The Whitest Band In The World

A few years ago Christian Lander, the creator of the blog 'Stuff White People Like', when asked who was the whitest band, replied 'Vampire Weekend... they're pushing it to levels unseen'. As it turned out that assessment may have been a bit premature, as several other contenders have emerged in the meantime. Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver made city-dwelling white people all over fantasise about leaving their problems behind and going to sing and play guitar in a cabin in a mountain forest. The Arcade Fire continue to reach new levels of whiteness, releasing an album that is an extensive love/hate tribute to growing up in the suburbs. And Yeasayer, from Brooklyn via Baltimore, with their world music-influenced pop, and band members named Anand Wilder and Ira Wolf Tuton are perhaps even stronger contenders for the title than Ezra Koenig's crew.

 

Image: Stereogum

But none of them can compare to the xx. Name a prerequisite for whiteness and this band can tick it off. First, they are all as pale as the moon. The guy singer (Oliver Sim) has the smooth, deep, understated voice to make all white girls swoon and want to buy him a Shiraz Cabernet. The girl singer (Romy Madley Croft) is not overly physically attractive, so white girls don't feel threatened by her and white guys can like her and make believe they are sensitive. They hail from South London, placing them closer to the Tate Modern than Old Trafford. Their name centers around the white person's favourite letter (despite 'The X-Factor', the word 'ex' retains a special place in white people's vocabularies), and their album cover was a masterstroke of white person design - all black, with a white 'x' in the middle of it. Their music is dark, brooding, and romantic; a more mature version of teenager outsider poetry, with lines about bridges being on fire, and becoming crystallised, and watching things on VCRs. The xx are the ubiquitous white person group - they could fit into any white person club in any white person city and be wholeheartedly embraced. Because secretly every white person wants to form a band that is just like them.

P.S. I quite like the xx.