Music

Ezra Koenig is the singer and primary songwriter for Vampire Weekend, whose 2019 LP, “Father of the Bride,” debuted at No. 1 on t he Billboard chart and won the Grammy for best alternative music album. I asked him about how the album was frequently likened by critics — sometimes favorably, sometimes not — to jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish.

In coverage of a song like “Harmony Hall,” there was a recurring theme of “Vampire Weekend is being provocative by having these jam-band signifiers. They’re being contrarian or they’re challenging the audience.” Was that your intention? To a large extent it was just looking for what we thought was cool in the unfashionable pile. I legitimately think that Phish are more inspiring, forward-thinking, exciting and talented than a lot of what was higher up in the cool hierarchy. There might have been stuff when I was 14 that I thought was cooler than jam bands, for whatever reason. And then I just flipped. It’s not my gut anymore. I’m familiar with a certain type of hierarchy of cool. I know it. The artistic part of me just doesn’t buy it anymore.

When I started listening to jam bands, I had a fantasy that it was almost an escape from what you’re talking about — a way to step outside the taste wars. Of course, now I know that was a very simplified view; there are jam-band snobs and all of that. Definitely. I’m hesitant to talk too much about it, because I get concerned about stolen jam valor. If you go deep into the world of the Grateful Dead and you know too much about it, the idea of ever being like “I was influenced by this band” almost becomes embarrassing, because you’re referencing, what — this incredibly unique world that a talented group of people built over decades? And you’re just going to throw that in as a reference for your little song?

This is a broad-stroke, reductive view, but there is something about the jam-band ethos that feels pleasantly removed from the hard-core branding-and-marketing side of almost every other genre of music. You could poke holes in that argument so easily — I recognize that. But to some extent it does stand apart.

My adult life has almost exactly tracked the rise of social media. When Vampire Weekend started, it was the MySpace era, and then as Vampire Weekend became established and there were people vaguely interested in what I had to say, that’s when Twitter started. There’s something about taste and social media that I guess has probably given me a little bit of a contrarian streak. I did an interview where I said something like, “I like to look at things that are uncool and find the cool in them,” but that’s wrong. It’s not “cool” — what I was really saying is, I’m interested in things that are unfashionable. Because nothing’s uncool. Things are unfashionable.

I recognize the extent to which it’s all mirrors anyway. You like what you like, but you also like music that makes you look a certain way, and you try to avoid music that makes you look a different way. You want to be similar to people who are cool, but not so similar that you lose it. It’s all this big goofy game of signifiers, and if you think about it too much, you can almost be like, Wait, do I like anything?

I love that there’s a superficial layer to music that’s as simple as what genre is it, who’s singing it, what is their niche. And then there’s the level of what are they referencing, how do they do it differently, what does it mean to reference that in 2020. I feel a real kinship with critics; at a certain point what we’re all doing is interpreting the culture around us and saying something about it. But what’s interesting is when you transcend the little mood board of being like, “I think this is on trend right now.” What’s interesting is when you talk about: What do things mean?

You’ve changed how you approach live shows. Early on you said they felt like a promotional obligation, but now you’ve moved toward having them be a place where you can do things you can’t do on records. My first love was recorded music, not live music. So to some extent getting more into this interplay between the record and the live show, I started to look at that as an art form in and of itself. If you’re in the jam world, if you’re a Deadhead, it’s like, Of course! That’s all there is. But in the world that I was more familiar with, the idea that you would let a song like “Sunflower” be two and a half minutes on record, but you would let it open up live and show the ways in which that riff is durable and flexible — the idea that you wouldn’t lay all that out in the recording? When you’re going to be literally graded and judged on it? The idea that you would let that record be a small little feed that you can have fun with much later? It’s a different way of thinking. It’s a different art form.

I guess jamminess is an aesthetic. You either find it cool or you don’t. But also it’s a way of approaching a music career.

Steven Hyden is the author of four books, including “This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ and the Beginning of the 21st Century,” out in September. He last wrote for the magazine about the national mood. Arielle Bobb-Willis is a photographer from New York who was recently featured in Aperture’s “The New Black Vanguard.” This is her first assignment for the magazine.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Stylist: Evan Simonitsch. Grooming: Candice Birns.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint. More

To have a No. 1 pop song, even in these more-algorithmic-than-rhythmic times, is still a huge deal. The No. 1 spot determines cultural coverage, appearance fees, venue sizes. No. 1 signals to talk-show and festival bookers that an artist is enjoyed by fans across race and gender borders. No. 1 is a knee in the gut of lax awards juries. And for black artists? No. 1 means the “mainstream” really enjoys your music.

For black women, it means you have joined a superheroic clique that includes the Shirelles, Little Eva, the Dixie Cups, Diana Ross (with and without the Supremes), Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. Gloria Gaynor, Deniece Williams and Tina Turner. Brandy Norwood, Monica Arnold, Toni Braxton, Ciara Harris, TLC, Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys. Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. Donna Summer and Whitney Houston. Robyn Rihanna Fenty. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (with and without Destiny’s Child). Cardi B. And now Melissa Viviane Jefferson — better known as Lizzo.

Her 2017 song “Truth Hurts” became a viral hit in 2019 via a Netflix soundtrack, TikTok and tidal waves of radio play, eventually spending seven weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. “Truth” is a deeply cute bop, a taunt, a million middle fingers atwirl at fear and heartbreak. Lizzo has given late credit to the songwriter Mina Lioness for using a Lioness tweet in the song, but “Truth” is about more than being “100 percent that bitch.” When Lizzo singsongs, “You coulda had a bad bitch/Noncommittal/Help you with your career/Just a little,” I hear Lauryn Hill chanting, “You might win some/But you just lost one.” That line, from Hill’s 1998 “Lost Ones,” is one of the most satisfying chin checks in pop history — and “Truth Hurts” is right in its ring.

[Diary of a Song: Watch Lizzo Make ‘Juice.’]

Lizzo’s song glows with the fury of the big black women in pop’s past. Black pop subtexts — that tension you feel in even the happiest of big black records — often function as a counterbalance for historical undervaluation, and “Truth” can be heard as payback for the erasure and exploitation of singers like Martha Wash. In the mid-1970s, Wash began her career in a backup duo with Izora Armstead called Two Tons o’ Fun. Renamed the Weather Girls, they were Grammy-nominated for their 1982 classic “It’s Raining Men.” When Wash re-emerged as an in-demand session singer, her demo and background vocals were used as lead vocals — without permission or proper payment.

At one point Wash was suing three different labels for, variously, fraud, deceptive packaging, unauthorized use of her voice and commercial appropriation, including on Seduction’s “(You’re My One and Only) True Love”; Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody”; and C & C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” That’s Wash singing the words “everybody,” “dance” and “now.”

“Sweat” was on the pop charts for six months, and for two weeks in 1991 it was the No. 1 song in America. In the video, the lithe singer Zelma Davis lip-synced Wash’s vocals. In the video for “Everybody Everybody,” the model Katrin Quinol mouthed Wash’s work. Wash’s cases were settled out of court, even as her battle set in motion federal legislation mandating proper vocal credits. She never got her Lizzo moment — her own No. 1.

“The vocals that I did are my vocals,” Wash said on the news show “A Current Affair” in 1991. “This is my career. This is my life.” Insult was added to injury when C & C Music Factory’s Freedom Williams said in the same episode, “I don’t mean to be rude, harsh, callous or maligning or vilifying,” and then just said it out loud: “but I’d rather look at Zelma onstage.”

Got it. So when Lizzo raps, “We don’t [expletive] with lies, we don’t do goodbyes/We just keep it pushing like/Aye yi yi,” the message feels like “Hi, I’m Wash’s lawyer/We demand she be credited and paid/So please govern yourself accordingly.” My body mass index quivers to “Aye yi yi” joyously, every single time.

The line from Wash to Lizzo connects through the singer-songwriter Kelly Price, who helped lift the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1997 No. 1 “Mo Money Mo Problems” to immortality with her chorus: “I don’t know/What they want from me/It’s like the more money we come across/The more problems we see.” Price did appear in the video — in a small box, visible only from the shoulders up.

Sixteen years later, Price, on the red carpet for the “R&B Divas: Los Angeles” premiere, said she was pitching a reality-TV show called “Too Fat for Fame.” “How much good singing, dancing, entertaining, acting do you think the world has missed out on,” Price asked, “because somebody was told, ‘No, because you’re too big’?”

And then here comes Lizzo. Body too big. Personality too big. Talent too much. Audacity so consistent. Talking about living out of her car. About not feeling bad about feeling good. Setting the social streets afire by wearing her ass literally out, courtside at Staples Center. In the music video for “Truth Hurts,” Lizzo’s lush bits nearly fall from ivory lingerie. She rocks her heft like a safety pin through her lip.

Who’s gon’ stop a black woman from rap-singing from a place where pain hardens to growth, and tears rise steaming? We tend to uplift a black woman who works out her blues publicly, to a melody. When black girls perform, we dance. We karaoke. Everybody screams, “Goals!” God bless Lizzo for pulling up to pop culture big, loud and stomping. God forbid the black woman in the next cubicle speak a hurting truth in her indoor voice, though. On behalf of herself. To power. Or about anything else that matters.

Danyel Smith is a writer based in Los Angeles and the author of the novels “More Like Wrestling” and “Bliss.” Her first book of nonfiction, a history of black women in popular music, will be published by One World, an imprint of Random House, in February 2021. This is her first essay for the magazine.

Illustration by Denise Nestor. Source photograph: Karwai Tang/WireImage, via Getty Images. More