My Life and Thoughts

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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