The Rules of the Game: A Fuller Thought on J. Hopper and Vampire Weekend
Yesterday I posted a fairly peeved note concerning Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader article about Vampire Weekend. (She’s responded to that note, very graciously, on her blog, but that seems to have vanished.) My note led to a spike in traffic, which was unexpected: if I’d realized it’d catch much attention, I might have explained myself more carefully. The essay below is an attempt to outline my thoughts beyond the mere pique of the thing. Some of you may have heard me talk about this stuff before, but it seemed worth setting down a full, coherent version of it; read at your leisure.
Let me note first, though, that the point here is not to snipe at Hopper, whose work I enjoy. More importantly, the issue I’m about to outline is not really about the music of Vampire Weekend. I do not need you to like their music. But I do want you to think about the culture of our criticism, because I feel like it’s ever more beholden to a kind of blind posturing that wants to stop it from saying anything useful or true. Let’s go ahead and call this posturing The Game.
What all of this points to is that for the most part the issues being brought up here are at people who haven’t really thought very hard about “class” in the first place, and are really just going on gut instinct, using what “feels” about right — usually based on the kinds of conversations they have (and the kinds of experiences they have) at hand — and laying out an argument that’s been developed before the evidence is in. What the piece is saying is, “here is why this music can’t fit into the scheme that I’ve already got in my head, regardless of whether or not it merely points to the weakness or arbitrariness of the scheme itself.”
