Tynan's Anger

SONGS OF THE DECADE #68

[For more info, read the Ground Rules of The Song of The Decade List]

Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma (2008)



Vampire Weekend is about a lot of things. It's about youth, learning, love, live and let live...and about pretension. People who sneer at any mere reference to pretension hate Vampire Weekend, and hate "Oxford Comma" especially. But "Oxford Comma" is against pretension any way you frame it, whether you ignore words entirely or don't read beyond the song title.

All the title alludes to is an arbitrary relic from the past that people hold on to for no real reason. Copy editors debate the use of the oxford comma, and linguistics reject its important entirely. Nonetheless, it is something that those who believe it gives meaning to their lives to be grammar Nazis (assuming, of course, that it gives meaning to your life to be an anything Nazi) object to. That's not just high-end stupidity, it's also dangerous.

It's that disparity that connects those who don't listen to music all that carefully to those that study it well, and don't just study it. That's pretty much the ground that Vampire Weekend broke with their debut album. Is someone like Ezra Koenig, who went to an elite school, wears a tie, alludes to hip-hop, and makes classic pop automatically an asshole? Has he done anything to hurt you or someone you know? Or are people from those very elite schools just so burned out that they've forgotten how lucky they've been to have had that privilege?

If the world is going to improve as a whole, it needs each clan within it not to make judgments about any other clan, even a clan as big as America. Vampire Weekend is the musical equivalent of the ACLU, except that it works, precisely because the band addresses the presumptions that the ACLU ignored. "Oxford Comma" was the song that returned popular music back to "Live and Let Live" after even one of its blandest legends declared "Live and Let Die." That's a pretty fundamental shift in every way of thinking, especially musically.

Labels: 2000s, lists, oxford comma, pop music, songs of the decade, vampire weekend