Vampire Weekend

Last night unexpectedly, I got to go see Vampire Weekend.
The Dum Dum Girls and Beach House opened for them.
Going into the show I felt like some model casting call
from the J Crew on Rockfeller Center had spilled over
into Radio City but it was fine.

I love Beach House they are really soothing and they
seem to talk of a slight quiet sadness,
never attaches itself and never becomes personal, as is
in contrast, the case with Bon Iver which kinda lodges
itself in your gut and makes you relive all your
complicated breakups in graphic detail.It's sort of more
like an atmospheric sadness. In many ways I
was more excited to see them than Vampire Weekend, who
though I have been extremely aware of for awhile now, I
haven't really listened to, because maybe I felt the
conciousness they promoted didn't serve me well at a time
in my life when I was underemployed and too poor to be hip
in Brooklyn.

Just like some music is said to make you more
prone to doing drugs and being violent, I was afraid that
listening to Vampire Weekend would make me prone to
spending too much time at J Crew(where I recently saw a 700
hundred dollar leather jacket) and Zachary's Smile and
squandering whatever savings I had on argyle(socks, sweaters).
It's not that I don't like these things, it's just that
pursuing them wasn't useful to me at the time, I had an
expensive coffee habit to fund.

In a way I am really glad because it is maybe better to
see a band, especially one that is so popular, fresh
without having really heard them before.I guess the optimal place
to do this would be a small smoky bar, but baring that
Radio City is nice.When Vampire Weekend went on everyone in
the audience got up and danced and the level of audience
enthusiasm can only be described as adorable.

They have kind of bright guitar screech.I was recently listening
to Elvis and it sounded a little Elvis like to me. They covered
Bruce Springsteen and made lots of references to New Jersey( which
the audience heavily from New Jersey, liked). The
audience danced a lot, and they instructed people how to dance
(hold your hands up for a certain song), move more for the second
half. The fact that people were moving in Radio City Music Hall was
cool. I saw Radiohead there in the late nineties and we all just
sat in our seats (there were more drugs though, not me but around me)
and I may have fallen asleep.

I guess the biggest beef that people have with VW(other than the
fact that their initials are the same as Volkswagon) is that
they are, like their alma-mater Columbia, possibly guilty of
eminent domain abuse.They sing about African music from the 1960s.
People from Senegal living on 120th St should be singing this music
and making it famous.There are the comparisons to Paul Simon.But mostly
its just good pop music. I guess it's better to take your musical
influences from the African Market place in Harlem than from a bust of
Bach at the Manhattan School of Music. And the influences maybe aren't
that evident. Anyway, the show was really fun and I'm glad I went.
Any more serious discussion misses the point of good and layered pop
music, which it was.