[My friend Andrew Porter has written for Molars several times over the years, and since Molars has been going for 20 years as of this past September, I wanted to commemorate that anniversary with posts from all the folks who’ve written here before. Andrew kindly agreed to write a new post, and he sent along this characteristically thoughtful piece on the Vampire Weekend song “Gen-X Cops.”]
I grew up without the internet. As a teenager, I wrote an actual, physical letter to my favorite band, asking to be added to its mailing list, the address of which it advertised in its liner notes. I forgot about it, but then one day that band mailed me a 7” record. I didn't own a record player, so couldn't listen to the song. But more importantly, for the purposes of this post, was what came with the record: folded up with the 7" was a single sheet of paper -- a xeroxed list of books. A reading list of alternative histories, political agitators, nonconformists. This reading list changed my life's trajectory, if only briefly.
About thirty years later, Vampire Weekend released its fourth studio album, which sounds like Vampire Weekend again. Mary Boone is a stand-out track, in both sound and name. Like Diane Young (get it?), but a different sort of joke, an Insider nod. I listened to the album not long after it was released. I did not Google "Mary Boone." Pitchfork (RIP) wrote a review of the single. I didn't read that, either.
Then a few weeks ago I was looking through an exhibition catalogue from a Basquiat show I'd seen years ago in Paris and I learned who Mary Boone is. The coincidence was delightful, yes. It was also a sort of rescue, for it reminded me I could pass for someone who took for granted that Mary Boone mattered.
What I’m interested in is the connection between an artist’s ideology and the resultant work of art—in this case, its sound. The way that intent itself may not shape a work so much as outlook, the place (in space and time and position in the world and, sigh, age) from which the artwork originates. Perhaps this is why VW has always been a guilty pleasure for me, insofar as it is deft at evoking a feeling and a sense of aboutness, while also withholding just enough to make an Insider question whether they are in on—or the butt of—the joke. This self-restraint is the burden of the intellectual, the privileged, those of us who know damn well we have so much to lose from the righting of those injustices that we almost ignore. That we are undeserving of so much but our guilt.
Gen-X Cops has everything you could want from a VW song: kazoo guitar, Ezra’s perennially-fresh vocals, sing-along existential-corporate-retreat lyrics. The energy of youth, its fuck-all optimism and knowing doom. Real-life gen-X cops are the worst, but in being the worst, they’re also a gift.