The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J. Hopper and Vampire Weekend
One problem I’ve had with music criticism is how doggedly it refuses to pay attention to the music and favor the story around it. And it’s not even a very interesting story — we’re already getting this story from ourselves, from the judgments and opinions we have already deemed correct. We’re not getting the story from the music. I don’t mean to downplay the significance of the surrounding story, or the music’s role in that story (I love me a good metanarrative), but it seems like music has actually taken a secondary position to the story altogether, and we go to the music to confirm the bits of the story we already know to be true. This is how Taylor Swift becomes “innocent” or “sexless” or “promoter of irresponsible fantasies” or any number of patently ridiculous things that are in no way present in her music.
Something that I try to strive for in my writing is a focus on approaching music on its pure aesthetic and stylistic terms — I might use some of this extra context as a framing device once in a while, but in the general sense I like to think of an album’s place in the scheme of things as it relates to other music and not necessarily some sociological construct that may or may not even be apparent in the music itself. There are a lot of reasons for this, but an important one to me is that a lot of music that people love is made by musicians who just so happen to be flawed amalgams of egotistical impulses at best and pathological monsters at worst. And in a corner of culture where we’ve had to deal with the conflicts of enjoying music by people we would later discover to be political troglodytes, insufferable pricks, perpetrators of sexual/physical/psychological abuse, self-destructive trainwrecks, people who lied about who they were and where they came from, unrepentant criminals, even convicted murderers, “they have money and went to a fancy school” feels like a pretty hollow thing to hinge your criticism of a band on, especially if you can stand in the background of said band’s press photo and get mistaken for their new percussionist.
So how do we get past these issues? That’s our own problem to deal with, and I’ve got a bunch of Ronettes songs on my iPod that ask me to solve it every time they show up on shuffle. But if we can divorce great art from a troubling artist, who’s to say that an upper-class band shouldn’t matter to a working-class listener? I’d never been so desperately broke and unsure of my place in the world than I was in the winter of 2001/2002, and there were few albums that I enjoyed at the time as much as Is This It — when I hear what, to me, is one of the best works of straight-up power-pop/new wave of the last ten years, the fact that their singer went to a private Swiss boarding school means what to me, now?
