Hospitality's Debut Record Was The Existential Heart Of Millennial Failures
The Brooklyn indie pop outfit’s 2012 album was a fitting document about a generation that was never expected to grow up, suddenly having to.
Tristan Young @talltristan
Some time between the release of Contra in 2010 and Modern Vampires of the City in 2013, people had heard and learned enough about Vampire Weekend to have them pinned down fairly reasonably. The community at large was by then so familiar with their 2008 debut that any think piece on them was usually in the context of their affluent Brooklyn hipster persona. Graduates from prestigious institutes of higher learning, quixotic and carefree in their observational lyricisms, living a life of comfort so pronounced that they could spend time litigating proper use of the Oxford Comma. These dudes had made it, and they hadn’t even broken a sweat. While their music was (and is!) wonderfully inviting and communal, strands of pretention and privileged obliviousness become more and more apparent just as culturally systemic issues like the income gap, wage stagnation, and student loan debt became more ravenous impediments to any kind of life resembling secure. Vampire Weekend is the preeminent millennial band, but they don’t tell the story of the millennial.
An alternative voice needs to speak for all of us, one that acknowledges our financial struggles, the paradoxical perversion of the relationship between university and poverty, and a system that had been manipulated and corrupted in the service of the wealthiest, at the expense of everyone else. Luckily, for some time Hospitality’s debut album, released in 2012, has been here to speak to these frustrations. The Brooklyn group’s songs of millennial disenfranchisement and economic insecurity aims to tell the story of our generation in all of it’s deflating glory. One with the odds stacked against them, with uncertainty abound, and with a persistent and nagging comparison to the successes of prior eras. It does so less with insolent victimization and more with sardonic wit, wry self deprecation, and universally relatable language. This is not the record of cardigan wearing, horchata sipping hipster, but of the cheap used dress wearing, dead end job loathing… er, hipster.
Hospitality is a spritely affair. Well aware that a mere indie pop rock record is not likely to solve any issues that years of organized protests have done little to put a dent in, the record instead aims to frame them more lightly as perplexing conundrums. In ‘Eighth Avenue’ singer Amber Papini jokes that she spent most of her twenties in bars and bathrooms, woefully ill equipped at what comes next. During ‘Liberal Arts’ she warns, “so you found the lock but not the key that college brings”, directly alluding to the crushing consequences of deficit financed education, that often does little to forward ones professional situation. The cycle of dependency that is somewhat perniciously ingrained into millennials comes up as she sheepishly intimates with the phrase, “momma bought the clothes, coin to call your mother, she didn’t answer, put in another quarter”, in ‘Sleepover’. In that same track she would go onto admit she needed a lover because she felt she couldn’t do it alone.
Importantly, Papini does not render her struggles through obnoxious entitlement. While there are hints of confrontational petulance in her voice in tracks like ‘The Birthday’ and ‘The Right Profession’, among others, she does so in service of painting a slightly comical caricature of herself and her contemporaries. She is well aware her situation is informed in part by that perennial aversion to growing up that had been so accommodated by an increasingly service and comfort based society. This is an environment her parents and grandparents didn’t grow up in, as referenced in the ponderous and poetic ‘Julie’. “Thanking broad strong backs that built all the roads and the mines that were left behind”, she solemnly ruminates on amidst acoustic guitar chords and string instruments. steeped in stoic frontierism. Her contrast between the physical monuments of prior generations and her arrested development is starkly displayed and ensures Papini’s frustrations are tempered by introspection and taking responsibly for her part in things.
There’s also an evident effort to contextualize these issues not just in terms of Papini’s anecdotal malaise, but also optimism, at least melodically. There is enough depression surrounding this subject matter already, Hospitality injects some enthusiasm and much needed sweetness into the proceedings. The album is the day light twee indie pop response to the noir and nihilistic existentialism of early 2000s indie music, much of it also coming from New York. (looking at you Interpol). Instead, ‘Friends of Friends’ is a bulbous and blossoming spread of kooky brass arrangements. Peculiar scales and playfully exploratory key boards wander inconspicuously through ‘Liberal Arts’, even as Papini is calling out the trust fund brigade and lamenting the unrealistic emphasis on defining one’s life through financial success. This doesn’t undercut the messages of a lack of economic agency, or having no idea what do with your life, but Hospitality actively wants to ensure you don’t feel sorry for them.
Much of the album’s light hearted and encouraging tone revolves around the idea that we are all in this together, and that if we can’t solve some of these problems, solidarity is absolutely integral in seeing us through it. This is no more apparent than in the fiendishly delightful and exclamatory ‘The Right Profession’. There are many frustrating false equivalencies between the livelihoods of prior generations as they transitioned into adult hood and what it is like now. One of the more egregious examples centers on how 40 or so years ago the status quo revolved around getting a job, sticking with it for 50 years and that was that. That sense of manifest stability is a luxury that has long since evaporated. People entering and in the midst of the job market must contend with the reality that they will need to reassess their career options multiple times as the economy continues to evolve and mutate in disruptive forms. The enormity of that fundamental question of what do with one’s life can be so towering that it’s hard to distill it into a catch phrase to shout into the atmosphere. ‘The Right Profession’ covers this wonderfully as Papini frantically chants, “I don’t want to dream up a status change”. Her thoughts culminate with glorious and sloganeering fury, “It’s hard to change!”. As she exits the stage, a deliriously fun and all too brief electric guitar solo thunders out of the gates. The sonic burst is so celebratory that at first that the notes seem to race away until more control can be exerted over the beat. It’s the melodic center piece of the album that radiates enthusiasm and a sense of community across the entire effort.
That sense of community and reciprocal encouragement is foundational to why this album works. Papini is well aware that the modern cocktail of narcissism and neurosis tends to render must of us incapable of digging our way out of our own hole. It’s symptomatic of a social media charged culture where we always have an opinions and advice, yet can seldom take it ourselves. If she will tell her own stories of social paralysis, she will counter that with offering moral support to those around her, surely experiencing the same struggles. In ‘Betty Wang’ with a doo wop 50s inspired mix of background hums and twinkling key boards, Papini tells her friend, lovingly referring to her by her birth name “Su Chai” that they don’t need their boring jobs or cooperate cronyism culture. “You’re the only girl on the team, you don’t golf, you don’t smoke, you don’t understand their jokes” she begs; she doesn’t need the office drones, they have each other. Papini assures her, “If you leave New York, I don’t care, I’ll follow you back to Tokyo”.
These sentiments are emergent throughout, particularly in the quirky alt pop ballad ‘Argonaugts’. In it Papini builds her message around mythological examples of galvanizing and inspiring women. With preppy key boards fluttering and the rhythmic form of a soothing lullaby Papini proudly claims of her friend, “you are an arrow, you are an Argonaut, Atalanta”. Unexpected shrieks of guitar hammer the idea of strength, but the extended and comforting refrain is evocative of, finally, contentment. If Papini and those of her generation will not find fulfilment in a world that left them behind before they even got going, they will find it in each other.
In this regard the album has somewhat conflicted views on the value of reliance, where to draw the line between that and toxic dependency. But then Hospitality paints a world that is complicated, conflicting and not very accommodating. The answers aren’t in university, pursuant careerism, or the history of those that came before. As she intimates in ‘Liberal Arts’, lots of locks, not a lot of keys. No trust funds or daddy doctors, not for most of us. But we are surviving as best we can. It’s sloppy and inelegant, a treacherous path populated by as many self inflected wounds as there are systemic barriers. Hospitality wanted to make a record that assured people they weren’t the only ones mired in this arduous and not particularly fulfilling journey. And like all journeys, it’s better with a soundtrack.