Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic.
Monday, January 04, 2010
Places White People Live (Vampire Weekend)
The dots are all the independent record stores in NYC you can pick up a bonus-CD version of Vampire Weekend's Contra. Yes, all the places in all of New York City:
Personally, I was hoping for a Columbia student special. That way I wouldn't have to take the train.
Making predictions for the year to come is usually a doomed proposition: unless you get everything right, you look stupid, even if your rate of being right is quite high. This is in fact worse in the no-profit world, because unlike Jimmy the Greek or John Battelle, there's nothing to be gained by gambling on such predictions. Nonetheless, I do not think more money or less money is the same as this band is great/this one sucks. Hence, I will make predictions that will either produce anticipatory anxiety for no reason or allows me to say I told you so in December 2010. Here it goes:
1. Band to go from good to great: Titus Andronicus The Airing of Grievances was a fantastic album, full of ambition, preposterous thought it may be, intelligence, and catharsis that was covered by few outside the indie blogosphere.
Titus Andronicus is clearly upping the ante from Grievances' Shakespeare/Camus/Breughel references with the The Monitor: a Civil War concept album with tons of numerological significance, collaborations with the likes the Vivian Girls, Ponytail, and the Hold Steady, and even more wordplay, Shakespeare, and sitcom references.
I've heard "Four Score," an 8 minute track that'll be the first single from The Monitor, and if it's any indication of the album at large, The Monitor is starting to look like the In An Aeroplane Over the Sea to The Airing of Grievances' On Avery Island. Here's hoping Patrick Stickles doesn't pull a Jeff Magnum; you can already hear a remarkable improvement in Stickles' singing voice, and their just building on a sound that already has everything in place.
James Murphy made his name making fun of Generation X hipsters. He reached album of the year status by appeasing Generation X hipsters. It almost seems inevitable that James Murphy will turn into one of the people he used to make fun of; his description of LCD Soundystem's third album sounds like one of the spoofs mentioned in "Losing My Edge." There's few things sadder than an aging hipster, and a musician turning into one of the people he used to hate (but who are actually kinda nice) is up there. What happens if he turns into both?
3. Over-hyped band to prove to have longevity: Vampire Weekend
Way too much attention was focused on the band's clothes, image, and face-value lyrics, with little attention paid to the band's keen sense of musical perspective (Columbia grads raised on hardcore making Afropop sounds a lot better to me than Yale grads deconstructing hardcore doing whatever the hell the Dirty Projectors are doing). The early cuts from Contra all sound much more experimental and interesting than anything heard on the self-titled debut, and everyone loves it when a great pop band turns into a great art rock band, right?
4. Popular band most likely to go to dark concept album territory: Spoon
Shocked? Don't be? After Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel realized liked few of his indie peers that he was no longer an underground act. The band's festival performances in 2008 featured no-bullshit disciplined performance with no crowd banter whatsoever. The initial takes on Spoon's Transference sound astounding, even more so because of how different it sounds from anything Spoon has done previously.
4. Band most likely to get rave reviews no matter how much the next album sucks: Animal Collective
For better or for worse, certain artists with a decent enough track record will get free passes from critics basically as long as their work doesn't start sucking dramatically. This has happened to Nobel Laureates (Harold Pinter), Oscar winners (Steven Spielberg), and Rock Hall of Famers (Bob Dylan), and it will most likely happen to the first Internet-made musical sensation. Animal Collective may very well have peaked with Merriweather Post Pavilion, but they've got at least another five years before anyone starts calling them out for being boring. Once that happens, you'll start seeing revisionist reactionaries treat anything post-Merriweather the same way they now treat anything by Sonic Youth post-Daydream Nation.
5. Geriatric indie band most likely to reuinite: Tie - The Replacements/Husker Du
Fans have been pining for a reunion from the former Minneapolis rivals and grunge pioneers for quite some time, and a Replacements reunion has been in the air even since the rumors were nixed by Paul Westerberg in 2008. Meanwhile, Bob Mould and Grant Hart have been talking again, and Hart's even been performing for the first time since '80s indie bands started getting back together. Husker Du got along a much better in the '80s than the Pixies or Dinosaur Jr. ever did, and they were a lot more important. This is the only pick here that's half-prediction, half-wishful thinking.
6. Comeback musician who arguably never had anything to come back from: Alec Ounsworth
As the head of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the first crash test dummy for internet-fueled hype, Ounsworth made a quick blip back on the radar with releases by his new band Flash Python (announced in a personal email to his previous fans), and solo album Mo Beauty, both of which sound perfectly endearing for a musician who has always sounded endearing to begin with. Ounsworth has tour dates in New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago in January, dates and locations that seem perfectly fit to win back the fans who regret having been lost.
Runner up: The Ponys. One of the best Chicago bands of the decade has been shelved since 2007's underappreciated Turn the Lights Out, but the band is back in the studio after taking a hiatus. They've still got a deal with Matador, and since they left a lot of people wanting more, the added time on their hands should only fuel better reviews.
7. Previous Alt Movement Most Likely To Be Butchered By Revivialists: Noise Rock
It became difficult to appreciate Joy Division without the inherent connotation of rock snobbery in the past decade, as whatever greatness was "revived" by Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, and the Killers was ruined by a barrage of posers who thought shoulder pads and goth clothes could be cool again. As rock snobs start looking for underappreciated genres from the '90s, don't be surprised if noise rock gets cut by the hipster blade. There are good bands already doing great work here (Fucked Up, Pissed Jeans, the Black Lips, to name a few), but for every revivalist movement, there's a major label Mormonized equivalent waiting in the wings. I know a few people who may very well want to kill themselves if this happens, so I'd rather be wrong than right.
8. Former crazy awesome musician to go back to being crazy and awesome: Ian Svenonius
Svenonius's VBS.TV segment is regularly insightful, enjoyable, and funny, and while the former tongue-in-cheek revolutionary may be content to perform self-serious video interviews for Vice, I'd imagine he's still got some tricks up his sleeve. It's difficult to imagine something like Nation of Ulysses getting back together (that'd be way too bourgeois), but I'm seeing a Nick Cave-style conversion in the near future, where Svenonius rises from the complacent masses and starts showing the young idiots how it's done, figuratively speaking.
9. Former rock god proven to be a false prophet to dumb indie rock fans, Billy Corgan-style: Thom Yorke
Spin Magazine published an article calling Radiohead pretentious and overrated, and everyone got mad at Spin for pointing this out after the mag had been praising the band for years. What that overlooks is the burdgeoning level of agreement with that article that's gone underreported, most of which centers around the band's unavoidable frontman. Thom Yorke's recent rant in Copenhagen was eerily Bono-esque, and all it will take is one generally sucky album for people to latch onto Yorke's fevered ego. He just better keep the Greenwoods around as a buffer.
10. Awesome band to break up too soon: Fucked Up
They may have been the only punk band that mattered in 2008, but it came at a high cost. Damian Abraham's been killing himself to live in his live shows for a good 6 years now, and last I saw the band, it's seriously started to affect his health. Couple Tracks, a compilation of many of Fucked Up's best and most overlooked material, wouldn't be a bad way to signal the band shutting down. Assuming they're all alive 10 years from now, we should see Fucked Up finally get the respect they deserve soon enough.
Merry Festivus, everyone. Thank you for allowing me to air my grievances. I don't deserve it.
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.
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