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?

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In spring 2007, shortly after the publication of n+1’s “Symposium on New American Writing,” I received an email with the youthful subject-line, “hello!,” from a young person called Ezra Koenig, a recent Columbia graduate and a former student of Caleb Crain (who was next to me in the n+1 symposium, because of the magic of alphabetical order).

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OK OK, so I may be really excited about old historical novels and octogenarian translators and restorers of 18th-century clocks (see earlier entry)… but I have not forgotten my interest in today’s youth. In fact, last week marked the first meeting of Humanities 199A, my undergraduate thesis-writing workshop. This hour was full of delightful surprises. One delightful surprise came when I informed the class how much I had enjoyed reading their thesis proposals, and it emerged that the class already knew how much I had enjoyed reading their proposals, because, as one student explained: “They actually sent us your blog. I’m the one writing about St. Jerome.”

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Sometimes in the course of my day-to-day activities, I just have to pause and think: how does my lived experience differ from that of my colleague, Ian McEwan? Like me, Ian McEwan probably eats breakfast every morning, and wears shoes. Like me, McEwan also has a website: http://ianmcewan.com. The existence of this website proves that someone must be maintaining it (the “first cause” proof); which, in turn, raises the question of what McEwan’s webmaster is like. How do his character, appearance, and biography differ from those of my webmaster? Does he bartend?

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