My Life and Thoughts

After my recent post about Vampire Weekend, I got an email from my friend Sam Frank (a former copyeditor of n+1, a current music reviewer for Dusted, and a future editor of Triple Canopy), forwarding me the links to two reviews of Vampire Weekend—pro- and anti-—in the Village Voice. Reading these pieces, I found myself musing upon the reasons why I don’t like music reviews, which is what I’m going to write about today.

The main reason I don’t like pop music reviews is their increasing bent towards political criticism. Music reviewers have developed a whole lexicon (“precious,” “twee”) to pass off sociopolitical critique as aesthetic critique. It’s true of course that music can be an effective instrument of social change, but it’s not like there aren’t other, more direct instruments out there (teaching in schools, lobbying Congress, etc.). So why has social progressiveness become the privileged benchmark of musical merit?

It’s as if all the worst legacies of Marxist criticism have been carefully handed down to the field of pop music reviews. E.g. the equation of melodies and “catchy hooks” with capitalism (they’re just trying to sell records with their “catchy hooks”); and, conversely, difficult/ experimental music with political progressiveness. You don’t see it as much in literature—the equation of progressive form with progressive content—because the most formally experimental, non-narrative literature will eventually be attacked as “art for art’s sake,” art from the ivory tower, etc. In music criticism, though, the corresponding devices—dissonance, distortion, “noise”—are still earnestly and weirdly associated with populism.

I say “weirdly” because, when it comes to actual members of “the people,” you know the teenagers who sewed the rivets on your jeans would much rather listen to saccharine Asian pop music than to, say:

• some dude “howl[ing] and brood[ing], spewing righteous accusations, shouting about the ocean and falling bombs, while his bandmates push and push”;
• the “electric crunch” perfected by the descendents of “some of the world’s last truly nomadic peoples” who formed a band while interred in a refugee camp; or
• the use of “baroque compositional curveballs to spotlight problems with alcoholism, depression, and police ignorance” (from Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2007).

And when you pass by the kitchen where the short-statured Central American immigrants are cooking Thai food that has been made simultaneously extra-rich and underseasoned for the overprivileged American palate—what is on their stereo? Tuneful tuneful Mexican music, or “a stammering Glaswegian language artist [turning] phrases over and over, inverting and examining and disassembling and reassembling them a word or a syllable at a time”?

Moving to the Village Voice articles, they said pretty much what you would expect. The “pro” article (Mike Powell, “Please Ignore the Embroidered Dog Sweater”) opens with the observation that it would be racist to criticize Ezra Koenig for buying a Ralph Lauren sweater covered with embroidered dogs, because nobody would say anything if it was Kanye West flaunting his “Ralph Lauren gear.” This doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the review, but it’s a “safe” rhetorical gambit because a music reviewer will always score points for exposing a racial double standard.

Powell’s point is that we shouldn’t hate Vampire Weekend for singing about things like “Mansard roofs, WASP-y names like Bryn and Blake, Cape Cod,” Louis Vuitton, etc. Why not? Because the use of one milieu rather than another, as subject matter, is not a reliable index of aesthetic merit? No: because Vampire Weekend is being ironic! Theirs is “an album of subtle rebellion” directed at people called Bryn and Blake; like Evelyn Waugh, they are “sniping at the upper classes from close range.”

Of course, Powell knows that sniping from close range isn’t as good as sniping from a refugee camp among the world’s authentic nomadic tribes, so, when it comes to actually saying anything positive about the music, he is careful not to get too effusive: “Vampire Weekend is a jaunty indie-pop album with decent melodies and a distinct rhythmic sense, made by four reasonably good-looking young men.” Words to bring tears to the eyes of their proud mothers…

The defensive position of the “pro” review is characteristic of another regrettable phenomenon of the discourse surrounding pop music today: people have become so furtive and embarrassed about their musical preferences! Much more so than about their taste in books or movies. People are now too cagey to admit to liking any musical group, unless the vocalist is like a tiny Japanese woman who chants in Italian about panda bears.

Why is this? It could be related to the political critique; people are scared of endorsing a band insufficiently removed from gentrification, hipsterism, Williamsburg, the Ivy League, etc. But that can’t be all of it. A case in point is Sam’s email to me, about the VV reviews:

Oh and Vampire Weekend—the object of much hatred from my friends and colleagues. I saw them about a year ago at Barnard and had an inkling they’d get huge in a hurry.

This is what we can safely talk about, regarding a new band: (a) the extent to which they are hated; and (b) the extent of their current/ future commercial success.

The “con” article (“Please Ignore This Band,” by Julianne Shepherd) takes the offensive rhetorical stance, calling VW “deplorable,” and condemning them as a force of the #1 crime against the politics of music reviews: gentrification. VW is propagating “a mutated bourgeois fantasy” of Cape Cod, “fetishizing the parts of Massachusetts that would keep the actual ‘Massholes’ out”—as if any pop song that tries to convey a local atmosphere has a demographic obligation to represent the total population of every state in which said locale is found.

Shepherd then indicts VW of “blending Talking Heads with twee and African-influenced polyrhythms,” and “run[ning] their influences through a steam-cleaner—in sound, in texture, in language, in execution—until there’s nothing left but space and simplicity and precious little conflict.” This is another example of music reviews retaining the bad parts of Marxist criticism. By the logic of the music review, music that doesn’t have dissonance/ conflict must also be denying political conflict, opposing social change, and emitting “the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society.” As Shepherd puts it, “because their whole steez is so ’80s, I am forced to choose Black Flag and Minor Threat. Impeach Reagan!”

Shepherd concludes her review by suggesting that VW’s right-wing message may be deduced not only from the lyrics and the bowdlerized African polyrhythms, but even from their level of musical proficiency:

Their calculatedly highbrow guitar techniques— pointedly undistorted; I bet these guys read sheet music—and carefully tousled nice-guy vocals drip so liberally with propriety that their style has, for me, become a resounding philosophical statement, a line in the sand.

How is technical proficiency at the guitar equivalent to a resounding philosophical endorsement of Reaganomics? The only explanation I can think of is that it takes money and time to become really good at the guitar, whereas any full-time factory worker can make “lowbrow” noise. Similarly problematic reasoning was used by Malevich—who was crazy—to prove that all representational art is bourgeois, and that the future of painting lay in the production of Suprematist Black Squares. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Malevich was great—but he was an extremist in an age of extremists, and an artist; nobody ever took him for a standard-bearer of objective criticism.

Well, I will leave you with a comment on Shepherd’s review, written by a member of the Dusted newsgroup (and forwarded to me by my friend Sam):

The real problem with VW is the fact that it has NO politics; it is a band that has figured out a sweet little formula for selling records, combining pop acumen with feigned upper crust detachment for a result that is supposed to be an entertaining riff on old money whiteboys. The problem I have with VW is that the band isn’t really interested in prodding their privileged Ivy League status—at the end of the day, the band’s ultimate point is to make mild pop that is easily consumable, and which will garner them money, fame, etc. In other words, the point is to make fun of their privilege in order to enhance it further. It’s a bad joke played on us all.

Food for thought: what would it mean for VW to “prod their privileged Ivy Leage status”? What would the songs sound like? How would we know that “prodding” was taking place? I guess, the music wouldn’t sound so “mild” or “easily consumable,” and fewer people would want to buy the album, which would thereby make less money; then the singers wouldn’t recoup the money their parents spent on Columbia tuition, and then the moneyed classes would contain 12 fewer members (4 bandmembers + their 8 parents)? Avanti!

Tags: Malevich, music, n+1, politics, reviews, today's youth, Vampire Weekend

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.