Pithy truisms (“I think the skills we end up turning into vocations are simply the things we can do for a long time without complaining”¹) propound warm, wise authority. Innocence is compromised anytime Frere-Jones parlays his love of music into a job.

A few years ago somebody gave my grandpa a desktop computer with Microsoft Word loaded onto it, and he keyed out a document about his days in the tenements and the Navy, the mob and the G.I. Bill, stuff that seemed mundane at the time but had proven spectacular with sixty years’ distance. If you grow up comfortably enough, or accomplish enough, you’re expected to model a certain shame; others may see through it, but that’s better than being a pompous prick. In order to pull off real modesty — to connote wonder at time’s passage, to celebrate your achievements while acknowledging the element of chance — you must be genuine, and you must be kind. Criticism, I’ve learned, requires neither.

I was thirteen when I first encountered Frere-Jones in my mother’s New Yorkers. My entree into hip-hop was Manhattan’s FM radio stations, which conveyed rap as a medium akin to professional wrestling: 50 was beefing with Ja, who brokered an alliance with Fat Joe and Jada, who were chilly toward Nas, who had his sights on Jay’s crown. Artists walked into Hot 97 for on-air interviews and staggered out with gunshot wounds. Frere-Jones’s references were hard to parse, but he took rap seriously, isolating mechanics and expression from the melodrama of 106 & Park. Hip-hop was a circus, and Frere-Jones had been there from the start; it was not his space, but he played evangelist nonetheless.

As a critic Frere-Jones was accused of nostalgia, but I never sensed any gatekeeping. The access he enjoyed as a literate Brooklynite lent him a native’s perspective. Rap, go-go, and disco occurred in clubs and dancehalls; when they outgrew community spaces, they were susceptible to nefarious influence. Frere-Jones spent his teenage years combing through record shops, bickering with clerks, only to watch that culture, that language, that way of life disappear overnight. His angst assumed a moral, objective clarity. The arts were under attack, the bulldozers moving in, and Spotify was just a glimmer in a Swedish eye.

Frere-Jones is free to contradict himself; I suspect many aging writers aspire to Earlier’s mellow wistfulness, the angle of repose. But he can’t take back the anger of his New Yorker work, and Earlier’s contrived folksiness doesn’t compute. It’s a book about the experience of music, aimed at an audience of music snobs, who know about the author’s checkered past, which is never addressed. There’s a caginess about his past writing, an insistence that his bylined work was a side-hustle allowing him to focus on his own musical output. (What I really want to do is direct.) You can own or reject your past selves, but why dismiss them?

Glimpses of the old anger give Earlier teeth. In the mid-nineties, Frere-Jones beholds the proprietors of a Michigan bed-and-breakfast: “I think of them as Republican trash, which is unfair of me. They could just be trash.”² Around the same time he works for Columbia House, a mail-order scam disguised as a record club, “a bunch of not very smart people running around hoping to cram the current moment into a widget that can be sold, without understanding either the moment or the widget.”³ So goes music, so goes the century; the book’s best writing is limited to these asides.

There’s another book, I imagine, to be written about everything that didn’t happen. Earlier is dedicated to Frere-Jones’s first wife Deborah Holmes, who died in 2021. If their marriage is his great triumph, its dissolution is glossed over, a narrative devoid of consequence or comeuppance. His drug use begins during a period of teenage self-discovery, becoming problematic when he attempts to recapture it. Ultimately, Earlier is a tale of survival. Frere-Jones weathers a tumultuous childhood, addiction, the conglomeration of music and the collapse of publishing; he’s drunk and handsy for the better part of forty years, and gets a book deal out of it.

Of course his life didn’t just happen. His parents weren’t rich, but he paid his way through St. Ann’s and two Ivy League colleges on minimum-wage summer jobs. Proximity ensured he could elbow his way into bands, films, and plays. (In the eighties, a director buddy casts him in music videos for Living Color and Jungle Brothers.) These scenes are long gone, but Earlier is literal access journalism. Frere-Jones even recounts his dalliance with a young Mia Sarapochiello, who would play Sloane Peterson in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That’s something most men would brag about, but only Sasha Frere-Jones would write a book about it and dedicate it to his dead ex-wife.

I encountered one review arguing that Earlier’s narrative gaps read as autofiction rather than memoir. I don’t have an opinion on that subject (I believe autofiction used to just be called “fiction”), but any format can be deployed in service of an author’s agenda. When I was nineteen I found a summer job in Stamford, and rode the Metro-North out and back every day. I decided I should tackle an ambitious book, and for some reason I borrowed Bill Clinton’s My Life from the library. The hardcover edition is 1,008 pages long, with barely any mention of the sex scandals. Clinton describes his adolescence in photographic detail, then retreats into press-conference dispersion: I’ve made some mistakes, and my marriage is rock-solid. Okay, then what are we doing here? A memoir without atonement is just propaganda. We know Sasha Frere-Jones is full of shit. Does he?

1. page 158.

2. page 24.

3. page 41.