Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

its true i hate thinking about things

objectively, they have a number one album in the us and england

Number 3 in the UK. So unless Florence & The Machine's sales were heavily Wales-biased or something, no.

Aren't Vampire Weekend basically middle class kids who happened to go to an Ivy League university are camping up the upper class signifiers? Actually don't answer that because I don't really care.

I'm actually pretty good at tuning out awful lyrics in most cases - the Lex conversely is more focussed on lyrics and being able to identify or emphathise with lyricists than pretty much any other listener I know (cf his inability to really connect with any pop music not sung in English).

Vampire Weekend aren't really interested in pushing any of the buttons lyrically and possibly even musically that the Lex values so I'm not surprised he's going all "WTF this is worthless!" because he literally cannot see what other buttons they may be pushing.

i think that strikes me as LESS offensive about these guys is that they recognize that what makes indie 'indie' & worthwhile is entirely ABOUT signifying & certain affects & style. They dont pretend that indie has some sort of access to the avant garde that other genres dont, they dont pretend to be more 'progressive' or that they're a part of any real zeitgeist other than their own style, in fact theres LESS of a sense of 'power dynamics' at play w/ there music than I get from the praise for like MIA or dubstep or even animal collective (fwiw i dug 'my girls' ok but have never really been 'into' them for superficial STYLE reasons -- i think the name 'animal collective' displays a negative amount of SWAG)(im kind of joking & kind of serious but mostly i just spend a lot more time listening to /writing about / thinking about music that im really really into like bay area rap & gucci mane & grown folxx R&B & cheesy dance music/funky house & old music).

anyway my point is kind of that despite them getting a bunch of shit for the PRIVILEGE they display by saying font names or whatever, i feel like their music is actually way more aware of the issue of PRIVILEGE than music that purports to be all interconnected global music of the future but really feels like a condescending bite of 'lesser' populist musics

or not even a bite, but simply displays a lack of awareness of how that music functions in its original context

i.e. dj/rupture who i heard was djing recently & brought some friends out & the girls dug it at first but then theyre like "actually this is kind of boring" & then we left

i know ppl might not agree w/ me about that particular example but i think you get my point

that i know chicks B-)

I found DJ Rupture really grim when I saw him play (admittedly 5 years ago) - world party music without the party.

see this proves they are objectively awful

how does one "prove" that anything is objectively awful! criticising me for failing to "prove" that is kinda weak

the reason i'm in here at all is more b/c pretty much every otherwise like-minded ilx poster seems to be ok with them - even tom ewing likes them ffs - i'm pretty sure i'm not the one mishearing them so the problem therefore is you all

Not criticising you for that Lex. I'm saying that's the position you imply when you say things like:

there is basically no way that anyone w/decent aesthetic standards should be able to get past THOSE LYRICS and THAT VOICE

I mean, really, you're one of my favourite dudes but "decent aesthetic standards" is risible Alex in NYC speak and I hate seeing people write stuff like that on ILM.

no one ever, ever justifies their appreciation of horrible yelping indie voices

Lex I think the issue is that you cannot and will not get close enough to the music to properly articulate why it is bad - there are loads of reasons to hate Vampire Weekend and some of them are very good ones but you're not anywhere near them.

Not that anyone has to - I don't want to have to spend hours listening to Belle & Sebastian or Los Campesinos or Mariah Carey or similar tweeness in order to qualify for zinging them on an ILM thread, but it's probably best to go "hah this is shit" and leave it at that rather than get sucked into a lengthy argument you can't possibly win about how everyone else is wrong for listening to them.

Also the voice is a bit of a red herring given that Vampire Weekend dude can actually sing in tune.

ie you know how annoyed you get when people like that dude on Poptimists start talking about "horrible shouty garage vocals"? This is a bit like that.

Double X-post - Because it's like demanding justification for appreciation for the colour brown.

Alex in NYC would say the same thing about horrible R&B melisma - and nothing you could say would constitute a justification because every analogy or simile would simply confirm the horribleness for him.

It's like you're drawing a huge circle around all these stylistic affects and saying the Boney Joan rule doesn't apply there.

the point im trying to make here lex, is that these guys are kind of a poor target for yr bile -- theyre not particularly risible w/r/t the entire anti rockism project, & in fact there are lots of artists who do a lot more 'engaging with' music we both like that do feel like they're buying into an artificial hierarchical view of music that reinforces indie as some kind of superior taste alignment instead of a simple bunch of cultural codes & stylistic approaches

like, these guys should be the ultimate "not my cup of tea"-lex music, not the ultimate "i h8 them with every fiber of my being"-lex music

Getting back to the record I think the "she's never seen the world bombs" verse would totally fit in on an MIA record and it would require one hell of a beat for me to get past it even in that context.

thread reminds me of:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/jan/26/popandrock5

Alex in NYC would say the same thing about horrible R&B melisma - and nothing you could say would constitute a justification because every analogy or simile would simply confirm the horribleness for him.

Fair enough.

]I mean, really, you're one of my favourite dudes but "decent aesthetic standards" is risible Alex in NYC speak and I hate seeing people write stuff like that on ILM.

Maybe you should stop taking it all so seriously.

Ha it's like Beatlejuice.

Uh, I haven't read this thread (and probably won't have time to), but I did write (not especially coherently or definitively, maybe) about this record. Think it's not nearly as good as the debut (which I kind of liked). So fwiw:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2010/01/vampire.html

What I wrote about their debut a couple years ago is here (scroll down):

http://www.emusic.com/album/Vampire-Weekend-Vampire-Weekend-MP3-Download/11227999.html

See, xhuxx saying the new one isn't as good as the first one is definitive proof that the new one is better than the first one!

I kid. Sort of. ;)

Nah, definitive proof that I'm right is how many reviews of the new one call it "a grower," which basically means they didn't like it much in the first place. (Always a red flag.)

Things you like in the first place often get real boring by the third place, tho.

I think it's fine to be a grower if you're making minimal house or dark intense folk music or something but probably not if you're Vampire Weekend. The album seems to be aiming for immediacy from what I can tell.

Which might be useful on hipster dancefloors if Vampire grooves didn't have a mysterious tendency to clumsily disentregrate almost as soon as they're established.

yes, thx. like i said up above, i think the focus by detractors on the vocals/lyrics is a little off because it doesn't address a lot of the things that people who like them say they like: the hooks and grooves and multiculti appropriations. and my problem with the hooks and grooves and appropriations is mostly that (like the vocals and lyrics) they just seem awfully glib. and glibness is not necessarily a function of privilege or whiteness or indie-ness, it's a freestanding property of its own. and it's not even a universally bad thing, there is some art i like that i would probably call glib. just not this particular variety.

like, these guys should be the ultimate "not my cup of tea"-lex music, not the ultimate "i h8 them with every fiber of my being"-lex music

― not a playa but i ilx a lot (deej), Monday, January 18, 2010 5:59 AM (5 hours ago)

don't mean to draw lex in any further but ^otm, my thoughts exactly

sounds like lex hates them for the same reason LJ hates them, but wants there to be a real reason instead of a hype reason, and so he talks about the guys voice or whatever

sounds like they both hate them for the same reason dr morbius hates anything tbh

ha!

guys i just realized something - i am a diplomat's son

im gonna say this as a v not irl wasp type but i like to think i've seen enough oc eps to footnote. there's this bit in middlesex by jeffrey eugenides where he visits one of his old-money type friend's house for the first time and he says something abt how everything seemed like it had been carefully bought with good taste and that they just had to live in it now and i think they do have this breezy feeling of everything being so easy, u kno young and rich and the world at our fingertips and "we just have to drop a few names here and there so u know what page ur on FYI." and man its seductive like i just wanna hang with these guys

fwiw OC residents are not WASPs in the sense that VW are

lol i am not that dumm

not 2 derail thread or nething but i can't stop listening to this when i should be sorting out the 2k9 poll ballot.

Yeah, they manage to sound maximalist without actually being maximalist. I see what you're saying.

― rennavate, Sunday, January 17, 2010 6:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is what i like about the production specifically, is that it feels really huge but there really aren't very many parts happening at any one time. they can get away with that because each sound is really good and the parts are so well-chosen, so they have room to breathe. i feel like this is the opposite of merriweather post pavilion, where most of the sounds are thin & shitty so they end up building them into this wall of busy-ness.

fwiw a Jew and a Persian are not WASPs in the sense that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are

yeah, but feel like they are just tapping into a "life of leisure" type vibe that the wasp-ey thing works as a vehicle 4 (via "yacht rock")

a persian?!

Sure, but arch observers of WASP culture /= WASPs (just get so tired of that as an epithet for these guys)

Batmanglij was not exactly a common name on the Mayflower

yeah ppl who act all waspy shouldn't get called wasps

"preppies" just seems like a more applicable term here, that's all

i can't think of another band that has namechecked "bears" in their lyrics which i also think is awes

i dunno tho, i spose if this was a load of fuckers from donnybrook or belvedere knockin on abt trinners and kilreekil i'd wanna gouge their eyes out, but gilmore girls etc have made this a fairy tale place where goodlooking ppl get ivy league scholarships

pretty sure nobody who would understand the 1st part of that post is gonna read it