Minds meet at the merch table

​If ever the was a home team crowd for Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, far away from the slings and arrows of preppiness and the dark continent and the looming specter of book-learning, it was here, at the New York Public Library, where your bio can proudly boast that your second album, Contra, "includes no songs about commas." Seating Koenig opposite a novelist, John Wray (as opposed to say, a bitter, failed writer turned music critic), was an obvious and overdue set-up waiting to happen. So leave it to the NYPL's Young Lions--library supermembers in their 20s and 30s who, in exchange for a tax-deductable 350 bucks, get their own private events like this one--to finally make it happen, gathering the city's youthful book nerds for an evening devoted to "Music & Words."

Well actually, there was a lot to like here--a little string quartet and two foxy, bejeweled back-up singers on "Giving Up the Gun" in particular, which remains a really satisfyingly grown-up song coming from a band this young. And "Cousins" has like 50% less stressed-out guitar face than it did when VW first start playing it on late night TV shows! A win all around, and a nice pairing with the always charming Zach Galifianakis. Real talk though: Ezra needs to give the red APC Nikes a rest--it's been like a year now, dude. If Rostam can put the scarves back in the closet, you can do it too.

If you live in Barcelona they will, anyway. According to the YouTube description, some Spanish kids met the Vampire Weekend boys at a bar after their show, and the rest was history--Vampire Weekend is playing my house, etc. Maybe it was even a girl's birthday party, according to Prefix? Anyway, if you ever wanted to know what it'd be like to see Vampire Weekend play "A-Punk" in somebody's living room, now you can. (It involves a lot of singing along, and that weird Deliverance-y moment when the band is finished by the rest of the room is decidedly not. I'd grudgingly play "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" too if I thought it'd get me out alive.) Notably absent: Rostam Batmanglij. Guess he goes straight back to the hotel instead? [via Prefix]

We are totally on board with this, particularly Jake, whose total investment in every role he plays is admirable. If someone could translate the Lil Jon part, that'd be great. [More info at Spinner.]

​This picture currently serves as the entryway to the Vampire Weekend website. Augur of things to come? Rebuke to the haters? Larfs for the sake of larfs? No doubt we will find out soon enough. ...And, here we go: "What do Lil Jon, Joe Jonas, Jake Gyllenhaal, and RZA have in common" asks Anthem Magazine? "Well, aside from sharing the spotlight at the epicenter of music and film, they were all recruited to make cameo appearances in the new Vampire Weekend music video. The clip is for 'Giving Up the Gun,' the second single off the indie rockers' heavily lauded sophomore studio album, Contra, out now on XL Recordings." The video's co-director, Emmett Malloy, tells the magazine that the clip will depict a "bizarre-o tennis match." [Vampire Weekend, Anthem, via Pitchfork]

​Here we have the Dean taking on our Rancid-covering, (briefly) chart-topping heroes, and of course, their haters. "This is all still privilege. But it's no closer to ruling-class power than it is to the affluence of the average American geekboy who gets to insult music he resents online." SHAZAM. As the guy who knows more about the music VW is allegedly stealing than anyone accusing them of stealing it, it's good to have Bob involved. Let's just say he has a way of dominating the conversation.

​You thought they were kidding about the ska thing, huh? They were not kidding. In an interview with us back in January, Vampire Weekend drummer Chris Tomson revealed his band's hidden passion for No Doubt, Sublime, and, most tellingly, Operation Ivy, the outfit that would later morph into Rancid. So is it any surprise they just got around to covering "Ruby Soho" for the BBC's Radio 1? Download it here. Skampire Weekend, let's go! [The Huddle Formation, via Andy Greenwald]

Leslie "The Opportunity" Feist

This isn't the dumbest way we've ever spent an hour in the workplace, but it's certainly up there. The most idiotically laughable meme of the past few days goes to Jerzify Yourself, the inevitable Jersey Shore personal-transformation site in the glute vein of such popular avatar reconfiguration hubs as Simpsonize Me and MadMen Yourself. The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-sized jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spraytan shade, pick your pose--and holy Freckles McGee, you're magically recast as a human meatball. Michael Cera already did this for real, so with the help of the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, it seemed like a natural progression to run your favorite indie luminaries through the G.T.L. ringer. Certainly you can conceive better ones, and please do send them our way, but first, a few words of caution: beards look funny, as does Thurston Moore, and thin-faced folks don't adapt well to this interface, so Bradford "DJ Douchebag" Cox and Stephen "S-Tan" Malkmus were sent to the great Apple trashcan in the sky. So without further adieu . .

Back in the heady days of right-around-this-time, 2008, this paper ran competing reviews of the debut Vampire Weekend record. "Please Ignore This Band" was the headline on one; "Please Ignore the Embroidered Dog Sweater" was the headline on the other--a positive take, that one. Plus we reviewed quite favorably the band's newest, Contra, just recently, so please forgive us as we get out of the way of critical infighting that is belatedly breaking out over Vampire Weekend's sophomore record. It sort of started here--Jessica Hopper's "Appropriation, Vacation"--which contained some provocative words about Contra ("it's stocked with cheap imports, a bit too sure of itself, and trying to bullshit its way out of trouble," say), plus a riff on a phenomenon Hopper calls "the Pitchfork-nation equivalent of 'Some of my best friends are black.'"

​Turns out that a #1 record in January is no more complicated than Justin Timberlake singing "Hallelujah." Vampire Weekend's short, terrifically fun reign at the top is now over, a week after it began--sales of Contra dipped 65% to 43,000, good for a fall all the way down to #6. Which is still a high, high number, by the way, for an independently distributed record by a band who haven't being doing this thing all that long, New Yorker profiles or no. Hope For Haiti (171,000 copies sold) is your new champion, fueled by all sorts of digital downloads and the 83 million people who watched the telethon on Friday night. Spoon had their biggest debut ever, selling 53,000 records, snatching the #4 spot, and giving all the VW haters a lot of context to think about--Contra's debut last week, let's remember, was a far healthier 124,000. And you wouldn't know it from the Billboard article, but reliable sources say Surfer Blood's Astro Coast debuted at #119. Which is what, after all, you expect your indie titans to do. Let's take our culture back, indifferent consumers! [Billboard]