two pointers
Between me shooting my mouth off and the magic of Twitter links, I imagine there are some people reading this who are particularly interested in Vampire Weekend — and possibly not as neck-deep in music criticism as some others. At some point soon, I’ll try to talk more about what I actually find in VW’s music, as opposed to just bemoaning the discourse around them. In the meantime, though, can I introduce some of you to a couple interesting writers?
The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J. Hopper and Vampire Weekend
Yesterday I posted a fairly peeved note concerning Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader article about Vampire Weekend. (She’s responded to that note, very graciously, on her blog, but that seems to have vanished.) My note led to a spike in traffic, which was unexpected: if I’d realized it’d catch much attention, I might have explained myself more carefully. The essay below is an attempt to outline my thoughts beyond the mere pique of the thing. Some of you may have heard me talk about this stuff before, but it seemed worth setting down a full, coherent version of it; read at your leisure.
Let me note first, though, that the point here is not to snipe at Hopper, whose work I enjoy. More importantly, the issue I’m about to outline is not really about the music of Vampire Weekend. I do not need you to like their music. But I do want you to think about the culture of our criticism, because I feel like it’s ever more beholden to a kind of blind posturing that wants to stop it from saying anything useful or true. Let’s go ahead and call this posturing The Game.
jessica hopper should be sort of ashamed of herself, in my opinion
I’m a fan of Jessica Hopper’s music criticism, because she can bring to bear an energy, passion, and point of view that’s exciting — enough so that I’ll often look the other way about the fact that her strong point of view often extends to actively mischaracterizing others, playing fast and loose with perspectives that are not her own. (“Hoppersplaining?”)
This Chicago Reader piece about Vampire Weekend, though, is something else. Mostly it’s just Hopper riding the usual horse, tackling the usual rhetoric about privilege and cultural appropriation and “whiteness” — i.e., all the stuff that Vampire Weekend songs are already about. (More and more I think critics are flummoxed by the idea of a band writing songs about the very issues critics want to use to analyze that band — their vocabulary and their pet issues have been preempted.) But then there’s this line about Ezra Koenig, which I’d like you to look at very closely:
He bandies about the ethnic heritage of Vampire Weekend’s members (he’s Jewish, Rostan Batmanglij is Iranian), but “One of my bandmates is Iranian-American” has got to be the Pitchfork-nation equivalent of “Some of my best friends are black.”
Are you following this? “Bandies about!” What we are looking at here is a (so far as I know) white woman selectively misquoting/mischaracterizing a statement of two people’s identity so that she can cast it as some kind of bragging, or some kind of defensiveness, which the clever white critic is here to debunk. A person’s actual identity — like, say, being Persian — is secondary to Hopper’s desire to fit it into her own critical hobbyhorses about privilege and “whiteness” and the first world. The critic’s discourse is far more important than who you actually are, and any declarative statements from you on the topic will only be read as posturing. Not-being-white is posturing. It matters none to the critic. And the way you can tell this is because she refers to VW as “a white American band.”
This is not just lazy or stupid or dull — it’s actively shitty, and constitutes the first time music writing has truly pissed me off in years and years. Jessica Hopper, clever white critic, will decide who’s white and who’s not, thank you very much.
Sharing my gall yet? You’ll only be more galled if you actually look at the quote she’s mischaracterizing, keeping in mind that she’s already referred to this as a “white” band. Here’s the actual quote:
two main writers in the band are Jewish and Persian, which is a pretty broad definition of ‘whiteness’
Do you see what I mean about playing it fast and loose here? She — like everyone else — calls them white, then digs up a quote correcting this misstatement and brushes it aside as some kind of posturing: “bandying around” their ethnicity. If Jessica Hopper wants to call you white, no amount of not-being-white is going to change that. She will match lazy thinking with heroic contortions of logic to make you otherwise.
About which — even though I generally enjoy her writing — I think she should be sort of ashamed, if you ask me.
UPDATE: I later explained my thoughts on this a lot more carefully, here. I was pretty irritated with this review, but I’d hope it’s clear that I don’t think Hopper really needs to be “ashamed” about it. Or anyway I only came close to feeling that way for that impassioned hour and a half or so.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND - “MANSARD ROOF” (LIVE AT THE 2008 READING FESTIVAL)
Chris Baio plays bass like an dolt. People say that the guitar is a priapism, a power-penis-symbol. And so certain guitar-folks hold their axes down low, which I suppose like intensifies the effect if you’re expressive and imaginative enough about it. Chris Baio, though, he keeps his slab glued snugly to his hips as he trots around stiffly, like he learned about the phallic thing in a book and never actually saw it done on a stage. I don’t think that guy can bend his knees either, like not at all, just never figured out how. Chris Baio is clearly the worst dude in Vampire Weekend.
Wait wait but this is just weird!
Like half of the band’s first album is based around the fact that Baio’s the most noticeably good player of the four. (Except Batmanglij, but nobody notices someone being “good” at playing keyboard arrangements.) The guitar parts are sparse and simple and the drummer wasn’t a drummer, and their most successful upbeat pop songs rest on Baio playing something fast and fluid (“Campus,” “A-Punk”); elsewhere Koenig loops through a simple part and leaves it to Baio to elaborate underneath (“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”). The guy may not look very cool, but thus far he’s standing uncooly over on stage left carrying a whole lot of water.
Plus bass isn’t guitar; I mean, the places you’ll put them on your body are different, because — even if you play bass with a pick — your hand addresses it differently. (E.g., more rocking from the wrist, less swing from the elbow. Hence: lower.) Different size, shape, length, weight. A tall, gangly guy like Krist Novoselic can swing his bass down to practically floor-scraping Slash levels, but it doesn’t do that “phallic” thing in the same way as a guitar. I think Baio tucks his slightly higher than loose-swinging bassists because his parts don’t need the loose, imprecise power that’s at the end of the arm (think of Novoselic) — they need the quickness and precision that come higher up. (Plus his arms aren’t as long as Novoselic’s, or Simonon’s.)
It’s a little stiff and uncool, sure — which is to say that he comes across on stage too much like a normal person. (Not sure how much that seems worth criticizing.) God knows you catch him trying, though, midway through this clip. Except that jerky straight-legged motion he tries on isn’t just awkwardness: it’s really part of a whole line of post-punk knock-kneed bass-player stumbling with a lot to recommend it. A line recently culminating in this guy, half the reason I’m posting about this: Liam from Cause Co-Motion, whose awkward, enthusiastic flailing can actively confuse and embarrass the audiences of the bands they open for. YouTube pickings are slim, but a couple clips capture bits of it.
Baio doesn’t get to do that, though; not the band’s style. Just wander around stage left and try not to look too awkward, too stiff. Have fun with it. Loosen up. It’s not like anyone will notice the parts you’re playing are actually shouldering the whole endeavor.
reblogged from pornsoda
“white”
“I was corresponding over e-mail with Ezra recently … and he pointed out that it’s very infrequently mentioned in pieces that catalog the band’s penchant for deck shoes, Cape Cod shout-outs, etc., that the chief songwriters in the group—Ezra and Rostam Batmanglij—are of Jewish and Persian descent, respectively.”
—Jonah Weiner on Vampire Weekend
Ezra Koenig is not incorrect about this. I might even replace “infrequently mentioned” with “infrequently even noticed.” For me, this was a constant surprise in reactions to Vampire Weekend’s debut: how often and how casually the band was described—or derided—as being white, or consisting of WASPs. Given how much it bothered me as a third party, I can only imagine how irritating it’d be to have white people criticize you for being “white” when you’re Persian; to have Protestants write you off as a WASP when you’re Jewish; maybe even to have people call you a WASP when your name is Baio.
This isn’t just pedantry about the meanings of words, though. Most of what people are trying to shorthand when they call indie acts “white” is set of ideas about social manner and social class: what they’re doing is fundamentally just a modern-American youth-culture spin on calling people bourgeois. (Obviously the last thing you’ll risk when calling out an indie band for being bourgeois is actually using an upscale word like “bourgeois.”) As always, much of it is a game of small differences: middle-class youth reprimanding one another for being whatever they’re most embarrassed to be. Koenig and Batmanglij can be those things, too—of course they can.
I don’t even object to the inevitable use of shorthand for those things. (The English have an interesting term: “student types.”) What surprises me, though, is how many white speakers—including people who are relatively savvy about race and culture—seem completely unbothered by the very obvious problems involved in using a racial shorthand for them. Some will quite casually use “white” as code for a certain set of qualities—safety, cleverness, politeness, education, middle-class manner, “literary” pretensions, alleged blandness—without, so far as I can tell, much noticing the shadow of opposites that casts on everyone else. (Danger? Vulgarity? Ignorance? Poverty? Savagery?) Some will argue, in earnest, that they’re actually taking the side of some vibrant other thing over bland, upscale whiteness—all without noticing how very old and familiar that line is. (Haven’t white audiences traditionally admired black artists as a source of transgression, of danger, of dirt, of “authenticity,” of “soul,” of “primitive” thrills?)
But even more than those obvious issues, I’m surprised by how this mode of thinking can lead people to actually misapprehend what’s right in front of their eyes—straight down to the ability to look at four guys in a band, one of them a Persian guy with the surname Batmanglij, and say, without missing a beat, that you’re looking at four white guys. The ability to look at a crowd at an indie show and claim that everyone’s white, even when you’re surrounded by two dozen east Asians. The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.
