The New York Times, doing its best as always to hunt down news from the real world and bring it back to the drawing rooms of Manhattan, reported this sunday in the Style section that there exist some black folk who actually enjoy and identify with indie rock…

Upper East Side newsflash: There’s a lot of young black people in the country. They’re not all gangsters and hip-hop heads. They’re not all addicted genetically to rap or jazz. Turn to the sports page and you’ll find that some of them have also learned to play tennis and golf!

For real, this was not an analytical piece, not a cultural study, not music criticism. The existence of the black indie rocker is presented as news from the exotic, as in “You’re not gonna believe what we’ve discovered!”

The piece includes some great bumbling race quotes, which serve up laughs but also, in effect, point back to the anthropological-style race bumbling of the reporter, someone named Jessica Pressler, whose writing includes awkward truisms such as: “This is not the first time there has been a black presence in modern rock.” and “Some black fans are adopting rock clothing styles.” I hope for her sake that Jessica is at least sixty years old.

Some of the exotic specimens she quotes include Nev Brown: “You get idiots [at the shows] who think you’re a security guard.” And Damon Locks: “I’m always mistaken for one of the three other [indie rock] black guys in the city. The three of us were joking about starting a band called Black People.”

Pressler also references James Spooner’s films “Afro-punk” and “White Lies, Black Sheep,” which are much better explorations of the topic. There’s also an interesting comment by author Nelson George, who says the indie-rock style aesthetic bars larger participation by black kids. “They don’t want to go out in bummy clothes and dirty sneakers. There’s a psychological subtext to it, something about being part of the [wider American] culture where they are not valued and so they have to value themselves.” True? False? At least that’s a conversation starter. Too bad it came at the very end of the article.

Main thing, though, is that the mere appearance of the piece gives me the opportunity to stream a song by those black-indie favorites TV on the Radio, the song of course being “Dry Drunk Emperor,” their nod to our fearless leader. Enjoy.