I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not (53 Reasons to Hate Vampire Weekend, Pt. 3 of 4)

BACK TO PART ONE - PART TWO

"That you would hear a kind of chimy, South African-style guitar line, and the first thing you think of is Paul Simon?  It's a little bit pathetic." - Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig

"Paul Simon hasn't suddenly gotten good. But he has come up with a GREAT idea. ‘Hey, this music I love,' he says to himself, he says, ‘Let's have me sing in my pussy voice over it and call it "Paul Simon."'" - Mark Prindle

In 1984, Paul Simon was coming off two flop records and a dismal dalliance with film work.  A marriage to longtime-sometime girlfriend Carrie Fisher turned to separation after eleven months; she miscarried, she overdosed.  It was a good time to get away.

"I was building a house in Montauk, Long Island, and while I drove out I would listen to this tape that a friend had given me and I began to realize that I really liked that tape.  After a couple of weeks of driving back and forth to the house, listening to the tape, I'd think ‘What is this tape?  This is my favorite tape!  Wonder who it is, I wonder who this band is!'"

The tape was a mbaqanga compilation called Gumboots:  Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II.  Gumboots, Simon says in his liner notes, "is the term used to describe the type of music favored by miners and railroad workers in South Africa."  It's a style that originated in the 19th century when mine workers were kept underground for three months, chained to their stations, beaten when they talked.  The boots - Wellingtons that mine bosses had bought for workers because standing knee-deep in infected water introduced diseases that lowered productivity - were used to tap out code in the dark.  Anyway!  A year after hearing it, Simon was in South Africa re-recording the title track from that comp with its original musicians, Boyoyo Boys; later, he would write and sing his own lyrics over it.  "You don't feel you could love me," he sang, "but I feel you could."

*

I was fifteen when Graceland came out in 1986, and there are four things I remember about it.

There's the music, of course, which I recall as seeming both ubiquitous and unique.  It enjoyed white suburban cross-generational approval, the most acceptable LP in your parents' record collection.  The sound was distinctive and unforced and came with a convenient descriptor.  "Paul Simon's South African album."  The music was, and wasn't, "South African" - that's what makes it such a successful record, that it both is and isn't - but pop from most other parts of the world was rarely translated so wholly into our own mainstream culture.

The mbaqanga or "township jive" that first attracted Simon was (bear with me, I seriously know nothing about African music) an amalgamation of urban styles centered around Sophiatown, a township outside Johannesburg.  Marabi, a dance music based around a repeated three-chord progression that allowed for improvisation and quoted melodies, developed in speakeasyish spaces during the 1920s.  Kwela, or pennywhistle jive (jive = pop, as opposed to higherbrow jazz), started as tin flute streetcorner stuff in the ‘40s; a lead flute would elaborate happy melodies over either harmonized backing flutes or a tub-bass and guitar/banjo combo (download a couple early studio recordings from one of kwela's originators at Learning to Share, stream samples from Spokes Mashiyane, one of kwela's biggest stars, at Amazon).  Kwela turned to mbaqanga when flutes gave way to saxophones (or sometimes to accordions or fiddles, or sometimes disappeared altogether) and backing bands plugged in, boosting their bass.  Vocals - in Solomon Linda's mbube style, featuring traditional Zulu harmonies delivered in staggered calls and responses - were added, sometimes led by a deep-voiced "groaner."

Mahlathini and the Makgona Tsohle Band - Ngicabange Ngaqeda (I Have Made Up My Mind)(mp3) (buy)

Amaswazi Emuelo - Thul'ulalele (Just Stop and Listen)(mp3) (buy)

South African pop has a history of embraced derision.  Lemonade.  "Kwela" - a name given by white fans of pennywhistle music - repeated a police command aimed at arrested musicians; literally "get up" or "climb up," it basically meant: "Get in the van."   "Mbaqanga" translates as "cornmeal" or "porridge" or maybe "dumpling;" it was first used by a jazz saxophonist to describe musically illiterate "homemade" music.  When mbaqanga faded from favor in the early 80s, its successor was a synthesizer-dominated style called bubblegum.

Simon was also drawn to a soft-attack Zulu a capella called iscathamiya, exemplified by Joseph Shabalala's Ladysmith Black Mambazo group.  Mambazo had been huge in their country from their start in the early 70s; as with mbaqanga, their style had seemed to have peaked before the mid-80s.

Paul Simon - Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (mp3) (buy)

It's not hard to see where Simon found himself in this music.  He'd dabbled in doo-wop as recently as his last record, Hearts and Bones; he'd been messing with foreign sounds at least as far back as El Condor Pasa.  Though he'd incorporate other Pan-African and American sounds into Graceland, mbaqanga itself is very pliable; its rhythm sections aren't polyrhythmically heavy, rhythms are driven by different parts of the band, vocals play a heavy role.  His own rambly bambly lyrics could establish themselves as a sort of extemporaneous counterpoint.

"Diamonds" - co-arranged with South African guitarist Ray Phiri, co-written with Shabalala and recorded with Mambazo in New York, with added percussion from a trio of Senegalese musicians including Youssou N'Dour - gives you so much to listen to, never feels overburdened.  The collaborators gave Simon's new songs a great deal of sonic depth, even lent the lyrics a broader context.  This song's empty-pocket opening could be boulevard busking in Philly as well as Soweto, but its multinationalism isn't just worldly; the odd lyrical imagery, the universal wealthy girl/poor boy theme, the involving call-response between the voices and the instruments all suggest something mythic.

Hold "Diamonds" up against another 80s doo-wop-inspired ditty about class-crossed crushes.  Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" (humor me) is a thin dime.  The melodies are strong, but you only need to hear one verse and one chorus and the bridge before it's exhausted all its musical ideas; its story is high-concept, over by the time you've heard the song title.

This video, too, I recall as omnipresent.  It featured an irresistible tune and a high-profile movie star - Chase had fronted three (!) films the year before (the first Fletch, a second Vacation, and Spies Like Us (which I saw in a theater, and I'm still looking for that $4.50 and those 102 minutes, plus interest, send a check)) - being low-profile funny.  The title was nonsense (Betty, Al, whatevs) and Chase's performance invited you to either ignore the mileaminute verbiage as yadayada blather or to enjoy it on a purely phonetic level.

There are no lyrics on Graceland that talk about being chained and beaten in mines, or about being wrongfully imprisoned and tortured, or about imposed segregational injustices.  Thank God.  That would be as insulting as hearing a bunch of celebrities moan, "We Are the World."  The man discovered "Gumboots" while driving back and forth to a house he was having built for him on Montauk, Long Island.

The closest the record comes to cloying are the songs "Under African Skies" - actually based around modified childhood memories of guest Linda Ronstadt - and the lovely "Homeless" which, while suggested by Simon, was handed over to Shabalala and is dominated by Mambazo.

"I didn't feel that I was going to South Africa to come back and then express a South African outrage," Simon said in a Making of documentary.  "‘I'll tell the world how you guys are feeling'.  I really didn't feel comfortable with that.  My feeling was ‘I'm playing with musicians I have the highest respect for and the way I can show my respect completely is to write the best possible song from my heart that I can write.'  Not to say ‘I'll write the best possible song from your heart.'"

Simon isn't preachy, he's situational; he's not telling, he's doing.  He's got this rich foreign music that shares some inspiration with familiar Western styles.  He has surrounded himself with incredible musicians who are either recreating their own wild work in his pre-chewed structures or running rampant over the original melodies he's written.  His words express a wonder at the common ground of collaboration.  He's "Al's" unnamed dude, it's his first time around the Third World, he's spying angels in the architecture, he's crying "Hallelujah."

"Gumboots" was one of three Graceland songs to grab its tune directly from previously recorded work.  The music for "The Boy in the Bubble" came from a band called Tao Ea Matsekha, "I Know What I Know" from General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters.  Says so in Simon's liner notes.  In each case the original performers are credited (with Simon) for the music, in each case they perform on Graceland.  Simon flew to Johannesburg in 1985 and held studio sessions with several South African performers.  He later brought some- Phiri, bassist Bahiti Khumalo, and percussionist Isaac Mtshali - back to New York for additional recording; he and Mambazo worked together in London and New York.

If Simon softened and shaped music that wasn't initially "his," he also allowed his collaborators' work to reshape his lyrical approach.  The words in "Al" seem to giddily rush forward and grasp for places to pause and restart because they're reacting to how elements of the tune are being reworked underneath:

"The whole process of this writing came from a deep analysis of what was going on in the tracks," Simon said.  "Because the African musicians were playing what they normally play in a way that was different from the way American musicians that I was familiar with would play.  I was coming out of folk-rock.  That was pretty symmetrical, didn't change from verse to verse.  Their patterns altered in some subtle way and I was either playing in the studio when it happened or in the control room and wasn't aware of what the pattern was at all.  Didn't realize that there had been a variation in the pattern either intentional or unintentional until many months later when I was writing... And that degree of listening was my education.  That's what I learned.  I learned to listen on a level that I had never experienced before."

There are a couple unintended ironies to the "Al" video (which was a last-minute replacement, actually, for an unaired piece Simon hated).  The first is that its concept - which has the Mutt-like Chase stealing the Jeffish Simon's song and spotlight - has the comic doing to the singer what some critics thought the singer did to his African collaborators.  The second is that, when confronted with an album whose whole sound is based around black South African music and whose cast is largely made up of black South African musicians, the face initially used to promote it was that of Chevy Chase.

*

The third thing that's stuck with me since Graceland's release is some news footage from a college (Howard University, perhaps).  Simon sat shocked while an African-American student belligerently accused him of... something.  I don't remember the soundclipped argument, I remember the ferociousness.  I remember thinking, "How can anyone get so angry about music?"

There were a points worth raising eyebrows, if not hell, over.

Though Graceland is not an explicit political work, its recording was considered a political act and it had political repercussions.

The United Nations had been proposing various binding and non-binding sanctions and boycotts of South Africa's apartheid government since before the 1963 UN address that won Miriam Makeba exile from her homeland.  An increase in visible unrest and vocal opposition, along with the ebbing of The Cold War, brought the cause renewed attention in the 1980s.  The United States and Britain had refused to participate in official sanctions or condemnations; decrying the Nobel Prize-winning African National Congress (which did have an armed wing) as a terrorist organization, wary of communism, and reluctant to sever beneficial financial ties, our governments preferred a policy of "constructive engagement" (that would be the ‘80s version of "quiet diplomacy").  In late 1986, the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act finally passed in the U.S. Congress - with both houses overriding Ronald Reagan's veto - but it was less than comprehensive and spottily enforced.   People went on drinking their Coors.

There had been a UN-inspired cultural boycott of the country in effect, though; it kept South Africa from participating in the Olympics, blacklisted entertainers and sports teams that took money to perform there.  Simon was well aware of this.  He had observed the boycott by declining a pair of offers to appear in Sun City, a South African luxury resort; he had seen the reaction when his good friend Linda Ronstadt accepted half a million dollars to play there in 1983.  He was asked to participate in Little Steven's "Artists Against Apartheid" project and refused when an early draft of the song "Sun City" called out Ronstadt by name.

The UN Special Committee Against Apartheid added Simon to its naughty list... for three whole weeks.  He was removed after making a personal appeal armed with letters of support, after promising never to perform in the country while it was under apartheid, after grabbing a batch of Grammy nominations.  Clearly what Simon did in Johannesburg, despite any ancillary kick it brought to the South African economy, was different from accepting a big payday for a segregated playdate.  It's possible the committee was simply bothered the singer didn't ask their permission, first.  Others continued to be bothered that there wasn't a pronounced condemnation of apartheid anywhere on the album.  The absence of one certainly helped sales of Graceland within South Africa (it sold at least 150,000 copies there) and allowed the South African government to embrace the album's international success as a call to end the cultural boycott.  Particularly distasteful was Simon's inclusion of a duet with... Linda Ronstadt.  (If moral queasiness seems difficult to relate to in a post-apartheid world, check out the last six paragraphs of Robert Christgau's original review of the record.)

If there was an implicit political message in Simon's initial dismissal of the United Nations policy, it might have been that the cultural boycott had helped echo and amplify the apartheid government's own policy of tribal isolation.  There were certainly reasons, beyond economic ones, to not patronize the regime's approved cultural artifacts.  State-controlled radio had systematically segregated and depoliticized popular music (in some ways, the apartheid government were the ultimate World Music purists).  But if you discourage independent communication and collaboration by outsiders, the only voices that could be heard were those given state approval.  Whatever combination of egotism and ignorance encouraged Simon's border-crossing, it allowed him to disregard the artificial walls that had been erected between ears.  "The only sentiment I really feel I should express on the issue is that as far as all political parties are concerned... they should not tell me how I should play or write my music."

*

The charge of cultural appropriation has never fully gone away; it hopefully never will, as in some ways Simon provided a little bit of an example of how to answer it without adopting a pursuit of sainthood.

The iffy stuff:  Again, this music is built on South African sounds; the only things on the cover are a 15th-century Ethiopian painting of St. George and the words "Paul," "Simon," and "Graceland."  Simon certainly did not deny himself any writing credits; even on the songs he said were taken from other material he give himself musical co-credit.  The last track on the record, "The Myth of Fingerprints," was recorded with East L.A.'s Los Lobos; despite their claim that they brought the tune, whole, to the session, it reads "Words and Music by Paul Simon."  The inclusion of Los Lobos and the US zydeco band Good Rockin' Dopsie and the Twisters, part of Simon's search "for a musical connection to home," compounded the culture-vulture accusations.

Graceland revitalized Simon's career, it won him awards (including a Best Album Grammy in '86, Best Song in '87), it reaped critical acclaim; it sold millions of copies (in searches I've seen 10, 12, 15 million) and you can bet the bulk of whatever coin survived the record label machinery went to the dude whose name is on the cover.  If reaping profits of other peoples' cultural resources - Simon would next run to Brazil for The Rhythm of the Saints - didn't wholly smack of musical colonialism, it at least seemed to carry on the fine tradition of the White Dude as primary beneficiary of darker folks' efforts.

The record's Grammy-winning title track is both a smooth ride and a lightning rod.  The song's country sound and mention of the Mississippi Delta evoke a place where white and black musics come together.  Our journey takes us "through the cradle of the Civil War;" Memphis was of course well acquainted with the Civil Rights struggle, was where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.  Elvis Presley's home is offered as a Mecca for hope and integration.  Poor boys and Pilgrims, "we all will be received."

The band is still predominantly South African, the voices are all white.  "Largely because of the flexibility and collaborative musical gifts of two extraordinary musicians..." Simon says in his liner notes of Phiri and Khumalo (before giving full credit for the words and music to himself), "it almost has the feel of American country music."  King Sunny Ade's steel guitarist, the Nigerian Demola Adepoju, contributes some of the record's most evocative work.  It is sung by Simon and The Everly Brothers.

It all sounds so safe.

Living Colour - Elvis is Dead (mp3) (buy)

That's the last thing I associate with Graceland.  Four years afterward (and following a spate of Weekly World Newsish stories of Presley sightings), that era's only widely-played African-American rock band says funk-you-Paul-Simon.  Little Richard Wooo!s, Maceo Parker wails, future VH-1 VJ Corey Reid Browns out heh's and hit-me's all over an exaggerated dangerous mess.  Elvis rots, he dies on a toilet, he was a hero - but that's beside the point.

The Berlin Wall had come down the previous year.  Nelson Mandela was released from prison a few months before Time's Up ticked off.  But the world wasn't fixed.  New York City was still enough of a shithole that no one could get smug and satisfied and not know that there was work to be done.  We'll tell you when everything's going to be okay, Little Chief Inclusivity.  Leave it to some diminutive Caucasian millionaire to schedule his mass meet-up at a luxury mansion - $27-$68 at the gate! - that belonged to a "king" who got rich by singing black, being white.  And Simon did so while whitely fronting an all-black band.

"I've got a reason to believe we all won't be received at Graceland.  (No not you, my brother.)"

*

Graceland was Paul Simon's project.  Egotism, opportunism, sure.  The co-options made Simon's music sound more musical than it ever had before.  But financial exploitation only became a charge in the wake of its success.  A record of South African music blathered over by a squat wee honky didn't look like box office gold on paper.  It would not have sold (10, 12, 15) million copies were it not a Paul Simon album.  It would not have won Best Album were it not a Paul Simon album; at best, since there were no international music categories at the time, it might have gotten a "Traditional Folk" nod (as Ladysmith Black Mambazo would, two years later, with Shaka Zulu).

You can argue worker and creative exploitation.  If you're condescending enough you can argue that the South African musicians, unused to the context of U.S. pay structures etc etc, didn't realize they were being used, or that their gratitude for a musical platform wasn't greedy enough.  I'm not willing to defend people by calling them ignorant.  Here's Ray Phiri, many years later:  "We used Paul as much as Paul used us.  There was no abuse.  He came at the right time.  He was what we needed to bring African music more into the mainstream."

Simon's dealings with the South African musicians took a step towards responsibility, a step towards respectfulness.  Unlike Pete Seeger, initially, or the Tokens, or Malcolm McLaren, Simon shared (at least some, see: Los Lobos) credit, paid performers, delivered residuals.  The album came with detailed liner notes describing where he'd heard what, with whom he'd worked.  He brought many of his collaborators on tour with him, and while yes, that often meant an entire stage of African musicians supporting a little white American, he also stepped off during stretches.  So Mambazo could perform their songs.  So famed expat South African jazz trumpeter could perform his songs.  And taking Linda Ronstadt's place on "Under African Skies," and getting her first chance to perform in front of audiences across the United States in two decades, was Miriam Makeba.

That's from a concert stop in Zimbabwe, a few miles from the South African border.  After the initial tour, eight additional US shows were added as charity benefits.  Before turning away to South America, Simon produced Mambazo's Grammy-winning record.

Could he have done more?  Certainly.  Who here's got a copy of Gumboots:  Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II?  Wouldn't it have been a good idea to expose the rest of the world to the specific raw materials that inspired him?  Years later, when Graceland was released as a "deluxe" "enhanced" CD, its extras included a few Simon demos, but not the original versions of the three songs he remade.  Wouldn't that have been a good idea?  Or would that just revived the accusations of cultural plundering, would it have siphoned a few pennies off the royalties?

*

If success inspires imitation, why didn't Graceland's multiplatinum project leave us overrun by copycat American/African pop fusion?

One answer could be that the Simon record either inspired or coincided with more direct access to artists from other countries.  Instead of the hybrid, people went for the original.  Joseph Shabalala called Simon "Vutlendela," "the man who opened the door."  Ladysmith Black Mambazo won international (as well as domestic - they became the first black group to have a song in their language played on South Africa's white radio stations) recognition; South African groups like mbaqanga greats Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens reformed, found new audiences in Europe and the United States and revived interest at home.  The ethnic music movement McLaren had proposed at the turn of the decade finally broke.  A year after Graceland's release, the term "World Music" was coined, gained its own Billboard chart, had one, then two, Grammy categories devoted to it.  Through the 1990s, World Music represented the "single biggest growth area in record stores."

No single World Music artist would match the exposure level of Graceland.  Shaka Zulu was considered a huge success with 100,000 copies sold worldwide, less than 1% of Simon's sales.  The two mbaqanga tracks posted near the top of this entry were taken from a compilation called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto.  Released in the U.S. the same year as Graceland (in Britain, the year before) it became the title of choice for critics who wanted an authentic alternative; it came in tenth on that year's Pazz & Jop Poll... nine spots below Simon's "landslide" victory.  It was popular enough to inspire follow-up volumes, but there's a good chance it never made it to your parents' record collection.  Perhaps something like it did.  The sudden availability of multitudes of styles from different countries and different eras scattered the customer base.

Hybrids and collaborative efforts did appear, but few popular Western artists were as willing to let foreign sounds completely overrun their output (the oft-touted triumvirate:  Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel); there are a lot of excuses for the interested to avoid doing so.  There's the risk of seeming inauthentic.  There's the delusion of musical self-sufficiency, the idea that innovation was divorced from synthesis.  There are genuine responsibilities to the artists and cultures with whom you work.  Gabriel has been a force behind the worldwide WOMAD festivals since 1982 (post-9/11 paranoia has kept them from the US since 2001); both Gabriel and Byrne have formed record labels designed to raise the profiles of international artists they love.  (Such efforts also might be seen as attempts to authenticate one's love of the music, to establish oneself as more than a cultural tourist.)

(What to think of this recent project?  Where the press release reads, "In The Name of Love: Africa Celebrates U2, is an album celebrating the music, culture and future of Africa."  Really, is that what we're celebrating?  Because the title of the record is  Africa Celebrates U2.  The performers might be great - hey, look, there's Angélique Kidjo and there's the Refugee All-Stars - and maybe the renditions of songs are great, and everything should be about widening exposure, right?  But are "Africa Celebrates ______" records going to be the next "Bluegrass Tribute to Slayer" or "String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead?"  Who am I to hate on an album whose proceeds go to charity, right?  But does everything that says "Africa" also have to carry the charity tag?)

It's also possible that, for many of the x million owners of Graceland, "Paul Simon's South African Record" was the only South African record they felt they ever needed to have.  It had a specific sound, a sound that wasn't "mbaqanga" or "iscathamiya," but a sound that was "Graceland."  It sated their need for that sound; when Simon shuffled off to South America, maybe they followed, maybe they didn't.  And perhaps the instant high-profile middle-road success of the record so succeeded in branding these sounds, other artists were wary not of copying African music, but of copying Paul Simon's African Music.

And African artists?  If we're so sophisticated and worldly in 2008, where the hell's our "Patha Patha?"

There are plenty of reasons African music doesn't cross over here.  There are the hurdles of language, and culture, and form (Konono N°1 might have seemed like a gift to the dance/trance crowd but 23-minute thumb-piano jams aren't going to light up Z100).  The lack of targeted promotional muscle in our supersaturated marketplace isn't going to help any foreign artist to compete.  It's easier to pick up a Putumayo comp.  Look how much effort it took to sell Shakira to America, and she's an incredibly bright, incredibly attractive international superstar whose native tongue is this country's second most-popular language.  (I'm sure that once they do their wet t-shirt video, the popularity of Amadou and Mariam will take right the fuck off.)  Music critics might throw their weight behind one or two foreign releases each year, which (circle one) focuses the buying public/smacks of tokenism.

There have been high-profile figures who have found cult audiences here, same as before Graceland and "World Music."  Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Ali Farka Touré, Youssou N'Dour... You can pack them in a canon, if you'd like, but they're hardly household names.  This 1988 NY Times concert review follows up the question, "Why is African music so popular now?" with the concession that "African music is still the preserve of the hip, of outsiders pressing their noses against the glass."

Unless your African music is made by white people.  It's much easier to cut through our xenophobia if you appeal to our racism.  Has there been a bigger-selling African-born musician in the United States than Dave Matthews?  I'd hazard a list of the most widely recognized Africans would be topped by Nelson Mandela, Charlize Theron, and Matthews, and not in that order.  I'm sure I'm missing someone obvious.  Maybe Hakeem Olajuwon would make the cut.

Maybe I'm missing something here, too.  A quick scan of thirty years of Saturday Night Live musical guests turns up three performers from Africa:  Matthews; Ladysmith Black Mambazo, there to back Paul Simon; and the integrated, but white-fronted, Johnny Clegg and Savuka (as opposed to Clegg's previous band, the more balanced Juluka).  When the Grammys got around to introducing a World Music category in 1992, its first winner was... Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.  Both its 1994 and 1995 awards went to Ry Cooder collaborations.  Youssou N'Dour can get a single on a Billboard charts!  (#9!)  As long as Peter Gabriel's name is also on it.

We still want to look at a White Africa.  We like Tarzan, and we like great white hunters, if we're going to make a movie about Stephen Biko then it's damn well going to star white people.  Maybe that's why, twenty-two years on, when some pale awkward indie pop group grafts a few Afropop-inspired guitar licks to its otherwise stilted, incapable crap, everyone still gropes for Graceland comparisons.  Because that's the last time some well-recognized white dude sang in his pussy voice all over the African music he loved, and he called it "Paul Simon."

[In addition to linked sources throughout, I'm indebted to Jonathan David Greer's 74-page "Paul Simon's Graceland and its Social and Political Statements on Apartheid in South Africa" (pdf), the First Edition of The Rough Guide to World Music, and Simon's Graceland liner notes.  Paragraphs 22 and 23 were originally written by Boyoyo Boys, but now they're mine.]

NEXT TIME:  The stunning conclusion!  Last and least!  Vampire Weekend:  Puppy thieves and baby-rapers?  Or baby thieves and puppy-rapers?  Coming soon!(*)

(*)  Don't wait up. 

(And again, I'll open comments on these when I get where I'm going.  Which might be deep into Chelsea Clinton's presidency.)

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