God this reads pretentiously, but how else can you write when you’re talking about Vampire Weekend?

9 is generous IMO – it really is just a retread of Since U Been Gone – but I do remember this one fondly and Tom’s love for Kelly remains adorable. If your book publisher hasn’t tried everything possible to get you on Kelly’s show I will be very upset on your behalf.

she’s getting there

Every Vampire Weekend album since the debut has hit me right where I needed it, when I needed it, but this one packed an absolute wallop that I can still feel. My favorite record of the 2010s. A masterpiece. Wish I could tell the searching, deeply inebriated, lonely 20-something in a crowded city that I was and that I can’t help thinking about when I hear this album that it all works out.

I’ll just say it…

This album is very good.

1) I remember reading Koenig saying around this time that he wished that (Rap) Genius had been named Rap Exegesis instead, and just grinning like a goon.

2) One of the things that is so frustrating about David Brooks is that he’s kinda dumb most of the time, but when he’s on point he’s almost blindingly brilliant. This time of the ’10s was near the apex of the BoBos in Paradise era (from the title of Brooks’ book ten years earlier), in which political and social power lay with bourgeois bohemians like so many of Koenig’s classmates at Columbia (and Scott’s and mine at Cornell, for that matter) who hailed from the Brunch Belt, went to Ivy League schools, lived in gentrifying neighborhoods but aspired to move out to Ward 3 (the swanky part of DC). It was the time when captains of industry dressed and talked like us, and seemed to value what we did. (They of course were mostly giving lip service, and were the same sociopathic libertarians they’d always been.) In retrospect, it was a time of unimaginable smugness, and the disasters of 2016 were a rapid chastening. I can’t help but think that Koenig was immensely aware of the fin-de-siecle nature of his milieu in writing this record.

I also work way too hard and leave work early.

I came to respect the motherfucking craft, and I left knowing what a whizjet is.

there’s no Stereogum article quite like the unsigned ones

Try as I have (and lord, have I tried), I always find Taylor Swift’s music to be an utter emotional void. A blank space, if you will.

But this was an absolutely lovely piece. So glad you got to share that experience with your daughter! ❤️

p.s. Crying at shows is, like, the best.

This is what you get without proper writers, just an endless string of celebrity cameos.