Without endeavoring to summarize the entire "is Stephin Merritt a racist?" discussion (one can find a recent note and an outlinked entry-point to the debate here and here), sugarhigh! offers a couple ancillary notes:
• It's interesting that the debate focuses on trying to ascertain some abstract truth about Stephin Merritt, as if that mattered at all. The soul of some individual you're unlikely to spend much time with: whatevs. What seems more fundamentally at stake is: does this possibility begin to explain something about Merritt's music and, far more importantly, about the extent to which people embrace and identify with it, despite its dullness? That is, is this an explanatory account, or just an insult?
• Somewhere around the heart of this lies what we see as a most fundamental issue about "taste," and what can be deciphered about ideology and social damage by tracing the chasm between someone's self-proclaimed beliefs and what seems to be revealed by their actual practices. But if we're going to do this, let's do this. No one thinks they're a racist, and as sugarhigh! can attest from asking strangers "what kind of music do you like?" reflexively for years, a vast majority of white people from metropolitan areas believe they have eclectic tastes, or enjoy "everything." This everything, as it happens, is a curious one: it never includes Too Short, or Christina Milian (or, for that matter, Toby Keith or Jessica Simpson).
• So, you are saying, there are two issues being conflated here: the racism implicit in the empirical preferences of some people who insist they're not racist, and the unstated opposition between "eclectic" and "pop" that renders the term "eclectic" as self-canceling — not just meaningless, but encrusted with a rather laden delusion. Indeed. This conflation, and the labor of spackling over the logical fissures of each portion, strikes at the heart of the basic problematic of taste as it regards mass culture in the United States (particulary when race is considered integrally with class). Stephin Merritt is just a cool test case: everyone believes they have self-determined, non-ideological preferences that are not only unbound but democratically virtuous; meanwhile, individual taste, when you look at someone's iPod, often turns out to be a map of exclusions — a map that is resonant with, if not isomorphic to, rather undemocratic histories.
• But why pillory poor Stephen? If the order of the day is to call bullshit on this phenomenon, there's a broader version we've been meaning to mention: the "playlist meme." Every now and then, someone sees fit to post a random list of ten or twenty songs generated by their digital music player. We understand this practice as meant to demonstrate the serendipitous collisions of songs that can be produced by randomizing; meant perhaps to archive a particularly pleasing set; and meant to celebrate the general excellence of the songs appearing. Swell. At the same time, let's remember these lists have two determinations: on the one hand, they are a "random" cross-section of the kind of music someone collects; on the other, they are a cross-section the person feels particularly compelled to share. They are, thusly, doubly representative of someone's empirical tastes. So let us love this empiricism, and invite everyone into the Merritocracy: if that playlist is all white people, well then, whatever it is that one thinks it is communicating about one's taste, and whatever one might claim about how that quality came to pass...