Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

Rostam is talking about nabisco's post on the twitter: http://twitter.com/matsoR

And apparently talking to the "Chicago Reader music editor"

http://twitter.com/matsoR/status/8184054742

shamelessly trying to curry favor with whiney

tips my goal in posting is not to try to get you to like a band

and i'm not tryin to get anyone to dislike them. just i think there's a fair amount of suspect stuff said in re v.w., both in terms of how much all their "class" stuff really registers (it feels to me like something heavily inflated by people looking for something to chatter about) and in terms of what they're doing musically. i accept that people like it, that's fine and all, but the critical cases made for them seem weirdly detached to me from the experience of actually listening to them. they are a frail frame on which to hang all this rhetoric. imo.

well true enough, my post above was speaking against the hopperish idea that VW is "just a band of wasps stealing music from africa so they can sing about being rich"

oh hahahaha I am listening to "A Punk" now and did not realize that THIS was THAT song

I don't mind these guys after all

Btw, I think goole is OTM about them being upper-middle-class looking at old wealth, and I think that's why Ezra being Jewish (and I guess the other guy being Persian) is important. There's a whole history of Jewish wealth contending with old WASP money, and I believe that's definitely running through what's going on here, even if it's not explicit. They're also one of the first generations of wealthy Jews (or their parents are, most likely) who don't seriously have to deal with things like restricted country clubs, quotas at Ivy's, etc.

philip roth is better than VW tho imo

http://twitter.com/matsoR/status/8184054742

shamelessly trying to curry favor with whiney

― zvookster, Friday, January 29, 2010 10:01 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and geir!

ON a HARD COLDPLAY KICK 11:20 AM Jan 25th from web

Philip Roth definitely better than VW, but also writing about a different period of time. I can't see VW relating to American Pastoral or even Plot Against America. They're kinda the (grand)children of Philip Roth.

yeah and Philip Roth's grandchildren probably don't understand him or read his books, either

philip roth had persian friends

portnoy's complaint is definitely news that stays news

FWIW, I wrote an article running next week that explicitly calls Vampire Weekend (esp Ezra) a Jewish band, or at least a band that has something to say about being Jewish. It's more in the context of African influences in music, but I think it's important to identify Ezra as Jewish (as he self-identifies that way) because although whiteness and Jewishness have become hard to disentangle in American contemporary culture, it's still a real issue for a lot of Jewish Americans and in other countries it's an even bigger issue (especially in the countries where Vampire Weekend is drawing on to influence their music). Which is to say that JH's critique of the band isn't just - as nabisco points out - very privileged and white in-of-itself - but super America-centric. As though opinions on whiteness in America (and really: in New York City/Chicago/LA, so not even America) should constitute what it means to be white everywhere.

my gf is trying to get me to have kids and i'm seriously thinking my official stance should be "the world doesn't need any more white people"

Btw, I think nabisco's two things on the JH piece are really tremendous -- if I could say, even OTM.

my gf is trying to get me to have kids and i'm seriously thinking my official stance should be "the world doesn't need any more white people"

― ben bernankles (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, January 29, 2010 5:46 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

u should read nabiscos tumblr pieces

tumblrs white people like

this isn't really the place for it, but that first salinger piece is a lovely, lovely piece of writing

salinger wrote a piece about VW?

if salinger were a young man today he'd be fronting a breezy ethno-pop ensemble

There's a whole history of Jewish wealth contending with old WASP money, and I believe that's definitely running through what's going on here, even if it's not explicit

Wish the VW guys would underline this so the debate would be whether thinkpieces about "Jew Wave" were offensive

I'd actually love to mention (and this seems like as good a place as any) that a number of times I've said that I'm Jewish, as opposed to being White, in a conversation or discussion and gotten called out as being disingenuous. I've actually been told that I'm splitting hairs, or that Jews are White -- which sometimes leads into a discussion of the history of Jewish Whiteness in America (which Karen Brodkin brilliantly imo traces back to the end of WW2 in "How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America"). So I'm kinda loving nabisco's piece because I never contextualized those conversational moments that way -- I always just felt kinda put-out and maybe a little confused -- like why do I *have* to identify as White? I speak Hebrew + Yiddish, I write for the Forward, I learn Chassidic texts with my father over the phone, etc. So the blog posts about the topic are kinda illuminating.

ties in zeitgeist-wise with chris matthews' "i forgot obama was black" rumination

thoughts on "Oxford Comma" and class:

"we always tell the truth":
Northrop Frye observes that, in Shakespeare's plays, when the noblemen toss around the epithet 'liar', it is not as a reproach on moral or ethical grounds; the insult is aimed squarely at one's social standing. The implication is honesty is the sole domain of the wealthy and prestigious, and that the reason one would lie is because they literally cannot afford to tell the truth. The liar lies because he is in the presence of his superiors.

Perhaps you misjudge VW's easygoing self-assurance as smugness, or perhaps you misjudge VW's smugness as easygoing self-assurance.

I'd look GOONish in a balaclava

http://homepage1.nifty.com/double_trouble/image/plies_dor.jpg

yes but isn't hip-hop's insistence on "keeping it real" heavily interrelated to its subversive program ie taking what traditionally is the dominant class's birthright by force...

Is there where I admit I'd find the whole debate over these last two days far more interesting if I found the band's music provoked more than a shrug and a 'pleasant enough at times'? (In that I am incredibly sympathetic to what da croupier has said above about the 'drudge siren' approach to liking/disliking VW, especially now.)

http://twitter.com/matsoR

ruh roh

i'm with you Ned

Here's where I get all Oscar Wilde and say that most good criticism is as much art as the art itself.

sure but most of the criticism i've read about the band is as boring as the music they make

and yet

and yet the CVB line is still 100% hilarious and accurate

http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/blackboard/images/eno-l.jpg

arzE very serious question 4 amateur ethnographers: is DJ Pauly D white?
7 minutes ago from Tweetie

none of this is addressing the problem of their drummer.

they should hire a better drummer. the beatles did it.

(honestly i just went back to the first album for the first time in a while and at first i was like "you know this is kind of catchy, the guy's voice isn't that bad, i'm probably being too harsh," and then after about two and a half songs it was just ARGH can't anybody establish a groove anymore what the hell is the matter with you people...)

and i understand that in some ways they're no more ramshackle rhythmically than a lot of postpunk bands, but a band like (say) the slits capitalized on the stiltedness of their rhythms, they did something with their awkwardness, because they understood that it was awkward and that it was a tool to work with. they turned it into something hard and interesting. vw doesn't have that inclination, which leaves them in a kind of mushy limbo.

maybe they're just judeo-persian rhythms, whitey

Arctic Monkeys kick Vampire Weekend's ass around the block over and over again.

xpost:
yr right i think what i really want is for them to play polkas -- the music of my forefathers.

jesshopp

@matsoR Do you really desire to try to bash this out on Twitter? Or do you actually want to have a real discussion about it?

Oh yeah! I would love to see Rostam and Jessica go cage match over this thing.

Having heard Vampire Weekend for the first time in my life this morning, I think that knocking them is kind of like knocking college kids for wearing madras shorts.

Well then:

http://twitter.com/arzE/status/8432237206

don't think nabisco gets why people read music crit.

Btw, I think goole is OTM about them being upper-middle-class looking at old wealth, and I think that's why Ezra being Jewish (and I guess the other guy being Persian) is important. There's a whole history of Jewish wealth contending with old WASP money, and I believe that's definitely running through what's going on here, even if it's not explicit. They're also one of the first generations of wealthy Jews (or their parents are, most likely) who don't seriously have to deal with things like restricted country clubs, quotas at Ivy's, etc.

I didn't know he was Jewish but that fits their in-the-world-but-not-of-it attitude towards WASP culture that I mentioned earlier.

Jewish people who have to immerse themselves in certain WASP schools and places usually have to engage in such complicated role-play that they end up knowing all the social codes and shibboleths better than the kids who were raised in that environment. The other kids in the rich clubhouse have close to no self-awareness about the life they lead and don't have to spend as much time trying to fit in.

I get that there are a whole lot of records in the world, and sometimes it's necessary to just say "pfft whatever" to one of them. But look. A band always gets described as WASPy. One of them says, "actually, I'm Jewish, and this guy's Persian." Are you really gonna react by just saying "LOL same difference?" That's high-level print criticism? As opposed to spending like a couple minutes' critical thinking on the kind of stuff people are saying here -- that maybe there's this long history of successful east-coast Jews with a complicated love/hate deal with old-money WASP culture? (That maybe a middle-class Persian guy has a related experience?) That maybe what you've just been told might be relevant in terms of figuring out what, if anything, they're actually saying in their songs? And if you really, really don't give a shit, and for some reason you're still agreeing to review their record, then why even bring it up?

Same deal with the crack about how one song mentions a typeface ("not typical rude-boy fodder" or whatever) -- like, no inclination to think about the actual meaning of the lines with the typeface in them? Cause so far as I can tell, they're actually about Americans wearing shirts with day-glo guns on them, like making an aesthetic out of the rest of the world's political violence. (Which we all thought was kinda cool when a Sri Lankan did it.) It's not like I don't understand the value of occasionally just going "LOL typeface," but seriously, do people read criticism not to hear some kind of actual ideas about stuff? I'm sure if you asked the Reader's music editor, he would not tell you his editorial mission is "a lazy zing is always better than an actual thought about your subject matter."

re: Ned's post

http://twitter.com/arzE/status/8432255955
http://twitter.com/arzE/status/8432293791