Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week he gives you a light reminder to not sleep on Vampire Weekend. Listen to “Campus” below, buy Vampire Weekend here and read about it after the jump.
This is what I have been trying to say about music: “Michael Chabon, arguably America’s best line-by-line literary stylist, says he became a proselytizing Obama supporter after reading a particularly impressive turn of phrase in the senator’s second book—a conversion experience that seems, on first glance, inexcusably silly, but on fifth glance might be slightly profound. How much can you tell about a candidate’s fitness to lead a country based on a single clause? The substance/style debate has been around for centuries—and, like all the other venerable binaries, is probably best considered as a symbiosis. Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call. Bush’s difficulty with basic units of syntax has not been trivial: It signals a wider habit of mind that has extended to every corner of governance. Hillary’s tendency to express herself in distant clichés very likely lost her the nomination—and, one might argue, rightfully so. Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year. It’s silly to downplay the importance of verbal intelligence to a job that makes you the mouthpiece of arguably the most influential nation in the world. As Ezra Pound once wrote, ‘The mot juste is of public utility … We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate.’”
I was saying this to my dad while leaning on the railing of the back porch of his and my mom’s beach house in Cape Cod on Friday. It’s been a while since I took a vacation, so on this vacation I took a lot of naps. I went to the beach twice and tried to mellow my farmers tan. I watched half of Wall Street and I watched some of America’s Best Dance Crew. I talked to people who do not have children but are my parents’ age. I saw Wall-E at a drive-in, ate onion rings and potato chips. But mostly I drove around in a rented Plymouth and listened to Vampire Weekend. I wonder who is more like the Kennedy’s, Obama or Vampire Weekend? On July 4th we watched a PBS documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald. That seemed like a morbid programming decision.
It’s been more than half a year since the Vampire Weekend album was released. Did you forget about it? I didn’t. But I dread the glut of people who, caught up in year-end reviews, remember in mid-December and pine for the glory days of early 2008 (Spin cover before they were famous!) with braided bracelets and madras. I don’t wear white jeans but I am from Connecticut via the Upper West side with Columbia lineage and well-to-do parents (self-made, nice one guys) and with the windows down and healthy sea air, Vampire Weekend feels like the right idea. “We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate,” apparently said Ezra Pound. “In the afternoon, you’re out on the stone and grass/ and I’m sleeping on the balcony after class,” Vampire Weekend says. Listen to it, sad little moan. But they graduated and now it’s time to work. Unless you’ve got vacation time, which in the US, is pretty minimally important. I guess it’s not our style.
Related:
- March Is Schnipper Month: J
- March Is Schnipper Month: G
- March Is Schnipper Month: H
- March Is Schnipper Month: K and L
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- posted on Jul 8, 2008 in SLEPT ON
- tags Barack Obama, Vampire Weekend
