Why Blog When You Can Just Read The New Yorker?

The current issue (thanks to Hannah and Neil for extending my subscription) had two articles of interest to me. One is about the band Vampire Weekend, reporting on their stay in California and previewing their upcoming second album, Contra. I must say that as an ethnomusicologist and teacher of world music classes, I’m pretty fascinated by Vampire Weekend. Though the comparisons between them and David Byrne/Paul Simon 1980s era world music are inexact, it’s nice to have a case study that’s slightly more recent. Plus, I went to college with these guys, and I sort of vaguely knew them. It’s hard not to be interested when people you consider your peers become successful in the field of endeavour nearest and dearest to your own heart. I don’t think that Vampire Weekend’s music always pans out, but they’ve got their moments. Their new single, “Horchata,” is certainly a dud, but “M79,” from their first album, is a small piece of brilliance. It’s also the best song ever about a bus route.

The article, by Lizzie Widdicombe (and if that’s actually her real name, wow!), doesn’t shed too much new light on the band. I mean, what can you do in 5 pages, really, especially when a sizable chunk of the article chronicles their meeting with Tom DeLonge from Blink-182? I’ll repeat the plea that I’ve made for M.I.A.: can someone out there smarter than me and with more time than I’ve got write something really intelligent about this band? I mean, maybe actually talking about musical style in a real way? And actually probing further into the question of imperialist nostalgia? If someone writes something like that, I’d read it. And I’d assign it to my students.

There's at least one quite smart thing in this article, though, and I think it deserves much more than the small mention Widdicombe gives it. She writes: "Many of the personas of rock music--punk rebel, sexual deviant--have lost their power to shock. But the effete, collegiate image projected by Vampire Weekend proved capable of offending in a fresh way." I think that's absolutely on point, that's exactly what happened with this band. Now, will someone out there spin out some elaborate theorizations on this?

Also in The New Yorker this week, Rebecca Mead takes on the thorny issue of what to call the decade we just finished. Her argument seems to be that our lack of consensus on what to call these past 10 years (the naughties? the aughts?) points to a general distancing from our recent past:

“Given all that has emerged in the past ten years, the failure to invent a satisfactory name for the period seems overdetermined—a reflection of our sense that the so-called aughts were not all they ought to have been, and were so much less than they promised to be. With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to--or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.”

Indeed, certainly the tone I’ve perceived in the end-of-the-decade pieces that I’ve read has been a rather negative one. And perhaps with good reason. From an American perspective, at least, one can trace the outline of the previous decade in a series of tragedies, fiascos, and failures: the disputed election of 2000, the attacks of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib, the re-election of George W. Bush, the near-total collapse of the economy.

In fact, looking back at all that has happened in the larger world, I feel kind of guilty admitting that the 2000s were actually pretty good for me. I graduated high school, left my comfortable Midwestern hometown and moved to New York City, made some great friends, listened to some great music, learned a lot, met the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, graduated from Columbia, got into graduate school, lived in several foreign countries, and nearly completed my Ph.D.

The 2010s look to be going equally as well. We didn’t see any lions on the outing to Pilanesburg National Park in South Africa that I took with several friends from college at 5:30 in morning on January 1^st. But we did see some rhinos, zebras, giraffes, and elephants. And a few days later, I got to see my freshman and junior year roommate get married. And in August, I’ll be getting married as well.

So as I say, the last 10 years or so have been pretty good for me. I certainly hope that trend continues. And I hope that when I write my decade-summing-up post 10 years hence, that events in the larger world will have been as favorable as those in my own personal life.

And, one more story about Vampire Weekend, or at least vaguely about Vampire Weekend. When I was in Argentina, I used to read the Argentine edition of Rolling Stone, which was made up of articles about Argentine music in Spanish and articles translated into Spanish from the American edition. They had a review for the movie Twilight that was, I think, by Peter Travers or something. It was one of the articles originally written in English and then translated. The title, in Spanish, was "Fin de Semana del Vampiro." This is clever in English, since it makes reference to the vampires in the movie by also name-checking a popular and trendy band. The Spanish version of the review must have just been a literal translation, but, as literal translations often are, it is somewhat lacking. Namely in that Vampire Weekend wasn't popular enough in Argentina at the time to have really rung any bells. Plus, I only got the original reference anyway because I was an English-speaker. To get the joke, an Argentine would have had to both be proficient enough at English to translate "Fin de Semana del Vampiro" to English (perhaps relatively easy) and recognize that translation as the name of an American indie rock band (relatively more difficult at that time in Buenos Aires, I think).

Anyway, I realize in just writing this little anecdote that it doesn't seem nearly as funny as I remember it being. I guess this just proves once again that when you are learning a language, any jokes or bits of verbal flair that you recognize and understand are absolutely hilarious.