Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times is taking a midseason look at the contenders for the Grammy Awards' fourth or fifth most prestigious award: Best New Artist, which has been given in the past to such luminaries as Paula Cole, Arrested Development, and A Taste Of Honey. Looking at all the exciting music produced by those who qualify for the award, it's really anyone's guess who will take home the prize next February. No wait, the winner's definitely going to be Duffy, isn't it?
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Vampire Weekend mania is not over yet, people! The band continues to stoke the flame with a video for "Oxford Comma," directed by Richard Ayoade of The Mighty Boosh. Precocious adolescents and the proudly collegiate will delight to see Ezra Koenig wander past cinematic references and chapter titles while wearing an all-white suit. The mix of surreality and upper-class affectation makes the video seem like a tribute to both Wes Anderson and late Luis Bunuel. If they don't lose their sprightliness on album two, maybe they'll eventually get their own video comp released by The Criterion Collection. [MTV]
Latest by n/a: Thank God that someone else sees the pretentious assbanditry of Vampire Weekend in making their video a complete homage to Godard's "Weekend", then premiering that video on MTV's new show FNMTV. The farmland, title cards, cars, guns, single-shot, wide-angle, bohemian more »
Lurking within today's New York Times' op-ed section is David Brooks' attempt to get in early on calling the rise of the "geek" in society, no doubt because he's looking for another genre of well-off people to sucker into buying a book that shows "who they really are" in the grand sociological scheme of things. (Oh, for the days when people read and wrote in an effort to experience cultures that may have been at least one degree removed from their own.) Brooks' column about the "nerd ascendancy" name-drops Tina Fey and Jason Kottke, notes that the new geek uniform eschews pocket protectors for "text-laden T-shirts," calls Barack Obama "the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes," and, of course, runs down the sort of cultural product that people who experiment with fonts for fun consume in their spare time:
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NME news editor Paul Stokes shares three "indie rock nightmares" on the magazine's blog, but they're along the lines of "I live with Julian Casablancas" and "this guy from the Klaxons is looking at me!" The world of indie rock has infinitely more disturbing horrors, and while I've never actually had the three dreams I describe below, maybe you will once you've read them. Prepare to Touch And Go...to hell! Eee-heheheheheheheeee!
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If Gilmore Girls were still on the air, it's highly likely that there would be at least one Vampire Weekend name-check by this point in the season. Here are four possible—and highly plausible!—scenarios for that reference. (My favorite, perhaps unsurprisingly, involves Lane talking about leaking the demos of her band Hep Alien to music blogs, and telling Rory that she's hoping for "a Vampire Weekend effect, even though their preppy afropop is totally overrated.") [Pretty Goes with Pretty]
This weekend, Vampire Weekend cemented their superstar status, joining the ranks of such timeless acts as 3-D, the Tragically Hip, the Bus Boys, Timbuk3, and the Hothouse Flowers as musical guests on Saturday Night Live! There's been a lot of talk about whether these guys are really Columbia douchebags or just playing up an image of Columbia douchebags and while there've been some salient points about the precarious position of class and race, we... wait a minute, what the fuck is that guy wearing? Really? A scarf the size of a tent? Indoors? He looks like Stuart Little after he curls up for a nap inside a shirt sleeve.
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Latest by SpeedyGonzalas: "Going preppy is punk rock if you think about it." You are so OTM. GG Allin was an Izod wearing bastard weren't he? Preppy asshole, that GG. more »
Amy Adams (whose IMDB page looks distressingly like my "favorite TV shows" list on Facebook) is hosting SNL tomorrow, and the musical guest is everyone's favorite cultural imperialists, Vampire Weekend. Sure, I could make some joke here about them pulling a Ted Danson, but I think the horrible SNL sound mix will be punishment enough. Godspeed, lil' rockers! [NBC.com]
Planning on visiting Times Square this weekend? Make sure you wear a few extra layers—the brisk winds of the Vampire Weekend backlash will be blowing extra-hard through that part of town, thanks to ginormous pictures of the band being plastered all over the windows of MTV's 1515 Broadway studio. [Beggars Group USA blog; HT Chris Weingarten]
"As non-music-critic venture capitalist Fred Wilson... wrote, 'What would happen if the 1977 vintage Talking Heads covered Paul Simon's 'Graceland'? You'd get the sound of a new band called Vampire Weekend.'" Concise, reference points easily graspable by everyday folks, an inferred sense he understands the socio-economic context of his subject, and he doesn't even overstep his bounds by wading into murky international waters: why we're all eventually going to lose our jobs to guys who don't need the money. [Advertising Age]
News of the Vampire Weekend backlash has apparently not hit the transom of the always-attractive "people who actually pay for their music" demographic; while the Internet's love-hate relationship with the band has been thrashing back and forth, the album's Amazon chart ranking is No. 7, and it's been rising all week. (Click to enlarge the chart.) [Infofilter]
As previously reported, both Jess and I think that the debut album by the buzzed-to-death New York band Vampire Weekend is perfectly fine. (Possibly of note: Every time I listen to their album, I experience an Orange Juice craving about six tracks in.) But coverage of the band—from its Rolling Stone accolades to all those blog posts—has been absolutely nauseating, to the point where it actually makes me kind of hate the idea of words being used to described music, or at least musicians. I hit some sort of breaking point yesterday, thanks to the "A Night Out With" profile of the band in the New York Times Sunday Styles. In its 489 words, it manages to hit on everything that drives me bonkers about the Columbia-bred band's preppy-smarmy signifiers, and it spends more time talking about the band's hype express than about the music that started that train a-rolling. After the jump, the four sentences that almost had me throwing my paper across the room!
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Latest by n/a: everyone says "paul simon" as a reference point--I don't hear it. I hear "Haircut 100". And hey, they've got the sweater thing in common.... more »
If you're one of the 12 people in the music blogosphere who has yet to issue an official opinion on the Vampire Weekend album, you can stream it here. Maura and I both kinda like it. First the Soulja Boy flip-flop and now this. What in the hell is going on? [The Leak via Paper Thin Walls]
Today's entry in the endless game of "blog entry or attempt to bring the verbal stylings of 'Sixty Second Preview' mouthpiece Jeff Craig to the world of indie rock": "Straight outta Jacksonville, it's the best new American band since Vampire Weekend, the awesomely-monikered Black Kids." [Good Weather For Airstrikes]
Idolator
Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times is taking a midseason look at the contenders for the Grammy Awards' fourth or fifth most prestigious award: Best New Artist, which has been given in the past to such luminaries as Paula Cole, Arrested Development, and A Taste Of Honey. Looking at all the exciting music produced by those who qualify for the award, it's really anyone's guess who will take home the prize next February. No wait, the winner's definitely going to be Duffy, isn't it?
More »
If Gilmore Girls were still on the air, it's highly likely that there would be at least one Vampire Weekend name-check by this point in the season. Here are four possible—and highly plausible!—scenarios for that reference. (My favorite, perhaps unsurprisingly, involves Lane talking about leaking the demos of her band Hep Alien to music blogs, and telling Rory that she's hoping for "a Vampire Weekend effect, even though their preppy afropop is totally overrated.") [
