Hardcore for Nerds

“In their shared commitment to demolishing binary oppositions (East/West, Black/White, Us/Them), Vampire Weekend, Das Racist, and Titus Andronicus constitute what I like to think of as the “second wave of college rock,” one that’s absorbed the post-structuralist theory so prevalent on the ’80s campuses that birthed R.E.M. et al.”

(Jonah Wolf - New York, NY) 

“One of the scariest developments of the past year has been the rise to the mainstream of a loose collective of overwhelmingly white reactionaries, defined by a self-contradicting hatred of East Coast elites, a complete inability to understand nuance, and an irrational fear of losing their dominance over a deeply flawed and somewhat scary cultural narrative. I’m talking, of course, about Vampire Weekend haters. Last year, I had fun cutting and pasting the identical criticisms of Avatar with those of Titanic in 1997. This year, I did the same with Vampire Weekend and the criticisms of the Beastie Boys circa 1986.”

(Ethan Stanislawski - Bloomington, IN)

I’m not sure if Titus Andronicus are committed to demolishing the “Us/Them” binary opposition so much as reinforcing it and then somehow overcoming it by being on the right side, but I like the idea of “second-wave college rock” anyway. Obviously it’s ironic as fuck, if by “irony” you mean “critical thinking”, and aimed at grad students with too much time on their hands to prevent their esoteric and in-depth studies from leaking into their music blogging. Of course none of us in my class last year knew exactly what structuralism meant, so some further journeying back into the pop-cultural past is still necessary, and the lecturer leapt onto a table for my inadvertently suggesting that punk rock hadn’t received any academic treatment as a countercultural movement (it still hasn’t gotten that much, especially if you take it very far beyond the fucking Sex Pistols…) so you’ve got to beware of the hipster-as-sociological-entity discourse.

Outside the ivory tower of liberal academia and indie, and apparently within it as well, there are the hordes of Arcade Fire fans. If the Vampire Weekend haters are analogous to the extreme right (also true in that I have little respect for either), then maybe those opposed to big-tent indies Arcade Fire are the radical far-left commentariat. Those that maybe don’t think that in ‘Rococo’ they “imagined downtown hipsters as a homogenous clone army with a sardonic spirit worthy of Don Draper”, except perhaps at his most out-of-touch and plainly pedestrian. Or that fail to see the value or even the real truth in the binary opposition “If this is the blueprint for a rock resurgence that moves past punk’s creaky anti-commercialism, I’m all for it” (the only parts of punk that are creakily anti-commercial are those that haven’t themselves moved, other parts are still quite creative - even Titus Andronicus caught the ear of the modern rockists this year).

Ultimately The Suburbs is a triumph of musical blandness that achieves through the very factor that makes it bland, and that sucks out any meaning beyond the banal (though sometimes the banal can be very interesting for those over-familiar with it, which appears to be Middle America in this case) - its horror of irony:

“Arcade Fire succeed through earnest creative toil, while Vampire Weekend find a much more ambivalent fate, one well known to those who tend to overintellectualize. Both succeed in their own ways, however, with coping strategies for us 21st-century moderns: pushing back against the encroaching horde, or luxuriating in its detritus.”

But the Arcade Fire are the horde, even it’s one trapped within an even larger apathetic society, and The Suburbs is as luxuriant an exploration of the material and middle-class detritus of post-war Americana as Contra’s often far more restrained meditation in its destruction.