I Rant Because I Care: Just Stop Already, Sunday Styles

I've ranted before about the strange hipster/scenester fkfest that is the NY Times' Sunday column 'A Night Out With,' in the paper's Fashion and Style section.  In these columns is usually profiled some person/band/phenomenon that is on the cusp of greatness -- and by greatness I really think it's one-hit-wonderness, but don't tell that to the breathlessly gushing Times reporters who spend an evening carousing with the person/band/phenomenon in question, and then offer up descriptions of how funny/quirky/smirky/smart these people are, and how cool it is that they've chosen to spend their Night Out at some effortlessly cool bar in Bushwick or a hole-in-the-wall Indian place that nobody knows about (shh!  don't tell!), and how droll and quippy their conversations are. 

Last week it was the young-ish cast of the new JJ Abrams-produced Cloverfield.  This week is a band called Vampire Weekend, four Columbia University alums whose first album is coming out next week (they've already won over all the music blogs, apparently), and who have decided to spend their Night Out at their old college-era haunts in Morningside Heights.  Oooh!  Fun!  Let's hang out with the band where they used to eat ... when they were sophomores!  How absolutely charming!  The article is here, but let me just give you the highlights:

“I think they invented the lime rickey here,” said the band’s keyboardist, Rostam Batmanglij, who interned for the Oxford English Dictionary during college. He took a sip of the retro soft drink and noted its cherry undertones.
[...]
Describing its sound as “Upper West Side Soweto,” the quartet combines library smarts with Afro-inflected pop; the lyrics name-drop reggaetón, Benetton and the Indian town of Dharmsala, and question the merits of certain punctuation marks in the band’s single “Oxford Comma.”
[...]
“Did you know the guitarist’s first girlfriend was Liza Minelli?” he asked, in a reference to the band [Love's] Bryan MacLean. His smirk betrayed his delight in wielding this nugget.

His bandmates were no slouches in the did-you-know department.

“Did you know that Henry Rollins was once the manager of an Häagen-Dazs store?” said Christopher Tomson, the band’s lanky drummer.

Mr. Koenig: “Did you know that New Jersey is the capital of the flavor industry?”

“Did you know the flavor of strawberry yogurt comes from crushed bugs?” Mr. Baio piped back up.

The guys are just as studied when it comes to fashion, with a preference for blazers, button-downs and other blue-blood affectations.

Sigh.  Somewhere in the middle of the article is the following reporterly quip: "Such intellectual showmanship shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Vampire Weekend — and is anyone not these days?"  And I guess that's the thing: look, I can't really comment on the band's qualities qua band-ness, you know, as folks who produce these UWS Soweto sounds, and maybe Vampire Weekend is, in fact, amazing and wonderful and deserving of all of these pre-release accolades.  But -- BUT -- you're not going to get me to actually listen to the music by saying shit like "anyone familiar with VW -- and is anyone not these days?"  Are you trying to get me to despise them before the fact?  Also, these sorts of profiles where I'm supposed to ooh and ahh over their intellectual credentials -- OH  MY GOD THEY WENT TO COLLEGE -- christ, Get Off It Already.  'Library smarts'?  Jesus.  And don't get me started on their 'studied' fashion sense.  I can't tell anymore which I'm more annoyed at: the band or the writing.  And that's the thing with the column -- the writing style pretty much ensures that you end up cursing everyone involved.  The self-satisfied smugness of it all just makes me die a little bit on the inside.   

At least in the time it took me to write this piece, we -- the collective intellectual showmanly duo of Probably Awkward -- got our library smarts together and figured out how to de-serif our fonts. 

Comments

[jb]

"His smirk betrayed his delight in wielding this nugget."

I thought it might be worth doing something with this sentence, then realized it does half of everything, or too much of nothing, on its own.

[Carson]

Apparently, the one on the far left is fatter in real life.

[benjamin]

if you need more evidence to reach the conclusion that they, like, totally have "library smarts": [link]

[jb]

yes (it was definitely high-school library foyer standard) -- and you know what else is amazing - when they did this interview with the Guardian, they posed in exactly the same positions + outfits as for the Pitchfork interview!

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/01/music_weekly_featuring_vampire.html

[jb]

Crikey, was this discussion this long ago?

Spurred by finding that an indiepop guru I know and respect has been getting into them, I have just heard Vampire Weekend for the first time. I might have thought it was OK if this whole article / post / discussion, + their ludicrous, ugly and generic name, hadn't queered their pitch so badly in advance. It wasn't special anyway - pretty contrived and shapeless. The high-life guitar is OK. But I could do that. Anyone could.

I am now listening to their 'Oxford Comma'. I'm not sure what they mean by this phrase, but I don't think it's a strike against the Comma, Hegemony. Come to think of it, it's pretty grim to swear as blatantly as this so upfront on yr big would-be hit. ... and this track also loses focus entirely and winds up nowhere much.

I fear that they are overrated, except by Probably Awkward.