Hardly risky, given that the musical guests at Happy Ending are supposed to do one cover version and five originals.
Compared with novelist Arthur Philips's gambit – he announced his abandonment of writing for a new career as a matador and staging a simulated bullfight onstage with a radio-controlled model of a bull – Vampire's risk wasn't spectacular: they opted to cover the Tom Petty song Walls. This raised the question of what taking a risk could be for Vampire Weekend and their musical generation in a sense the group's whole existence is about asking what counts as challenging in music in this hyper-knowing, history-addled, hard-to-shock era. In the end she'd gone with Vampire Weekend's own suggestion, "taking risks", and had challenged the three writers and the band to do something daring or embarrassing in front of the audience.
Introducing the night, Happy Ending's curator, Amanda Stern, explained there was a theme to the event, which she'd chosen after canvassing a disparate selection of people. But Vampire Weekend's music is dainty, sprightly, hyper-literate and crisply enunciated because purposefully being or doing the opposite has practically zero meaning or cultural traction in 2009. Twenty-five years ago Vampire Weekend would probably have been a group similar to the Replacements or Dinosaur Jr, downwardly mobile slackers making blurry, slurred anthems of defeatism and despondency. exactly the kind of thing some of their Ivy League peers doubtless went on to do after graduation. Indeed, if the members of Vampire Weekend weren't in a band, you could easily imagine them working at a publisher or a small, cool literary magazine a la The Believer, ie. One reason they're such a polarising group, loathed as often as loved, is that they've outed the secret truth of indie-rock as the music of the upper middle-class. And thus perfect for Vampire Weekend, who "oppose all rock'n'roll" to the point of drawing up a charter of principles when they were forming that included the decree that no member would ever be seen onstage or in a publicity photograph wearing a T-shirt or jeans. So the vibe was completely un-rock'n'roll. Mostly, though, the place – Joe's Pub in the East Village – seemed crammed with young literati and publishing people.
#HYPER ELITE ULTRA CONDENSED FONT MOVIE#
It would be an exaggeration to describe the event as star-studded, but Zadie Smith was standing right next to us, the model Agyness Deyn kept sauntering past, and during their second set Vampire frontman Ezra Koenig gave a shout-out to movie director Ed Burns. Taking a break from recording their second album, the band played two micro-sets of three songs each (frustratingly not including any of their work-in-progress), which bookended readings by three young cult novelists: Wells Tower, John Wray and Arthur Philips.
#HYPER ELITE ULTRA CONDENSED FONT SERIES#
The other night I went to see Vampire Weekend participate in a series of New York literary/music events called Happy Ending.
0 kommentar(er)
