Alexander Roger Wallace "Sasha" Frere-Jones (né Jones; born 1967) is an American writer, music critic, and musician.

[10] Frere-Jones was born Alexander Roger Wallace Jones on January 31, 1967, in Manhattan, the elder child of Elizabeth Frere and Robin C.

[11] He is a grandson of Alexander Stuart Frere, the former chairman of the board of British publishing house William Heinemann Ltd, and a great-grandson of the novelist Edgar Wallace, who wrote many popular pulp novels as well as the story for the film King Kong.

[13] In 1983, Frere-Jones's play We Three Kings was chosen for the Young Playwrights Festival;[1] the reading included actors John Pankow and Željko Ivanek.

[22] He covered independent acts like Arcade Fire,[23] Joanna Newsom,[24] Grizzly Bear,[25] Manu Chao,[26] and Bon Iver,[27] as well as mainstream successes like Neil Diamond,[28] Mariah Carey,[29] Wu-Tang Clan,[30] Lil Wayne,[31] and Prince.

[32] On October 22, 2007, The New Yorker published "A Paler Shade of White", an essay in which Frere-Jones examined the changing role of race in pop music.

[23] The article elicited responses from dozens of news outlets and blogs,[33] including The Village Voice,[34] Slate,[35] Simon Reynolds, and Playboy, which said that Frere-Jones had ignored "huge swaths of indiedom that might undermine the particulars of his premise" and that his underlying ideas about racial attributes and dichotomies were fetishistic and racist.

"[38] Frere-Jones published follow-ups to his article to address some of the criticism, including defending his description of Hall & Oates as "equally talented" as Michael Jackson (though he admitted his wording had been "slightly mischievous").

[4] After several months at Genius, Frere-Jones took a position as critic-at-large of the Los Angeles Times; he left after less than a year following allegations that he expensed $5,000 at a strip club.

[46] They played their first live show in 1991, and spent the following years touring across the United States and Europe, opening for bands like Tortoise and Stereolab,[47] with whom they collaborated on the Fires EP in 1998.