It’s a lazy argument to make, one born of cynicism and perhaps too much exposure to Top Forty radio these days: there is no good music being made anymore, nothing that will stand the test of time quite as well as whatever we remember from our youths (and that music depends on your particular youth. For my mother, it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd; for me, it’s Weezer, Radiohead, and R.E.M.). Sure, there’s always a surplus of indie rock bands plying their trade, you might say, but none of them will reach the heights of whoever it is that you remember as being examples of “good” music when you were first becoming aware of the distinction between good and bad music.
I have been guilty of that fallacy myself, and I know from experience how wrong it is, and how wrongheaded it is too. Vampire Weekend probably won’t merit a multi-hour documentary about their artistic legacy when all is said and done, but for the purposes of giving me something to listen to other than whatever’s on the radio, they’ll do quite nicely.
And while I’m snidely dismissing the radio in the previous sentence, allow me to fold a little and admit that, yes, there is good music on the radio now, but it’s played to death by programmers and disc jockeys too lazy to try and mix it up. Thanks to the fact that most radio stations are owned by a few corporations, what’s good for the bottom line isn’t always good for the listener. Adele is fantastic, I love her voice, but if I have to hear “Someone Like You” every hour on the hour for much longer I might just storm the nearest clock tower and hurl verbal abuse upon all below (violence never solves anything, and I don’t know how to shoot a gun nor do I want to learn how to anyway. People I’ve known who collect guns are a little out there, even for me).
So, good new music; it exists. Vampire Weekend is proof of that, even if they never follow up their first two albums with anything substantial. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” has a shout-out to Peter Gabriel, the immortal line “do you wanna fuck/like you know I do,” and a video that manages to remind me of “Teen Wolf” and just about any mid-Eighties movie “party scene” (in the horror movies, the parties end in multiple decapitations; in the comedies, misunderstood advances and crossed signals, which can be almost as painful as decapitations). I saw the video one night at a buddy’s apartment on campus, where I was in the midst of a drunken tear through pop culture (I believe I had quite an amount of verbal abuse to heap upon the hapless makers of “Beerfest,” though I think drunk or sober it’s an unwatchable train wreck of a film). MTV2, which sold itself as “the alternative to MTV” in the sense that it showed videos instead of reality shows, was running the “Cape Cod ” video, and I was stopped in my tracks from mocking it. I liked it, I really really liked it.
I’m prone to bouts of cynicism, indeed full-on meanness, and when it comes to popular culture I tend to be really cynical. In a world where three-fourths of the original Ramones line-up is dead and gone yet the Eagles remain alive and well, a world where the Kardashians are celebrities simply for being celebrities (or for being related to a sex-video star), a world where Howie Mandel can have a say in whether someone’s dreams of Vegas stardom can come true, I don’t think you can blame me too much for being cynical about good stuff being out there. Music has always been my passion, especially as I’m one of those lucky many who have no business trying to make it; karaoke night is the closet I’ll ever get to starring at Carnegie Hall, and I’m pretty sure that idea I had about a rock opera set during the Battle of Britain (but involving aliens who teach us all to love one another, before luring us to our collective doom) is best left on the drawing board of my mind.
I’m envious of musicians; I’m envious of the guys in Vampire Weekend, envious of their Members Only jackets in the video, envious of the cool guitar that the lead guy (who has the non-rock star name Ezra, of all things; Ezra is great for a poet, as the mother of Ezra Pound could concur) plays in the video and onstage the few times I’ve seen them live on TV (or pre-taped performing live on TV). I grew up not with MTV but with “Friday Night Videos” (I think it was Friday nights, I could be mistaken), which was when NBC would devote a whole hour (or half-hour) to music videos in the early Nineties (or maybe the late Eighties…whatever). The important thing is, when I thought of musicians, I couldn’t separate the visual presentation from the actual music. When I thought of R.E.M., I saw Michael Stipe pacing the floor in the “Losing My Religion” video, for instance. Gradually, I developed an admiration for artists whose videos might not get regular rotation if they made videos at all, but part of me still loves a clever or at least well-executed music video, and “Cape Cod,” drunk as I was, was clever the first time I saw it, and each time it subsequently aired that night, in between drunken rants at “Beerfest” (I have it on good authority that I threw an actual beer towards the TV during the movie, though I don’t recall if such a thing occurred). Perhaps it doesn’t hold up whenever I’m sober now (and rest assured, when I watch anything on TV now I do so sober; it’s been a while since I had a drink and I’d like to keep it that way). But I still like Vampire Weekend, and I still think (however passing their artistry may be) they’re a pretty good example to cite when people who are too young to be cynical say there’s no good music anymore.
You might have to be drunk at three in the morning to find it, but it’s there.
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