This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.
I’m embarrassed to say that my favorite music made in the last five years were Vampire Weekend’s last two albums, Contra and Modern Vampiresof the City. Embarrassed because as a white American male with a Subaru Outback and an advanced degree, Vampire Weekend is exactly the band I’m supposed to like.
In general I figure people identify with people like them because it makes the world feel smaller and more manageable. Social scientists call it homophily—“love of the same.” And Vampire Weekend offered me plenty of Same: They’re foppish, clever, a little bit overthought and into bright colors. I remember seeing a photo of Ezra Koenig in a cowl neck Ralph Lauren sweater and thinking I could finally walk the streets of Williamsburg in peace, and this was even before the Spin interview where he talked about how much he loved the novels of Evelyn Waugh.
But the band was also remarkably curious. A short list of things I either learned about or revisited after listening to Vampire Weekend records include: Toots and the Maytals, horchata, the history of the accordion in central African music, the history of plaid, Mexicali punk bands, and the corporate structure behind Tom’s of Maine. I remember hearing the Richard Serra reference on “White Sky” and being transported back to the stacks of the public library in Westport, Connecticut, where as a teenager I sat slumped with a pile of books on modern art not because my station expected it of me but because reading about modern art made me feel alive. Even four and a half years later, Contra explodes in my head like a cluster of hyperlinks—an album whose references didn’t shrink the world, but reminded me how expansive it could be.
So why do I write about Vampire Weekend in a place where I’m supposed to give some shine to albums that don’t already have a strong positive consensus? For a long time I thought music was a kind of competition—a bracket of underdogs and overlords, winners and losers, people who fought for what they had and people who somehow managed to have it handed to them. Vampire Weekend were so destined to win that they almost seemed bred for it—products not of struggle or invention, but of pedigree and predestination. What none of the angry thinkpieces about them seemed to want to consider is that their music already acknowledged that, and departed from the reasonable assumption that it didn’t matter.
As a kid who grew up on weirdo culture, I loved Repo Man, a movie in which a young Emilio Estevez essentially has a punk epiphany in reverse, realizing that his state-smashing, Black Flag-listening friends are just as intensely conformist as anyone else.
Toward the end of the movie, Estevez—who plays a character named Otto—is in a liquor store when an old friend named Duke tries to rob it, and ends up shot. “I know a life of crime has led me to this fate, and yet I blame society,” Duke says. “Society made me what I am.” Estevez is unmoved. “That’s bullshit,” he says. “You’re a white suburban punk just like me.” Estevez is right, but Duke ends up with the last word: “Yeah, but it still hurts.”
The first time I met my now-wife’s grandparents was at their assisted-living home in San Diego. The stories I’d heard intimidated me: She’d survived Auschwitz; he’d gone from being in the Polish army to becoming a successful biochemist and professor. They were patrons of the arts and had a low tolerance for bullshit. The first thing she said to me was that I didn’t look that Jewish; the first thing he said was “What do you think about Jonathan Franzen?”
We sat in their living room for a few minutes and then were told it was time to go upstairs and eat. “Where’s your jacket?” they asked. It was June. “It’s warm out,” I said. “No, your blazer.”
At times like this, my sense of social relativism goes out the window—I didn’t even own a blazer because I had no occasion to wear one, but I felt like garbage anyway. Shame quickly turned to anger. Did I even want to go to dinner at a place that wouldn’t take me as I was? Then I remembered “Taxi Cab,” a Vampire Weekend song about someone who pins the trouble in their relationship on the formalities of someone else’s family. “I could blame it on your mother’s hair, or the colors that your father wears,” the lyric goes. “But you know that I was never fair, you were always fine.” I looked at my wife, borrowed a blazer and ordered the steak, pink.
20 Albums, Tracks, and Artists From 2010-2014:
Vampire Weekend
Todd Terje, especially “Snooze 4 Love” and It’s Album Time
Cass McCombs, “County Line”
Joanna Newsom, “Good Intentions Paving Company”
Bill Callahan
Sky Ferreira, Night Time, My Time
Gunplay, “Jump Out” and his verse on “Cartoon & Cereal”
Frankie Cosmos, Zentropy
Nicki Minaj, “Super Bass”
Ashley Monroe, Like a Rose
Frank Ocean, “Pilot Jones” and Nostalgia, Ultra.
Grimes, “Oblivion”
Rich Kidz, “My Life”
Dirty Projectors, “Swing Lo Magellan”
Nicolas Jaar, Space Is Only Noise If You Can See
Lambchop, Mr. M
The Beets, Let the Poison Out
Das Racist, Sit Down Man
The last five minutes of Beck’s track on the Philip Glass remix album, “73-78”
Soulja Boy, “Zan With That Lean”