Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

Lil Jon may or may not be telling the truth?

The truth about the windows and the walls.

Well, who cares? It's the band's fault for not articulating in its music whether it's intended as satire.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, January 31, 2010 8:02 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tim sort of covered this--to be totally honest i dont care very much what koenig and the rest of the band think about their own music or what they want it to say--my question is more, is hopper misinterpreting something that they said? or is that a direct quote?

and co-sign tim and alex in montreal on the love/hate/lampoon ambivalence being a key factor in their not being totally insufferable

i was reading that br myers essay last week and i got to the part where hes writing about murray jay siskind and he makes the same mistake w/r/t delillo that hopper does to VW; i.e., when faced w/ ambivalence, avoids the thorniness of the relationship for an easy "he loves"/"he hates"

xxp And I mean, regardless of who they are or where they come from or why i "shouldn't" sympathize with them, people trying to figure themselves out make interesting music.

ashlee simpson's compelling in the same way (in part because of, not in spite of, her status as the younger sister of a pop star, and her own ambivalence about that fact). cf. shadow, which "has no right" to be sympathetic according to detractors (rich pop star whining about her childhood) but it IS sympathetic because of how she thinks and writes about it and, in doing so, connects with me.

i could give two shits about whether people have a "right" to make the music they do - it's of far greater concern what they say and do with the music they make.

how things have changed when we seek to justify vampire weekend by means of analogy with ashlee simpson!

for the better, imo

"Yeah I think that's totally right, who wants an entire album of class satire anyway??"

I do! But then I've been a huge Monochrome Set fan for 20+ years. they had panache and wit and could play like crazy though. and they had the ability to write amazing lyrics and songs. (and the way they incorporated non-western elements into their britpop was seamless and no big deal.)

Interviewer: "Is it true that you are descended from Indian princes?"

Bid: "Kings, actually."

i'm paraphrasing that last bit. from a snippet on an album i haven't heard in a long time.

i'm curious about vampire weekend though. if they did make snobby boating and yachting pop i would probably love them.

it can probably work on that level tho, if you want it to

i'll check them out. indie pop with ANY kind of attitude or point of view or novel approach will always get checked out by me. there isn't much out there that fits that bill.

for the better, imo

totally, it's a nice reversal.

tim's interpretation of VW's lyrics is tremendously alluring right up until i went to read the "contra" lyrics and it's just like...where is the narrative, the depth that would allow for comparisons to hollinghurst and tartt (both of whom i love)? the characterisation is total cardboard, there's not much insight or wit into either the narrator or the girl's personality, there's just nothing to latch on to, there's no progression from one point to the next...c'mon, when i think of pop lyrics that are genuinely astute and insightful into matters of class i think of, idk, pulp's "common people" (which i don't even like that much) or nellie mckay's "respectable". songs with complexity and humour which actually tell a tale.

Yeah in fairness there's a lot of "meeting halfway" going on here! But of course if you like the music that's what you do; if you don't like it then the song becomes entirely dismissible.

It's the same way in which we see value in Taylor's reversal of Shakespeare whereas others find it deplorable. The willingness to believe in both the intentions and execution of storytellers in music depends 90% on our sense of goodwill generated by enjoyment of the music itself, I tend to think.

i think i was just expecting more...content! i don't actually like the lyrics to "common people" very much, but there's so obviously a ton going on there - i don't think it achieves what it wants to b/c of the mean-spiritedness on the part of the narrator, but it's still a fully-formed character study and narrative. mckay's "respectable" uses class signifiers to portray a character more complex than you think really skilfully, and develops it in a really captivating way. "contra" is literally just "i think this, i think you think that, fin."

i guess it's a step fwd from the lyrics on the debut album which i found HILARIOUSLY bad

xp to Tim

Except that our willingness to have goodwill toward the music affects how whether we enjoy the music. If you are not open to enjoying a song, you won't enjoy it (there can be exceptions but I think this is generally true).

Which is why I tend to ignore negative criticism of music: I am looking reasons to open up to things. My goodwill is what's scarce.

Oh absolutely, yes. I just meant that are perception of what lyrics are doing (and whether they're successful in doing it) is even more enjoyment dependent than anything else. It does happen that people get into music they otherwise wouldn't like because of the lyrics but I think it's the exception to the rule.

I actually tend to like lyrics in general, assuming I get into the music: there's no examples I can think of off the top of my head where lyrics really put me off in and of themselves. I accept that this doesn't appear to be typical.

Ok I see what you mean: you mean goodwill to lyrics specifically. I don't attend much to the content of pop lyrics (compared to the wordplay of lyrics, say) so it would be unusual for me to be put off by a lyric, but if I get into a song and relisten a bunch of times then my goodwill to the lyric can evaporate: this happened to me with Wilco about a decade ago.

i'm rarely put off by vague or generic lyrics, but overreaching try-hard lyrics really grate on me (thinking los campesinos and assorted twee scandopop here) - to really love a song i increasingly need a real connection to the lyrics though. obviously delivery can elevate (or indeed drag down) a lyric.

lex, VW's lyrics are so much more oblique than Cocker's or McKay's that it's not a useful comparison. If you're open to it, it's not hard to miss the sense of outsiderdom and distaste for the super-rich in White Sky, the growing-older melancholy in Giving Up the Gun, the loss and confusion in Diplomat's Son, the self-aware class anxiety of Taxi Cab. It's not just arch, meaningless signifiers. In Common People, Jarvis has nothing but contempt for the slumming rich girl, but Koenig is constantly wrestling with his mixed feelings for super-confident trust-fund girls (and, in Diplomat's Son, boys) - he's suspicious but he's intoxicated. My wife often talks about people who go through life without touching the sides - they're annoying because of their unearned self-assurance, but their poise is enviable too: "I don't think your eyes/have ever looked surprised"; "You said baby, we don't speak of that/Like a real aristocrat." Like the narrators Tim mentions, and going back to Nick in the Great Gatsby, Koening feels ugly and awkward and unsophisticated in the presence of the genuinely affluent, and because he can't be like them he takes potshots at them but often feels churlish for doing so. The fact he (ie the narrator rather than Koenig himself) uses so many arcane words rather than more obvious and well-known signifiers, frames him as an outsider trying to master the vocab of privilege but overdoing it. So Hopper's binary choice - either Koenig loves the lifestyle or he's spoofing it - ignores the nervous ambivalence which is the whole point.

<3 the great gatsby - it's curious that people are comparing VW to some of my favourite authors, though crucially despite their lead protagonists, fitzgerald/tartt/hollinghurst all write in an incredibly self-assured manner - not the self-assurance of the super-privileged who "don't have to touch the sides", but the self-assurance of writers with an incredible command over their craft who can portray (and skewer) both those who live lives of privilege and the outsiders trying to pass in that life. i do wish i found VW's lyrics half as interesting as they could be, w/those themes; as it is, beyond the grating overreach it just comes off as those same ol' social awkwardness that makes up indie musicians' bread and butter transposed to rich society. idk i just like to hear self-assurance!

(nick is probably the least interesting great gatsby character for me - my favourite is jordan baker though <3 )

White boys don't steal -- they get mugged.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, January 31, 2010 10:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"Really doe?"

http://www.gothtronic.com/Goth/img_/Music1/plaatje/necro.jpg

Vampire Weekend: The William Makepeace Thackeray of 2010?

Maybe Tom Townsend in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan is a closer analogue to VW than Gatsby etc.

i like them now! i'm gonna buy the album. do they have cool 12 inches with cool b-sides? they remind me of lots of 80's stuff i liked way back when. like i said on the grammys thread, all this race/class stuff is silly. if they were british nobody would even care. it would just be part of the act. like the song i heard from the new album. they've got pep. i like pep. and their songs are pretty short. another plus.

they could stand to be even shorter.

koenigs themes are more like roths or woody allens. not that hes nearly as good a writer as either of those two, but great gatsby is only a useful comparison point in terms of its alternating fascination and disgust with wealth and society.

This thread lost me several years ago (like Scott says, "the race and class stuff on the vampire thread is funny. if they were british nobody would even blink. they would just be british!"), but did anybody link to the reviews below yet? Am I the first person to point out that the beginning of "Cousins" sounds kind of like the Contortions, or not?

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1870

Only an American could say that the class stuff wouldn't be an issue in Britain. If they were British and singing about Oxbridge and country houses in the same way, they'd have been torn to shreds the minute they appeared.

sorry i dont really see why "if vampire weekend were british" is relevant--british and american class systems are different, and british and american bands tend to deal with class in different ways... i mean, this should be fairly obvious? vampire weekend clearly hit a nerve with people thanks to the way they engage w/ class, so i dont know why its so weird that people are talking about it

like, "if vampire weekend were black," people would be writing very different things about it. "if vampire weekend were lesbian punks" people would have a different attitude.

http://booksslicedanddiced.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/sag-harbor.jpg

if Vampire Weekend were soccer moms but sounded exactly the same, they would be everyone's favorite band

a vampire weekend slating which doesn't mention class even once (scroll to end): http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=879:new-music-cd-round-up-5&Itemid=27

But that's a terrible review written from the point of view of an indie-hating world music specialist. I get the feeling that if someone wrote VAMPIRE WEEKEND R SHIT on a wall with their own excrement you'd applaud that as well.

if vampire weekend could fly, this would be... a... no-fly zone.

I think ur a contra.

if they're appropriating "world music", it's pretty much fair enough for world music specialists to judge them on those terms

“I’d sue if I was Paul Simon!”

wow that wins some kind of irony award

But then our potential saviours go and get it horribly wrong by creating music which, in its unrelenting tweeness and preciousness, is the antithesis of the muscular, joyful African and Brazilian music that inspired them. If you fail to recreate the elasticity of the rhythms and the edgy, mercurial qualities of – for example - the great Congolese guitarists then you’ve missed the point.

really? have you?

the antithesis of this music, my my.

xpost to lex But they're not trying to be world music, are they? Breaking news: "Band incorporates style in different way. Purist disapproves."

you know who is pretty fucking dope? king sunny ade! i just got into him.

currently listening to "Horchata"

these guys are kind of great and that is something I was really not expecting given the way ppl react to them (was totally expecting to hate them like Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys)

arctic monkeys had one great song IMO - "riot van"

but they are mostly o.k.

arcade fire sounds like john cafferty & the beaver brown band

Only not as good.

Always thought "Keep The Car Running" sounded more like "On The Dark Side" than anything else.

"on the darkside" is kind of a jam, it must be said

if they're appropriating "world music", it's pretty much fair enough for world music specialists to judge them on those terms

but not very useful unless you are also a world music specialist who shares this guy's particular and clear hangups (sharing sensibilities from world music apparently means having to sound just like what you are copying, which aside from being more problematic from a psuedo-imperialist POV also means not being able to insert any of yourself into your own music; having to give a shit whether someone 25 years ago walked any of the same ground you are working with now and getting grouchy about that)