Simon Reynolds (of Rip It Up and Start Again) on Vampire Weekend and why, perhaps, so many people hate them, a phenomenon I’ve never understood:
“So the vibe was completely un-rock'n'roll. And thus perfect for Vampire Weekend, who 'oppose all rock'n'roll' to the point of drawing up a charter of principles when they were forming that included the decree that no member would ever be seen onstage or in a publicity photograph wearing a T-shirt or jeans. One reason they're such a polarising group, loathed as often as loved, is that they've outed the secret truth of indie-rock as the music of the upper middle-class.” [read on]
8 comments:
People hate them because their lead singer sucks and they write songs that, while littered with pretentious (e.g. the Khyber Pass) and ironic (e.g. lil' Jon) references, are mostly about being spoiled upper middle class kids.
To clarify: I don't think we have a problem with the UMC per se, so much as we have one when it tries to levy critique, or when it comes off as whiny or self-involved.
Also: something I forgot to mention is the fact that the S/T record is basically a piece of exploitation (the indie Graceland, if you will), and it does seem kind of distasteful for a group of white bread Columbia grads to be hitting it big ripping off most of their ideas from obscure Afro-rock acts from the 70s that most people will never have heard of. It becomes less irritating if over time this proves to be a genuine affection and not a momentary affectation, but my guess is that if it is indeed the former, 3/4 of their fanbase will have moved on by the time this is firmly established.
Also also: Saying that you "oppose all Rock 'n' Roll" is one of the more assinine things I've heard a band that adheres to the basic guitar-bass-drums-keys format say.
See, I buy very little of this (perhaps only because I quite like Vampire Weekend). Some of the things you cite might indeed be good reasons for disliking them, but I have trouble imagining them being many haters’ actually operative reasons, rather than after-the-fact rationalizations. (And some seem just wrong to me: Koenig has, I think, an above average voice that fits perfectly with the sorts of melodies he writes). My impression is that most people just have a gut-level distaste but something about this band in particular makes them feel it necessary to say not just “not my thing” but “bad, categorically, because of X, Y, and Z”. And come on, that comment about rock ‘n roll is obviously said knowingly. Isn’t it the aesthete’s place to say ridiculous, manifesto-ish things? If you were talking to someone late at night, half-drunk, in the kitchen at a house party and they said they were opposed to all things rock ‘n roll, you’d rightfully think them a jackass. But saying it from the place and in the role of a performer/public personality is completely different. Is that the critique you see them levying? I don’t understand that charge at all. Vampire Weekend is not at all a band of Radiohead-ish world-changing, even music-changing ambitions, right?
But here’s what I’m interested in: what exactly is wrong with Vampire Weekend’s songs being about being spoiled upper middle class kids? Especially given the second “being,” which fully implicates them themselves? Surely this is only a problem if Koenig et. al. are somehow unaware of their privilege and simple-mindedly wrapped up in their campus and Cape Cod romances. How that charge can coexist with the charges of pretension and irony (which imply hyper-self-consciousness), I don’t know. And isn’t it (perhaps painfully) transparent that they’re fully aware of all this? There’s plenty of humor, a little bit of self-loathing, and finally the knowledge that it’s just pop music and pretty much a game in their songs, it seems to me. Anyway, in its serious form, this charge has never made much sense to me. It’s one that’s frequently made of young, male, white novelists (perhaps most recently the n+1 crowd, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision and Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men) who are said to either be transfixed by their navels or have their heads up their asses. The suggestion usually seems to be that there’s something inherently indulgent, wasteful, worthless, or shameful in writing about the 20- or 30-something Ivy-league overeducated, and that instead these people should be writing about what they don’t know, Rwanda or Darfur or racism or poverty (see Joyce Carol Oates single out for celebration what seems to me by far the worst story in Gessen’s book, about the West Bank), or not writing at all. Why? There’s no shortage of spoiled upper middle class kids (um, me and you included). Why shouldn’t we try to understand ourselves better? The line between self-indulgence and self-awareness that might help end self-indulgence is pretty slippery.
His voice is terrible. I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to this stuff, because to listen to most of the indie stuff out there you have to be, but at least with someone like John Darnielle, what he lacks in traditional appeal, he makes up in raw passion and performance. V/W's singer's pulse only jumps over 70 when he's making the yips that I'm surprised don't turn you off more, given your stance on Animal Collective and quirk for the sake of quirk. It's paradoxical to be affected and affectless, but that is how I'd describe him, flat and thin.
As far as his comments being said knowingly, I think that makes them worse. I'll take misguided honesty over someone who says things they don't believe to provoke a response any day. When your main traffic is in irony, there are going to be a lot of people that don't like you because they like to take their [insert media here] seriously. I'd argue (as DFW does in E Unibus) that irony should be used sparingly and to make specific points, not as S.O.P., like it seems to be for these guys ("Great lyrics"... I wonder if he was sad that he wasn't texting so he couldn't write l-o-l).
And as far as writing what you know if what you know is the UMC, I have nothing against that and find it preferable to trying to steal somebody else's story of hardship (which is basically what they are doing sonically). Even so, the simple truth is that stories about the pains of the Bourgeois lifestyle have been told over and over again...Cheever, Salinger and Updike were already retreading this stuff. That doesn't make this terrain unnavigable, but it does mean your average consumer is going to give you less rope t be mediocre than they would if your stories were fresher. Also, when people are obviously better off than you, fiscally, socially, however you want to frame it, you're simply less apt to want to hear about how tough (or alternately how interesting) their lives are.
I also think that this is an issue for a lot of people because the band seems to be dead set on promoting themselves this way. I agree that for the most part indie music appeals to and is made by a privileged subset of the population... but that doesn't mean their privilege has to be the central subject of the art they create (and for most acts it isn't). Choosing to focus so intently on it seems to suggest that the band thinks that it is preferable (or at the very least interesting in and of itself), which is an insinuation that understandably turns a lot of people off.
I think an equally interesting question is why people are unable to divorce their lyrical and musical content from one another and evaluate each one separately (something I know you don't like doing). You can say whatever you want about V/W's lyrics or "message," but their songs are usually tuneful, well-orchestrated and well-produced (which is generally the first thing to consider when evaluating a musical act, but for some reason isn't for them).
We probably pretty well covered this topic the other night. For the record, though:
I’m not sure “ironic” is any more the right description of that quotation or Vampire Weekend’s tone generally than it is of, say, Wes Anderson or Pavement. “Knowing” seems to me the closest single term, though that’s a rather unusual and ill-defined term (which I’ve thought about writing my dissertation about). God knows there’s nothing more tiresome than debating the exact meaning of irony. But when Vampire Weekend says they’re opposed to all things rock ‘n roll it seems to me they’re saying both that they are and aren’t so, and neither. It seems to me the briefest gloss one could offer of that statement is that they are positioning and defining themselves against a particular set or cultural signifiers like, as I said, Eddie Vedder’s growl, flannel, and hair. Which isn’t exactly to make a judgment about any of that. Better: when Koenig references Lil Jon, or Stephen Malkmus makes a joke about Geddy Lee, I don’t think they’re either approving or disapproving of crunk or Rush. Probably, Koenig kind of likes Lil John and Stephen Malkmus kind of likes Rush. (If not at all, then both lyrics are as lame as an ironic t-shirt, the subject of which the hipster straightforwardly disapproves of.) Rather, what they’re doing is self-consciously acknowledging the range of cultural signifiers they’re expected to move within, then violating it. I don’t think this is really ironic. It’s perhaps a kind of complicated irony, where one both means and doesn’t mean what one literally says, but that’s a pretty sloppy and perhaps useless concept that’s really pushing toward what I want to call knowingness instead.
Part of why I think contemporary literature is so important is that we don’t yet have a very good vocabulary for talking about things like this, and it’s trying to develop one. This is mostly done in fiction written by the overeducated upper middle class, not surprisingly. But I don’t think people like Kunkel or Gessen or a band like Vampire Weekend are usually even implicitly claiming that their lives are interesting or hard: that’s just the right site for talking about this kind of thing. Two passages from Indecision:
“‘You’re living a cliché,’ Vaneetha had said. ‘It’s not even a fresh cliché’
“I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.” (p. 26) [Not irrelevantly, on a page where the narrator’s girlfriend accuses him of still listening to Nirvana, only to have him correct her that it was Pavement.]
“‘What is this way you talk, Dwight? Everything you say is in quotes.’
“‘Everything everybody says.’” (p. 54)
I’ve tried to describe my distaste for Mad Men by saying that it seems to me built, self-consciously, on the myth that a certain kind of self-consciousness didn’t exist before the ‘60s. But I frequently find myself saying that there are never-before-seen contortions and machinations of self-consciousness springing up every day (especially when talking about DFW--though my less than full enthusiasm for E Unibus Pluram springs from thinking that he cuts off before getting to the latest, greatest contortions). So maybe a certain kind of self-consciousness didn’t exist prior to the ‘60s, and what I should say is that I don’t like Mad Men and I mostly read post-WWII literature because I’m mostly interested in self-consciousness. (And maybe this kind of rubricizing of self-consciousness is exactly what people call self-indulgent and hate people like me for.)
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