![]() The globe-trotting, brand name-bedecked, class-conscious lyrics on the Vampire Weekend’s first two albums, along with their (absurdly, in retrospect) controversial early preppy wardrobe, drew influence from postcolonial literature courses like Professor Gauri Viswanathan’s Imperialism and the Cryptographic Imagination. Like the band as a whole, who came together at Columbia University as college juniors and seniors ( their first gig was a battle of the bands at which they placed third out of four!), I grew up displaying more interest than the average rock ‘n’ roller in what could be learned from teachers and books. I’ve spent so much time listening to Vampire Weekend partly because of biographical resonances that often bind us to our favorite artists. However, I have revisited no 21st-century musical juxtaposition of past and present with more frequency or gratitude than Modern Vampires of the City, the final album of Vampire Weekend‘s remarkable initial trilogy, released ten years ago this month. In tracks like “That Green Gentleman” and “Northern Downpour”, the record’s rummaging through the sounds of 1967 is so winningly naive that it almost merits consideration as a masterpiece of outsider art. There is even a case to be made for Pretty.Odd., Panic! At the Disco’s much-maligned sophomore album pivots from theatrical pop-punk to the most whimsey sounds of the Beatles‘ psychedelic period. The infusion of the noisy tunefulness of Teenage Fanclub and My Bloody Valentine with traces of the Celtic folk music of Canada’s maritime provinces in all three Alvvays albums. ![]() Rosalia‘s startling blend of classic flamenco and 2010s electropop on El Mal Querer. The early Taylor Swift‘s use of tropes from Shania Twain and Faith Hill on Fearless to narrate the dramas of a millennial teen girl with uncommon vividness. Still, many of the best artists of our time have been able to work “the end of history” to their advantage, conducting creative dialogues with the work of earlier generations and ultimately producing something new out of the old.Ī number of examples exist in the world of pop music in particular: Kendrick Lamar‘s searching figurative and, at times, literal conversation with jazz and 1990s hip-hop on To Pimp a Butterfly. There is some truth to this diagnosis of broad trends in 21st-century culture. Who could point to, let alone celebrate, widely recognized era-specific traits at a time when the internet makes “content” from all generations congeal into a flavorless mass, clothing copies the past according to an ever-shortening nostalgia calendar, and classic rockers suck up much of the musical oxygen by turning into their own tribute bands? There is no mistaking a scene from an early season of Mad Menfor one from Boogie Nights. The 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s: they all looked a certain way and sounded a certain way. Periodically throughout the last couple of decades, perceptive writers, including the great Simon Reynolds, have argued that pop music and pop culture, more broadly, have become addicted to the past. Nonetheless, part of me regularly craved temporary departures from the sober minds of my would-be academic colleagues in favor of encounters with texts more closely attuned to the way history functions in everyday life: as an ongoing set of relationships constantly made and remade by emotion and memory, with various hazy pasts collapsing into the chaos of the present, for good and for ill.įor that kind of intellectual and emotional sustenance, I often turned to pop music. The field’s cause-and-effect analyses and linear narratives always seemed like a valid way to engage with the past. For a historian, time moves in only one direction, and the past is something to be sliced and diced to create the ingredients for a scholarly argument. Throughout my extended education, for all its attendant professional and personal ups and downs, I never lost faith in my discipline as an intellectual proposition. I spent most of my 20s in a doctoral program in American History.
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