Word: music
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Vampire Weekend are a rather unremarkable band. Ezra Koenig and company are little more than a few slightly preppy guys who got together at Columbia and started writing charming, inoffensive pop songs. Their most remarkable feature, their influence by African music, has in fact been vastly overstated and, given the recent success of internationalist groups like Yeasayer and The Very Best, it’s much less novel than it was back...
...therefore something of a surprise. That they have attracted a considerable backlash from hipster circles is possibly even more surprising. There’s very little to dislike in their songs: the lyrics are tinged with intellectualism, but their vagueness and anti-elitism renders them pretty harmless. The music is a delicate blend of indie pop, steady rhythms, and chamber music: again a combination not designed to offend. Vampire Weekend know what they do and they do it well, as proven on their second album, “Contra...
...Contra,” which recently topped the Billboard charts, is exactly what one could expect from Vampire Weekend—solid, enjoyable music, gently pushing at its own boundaries, yet just a little unremarkable. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could reasonably love or hate it: it’s good, and that’s about...
...comes as a shock that on his newest album, “Rebirth,” Wayne leaves rap music behind altogether in favor of an as-yet uncharted genre: rock. In this latest effort, Wayne abandons rap’s sampled beats for a bass, drum set, and electric guitar. Power ballads of unrequited love replace tales of street violence and self-promotion, and the dissing and calling out of other rappers is tossed out in favor of punk-inspired castigation of society and nameless enemies. This bold step, however admirable it might be in theory, comes nowhere near...
...forms and the problems and re-evaluations that result from it. Worse, the narrative that carries this theme is banal and in many senses childish. There is an inherent incongruity in the combination between Wayne’s hackneyed stories and the punk-influenced, angsty rock music that he is drawing upon...