Land of Fame and Lawsuits
Few people know there exists a band called Vampire Weekend. Fewer are fans. And an even tinier number of humans are aware that there is a Polaroid-looking photograph of an all-American girl on the cover of the latest Vampire Weekend album, and that this girl, Kirsten Kennis, has decided that when life gives you fame but not a lawsuit, you should take the fame and bring the lawsuit.
What seems to be a pointless tiff in the irrelevant world of world-beat-lovin', deck-shoe wearin' indie pop opens up on a Real World Issue. (Or perhaps the reverse -- a Real World Issue has managed to penetrate the groovy carapace of the blue state Afro-Prep scene...?) Supposedly, a creative, social-network-loving youth culture is swelling up to blow away the litigious, grasping, griping boomer culture still clinging to the rafters above it. Supposedly our swelling, youth-fueled love of fame is pushing out our lingering love of money, and the heaps of it that lawsuits provide. Supposedly free fame is the new free love; mere exposure sets you on the high road to El Dorado.
But these are straitened times. Rights too tacky to assert when we're high on the hog come back into vogue when the future's at stake. Either that, or you can throw opportunism out with a pitchfork, but opportunism comes back and back. We're still a society of fame and lawsuits. All the youth and hipness and open-source sociableness and all the feeling in the world of entitlement to anything plausibly labeled information won't change that. Fame and lawsuits are our get rich quick schemes. And our love for get rich quick schemes is as all-American as we can get.
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May '10
Re: Land of Fame and Lawsuits
My own get-rich-quick scheme is to invent the digital paperclip.
Jun '10
Re: Land of Fame and Lawsuits
The future belongs to those who can successfully sue to gain its boons. Why study and work hard when some articling student can do it for you? Gone are the days when a girl would do anything for a good mark except study. Now all she has to do is claim gender discrimination, and the B is in the transcript. Have the aforementioned articling student issue a writ of summons and the minimum that can be expected is a B+ or even an A depending on how weak kneed the dean. I’ll wager a positive and high correlation (approaching 1.0) exists between grade inflation and bra size, which of course does not invalidate skirt length as an untoward influence on the heterosexual professoriate more interested in getting through the night than the course. Used to be that a guy had to fork out for dinner, drinks, a movie, and drive a Vette; today marks and a doobie— you need the doobie to take the sting out of the hook-up—do the trick. Talk about cheapening undergrad degrees. So am I surprised that a band that can’t play is suing? Hell no!
Re: Land of Fame and Lawsuits
You know, I like Vampire Weekend a lot -- especially the NSFW tune, "Oxford Comma," which is catchy and sharp. But I got it on iTunes, and honestly have never looked carefully at the cover art until....this post. So that's one drawback of our lawsuit-happy society: sometimes, all it does is draw attention to the thing itself, presumably making it all the more "painful" and "damaging."
Also: poor Kirsten Kennis is about to discover that there's no money in the recording business.