As the controversy regarding hot-chick-model Kirsten Kennis on the cover of Vampire Weekend’s last album ‘Contra’ is all over the blogs (she is suing the band for $2 million claiming that she had no idea her picture had been used and that her signature was forged on a release form), Gustavo Turner of the LA Weekly came up with an interesting idea in his article about the story: ‘Can Bret Easton Ellis write something about this? Bret? Are you there? We can always use more freelancers’You know how Bret Easton Ellis has been considered as the most musical author, with his constant music references in his books, and the obsession to give a soundtrack to the most trivial things his characters do. How could we forget Bateman’s dry cold and endless monologues with Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins or Whitney Houston in the background?
From Fleetwood Mac to Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, the Ramones, the Verve, Radiohead and Jon Bon Jovi (among many many others), almost each moment of Lunar Park has a song reference like each of his books, and two of them (‘Less than Zero’, and ‘Imperial Bedrooms’) are named after an Elvis Costello’s song and album respectively.
The effectiveness of his musical use is uncanny, and even his tweets are gorged of song references: ‘Finishing “The Golden Suicides” script…staring at the view from my office…Dear Science playing…Mike at a friends in Lake Hollywood…’ was twitted on February 20th.
But I seriously doubt Bret is going to take the offer, as he has just released a new book ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ (reviewed very positively on rock nyc a couple of weeks ago) , a sequel to ‘Less than Zero’, and has finished writing a script for an upcoming movie ‘The Golden Suicides’. So he keeps himself very busy and quite successful.
Now this Bret Easton Ellis/Vampire weekend connection is hardly new since, when NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ reviewed ‘Contra’, they used the following sentence to describe the album: ‘Sometimes, there’s a blankness to the voices in Vampire Weekend songs that’s more Bret Easton Ellis than F. Scott Fitzgerald.’
And I have also found several other references in blogs, proposing they could practically be the soundtrack to a Bret Easton Ellis novel (http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/vampire_weekend/vampire_weekend), or evoking a sun-kissed indie-pop made by benevolent characters from a Bret Easton-Ellis story (http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/the-clash-essential-50-46-43), or finding them looking like they rocked up out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/acrosstheline/2010/07/oxegen_2010_vampire_weekend.html) or suggesting you’ll want to read Bret Easton Ellis when listening to them (http://www.clickmusic.com/singles/article/Vampire-Weekend-Mansard-Roof) … the only Ellis-vampire combination I was aware of was in ‘The Informers’! It must be some kind of underground conspiracy.
I had never thought about it before, but now that everybody is on it, I can make sense of all this rich kids’ ironic anxiety obsessed by designer clothes!