My Life and Thoughts

I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

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Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.

Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?

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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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