This website will remain as an archive for issues from before Spring 2020.

THE YALE HERALD HAS MOVED TO A NEW WEBSITE (yale-herald.com) was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In All Mirrors, night falls on Angel Olsen’s universe. The album is a seductive invitation to the shadowy, chrome world of the nocturnal, and — against the darkness — Olsen glitters.

It’s cool, it’s so cool; it sounds like how 5 Gum thinks 5 Gum feels. Characterized by her mercurial voice — sometimes crooning, sometimes airy, always doing exactly what she wants it to — Olsen’s music has always felt like a gift from another time or place. Her early work — Strange Cacti and Half-Way Home (2011) — was folk recorded in outer space. Burn Your Fire For No Witness (2014) saw Olsen visit the bouncing world of Roy Orbison guitar-rock. In My Woman (2016), Olsen upped the ante, embracing the energy of Burn Your Fire, intensifying the gravity of her songwriting and adding synths.

All Mirrors’ opening track, “Lark,” is a sprawling, six-minute odyssey that sits at the apex of Olsen’s past-and-present sound. The song begins in a cloud as Olsen’s voice floats over a bed of strings and strummed guitar. A pulsing, off-kilter groove enters underneath, giving structure to Olsen’s mercurial melody. A snare hit erupts and the top blows off Olsen’s vocals — she’s back.

The production builds as a piercing string section intermittently dive bombs Olsen’s harmony, pulling the song in and out of dissonance. At the five-minute mark, the climb reaches its peak as the song erupts into an absolutely disgusting explosion of guitars, strings, and vocals. “What about my dreams? / What about the heart?” Olsen exclaims to her bygone lover with a masterful balance of strength and vulnerability.

Too often, “let’s add a string section” is code for “the song sucks,” a wall-of-sound crutch for boring harmony and anemic writing. In All Mirrors, however, Olsen’s songwriting is stronger than ever, reaching deeper into the familiar and summoning the strange.

In “Endgame,” a detective’s cigarette smoke wafts through shuttered greyscale rays of light. In “What It Is,” Olsen revisits the galloping world of her rockabilly roots, adding a string section that sits halfway been A Moon Shaped Pool and Sgt. Peppers. When I get to “New Love Cassette,” I’m soaring. It’s like an indie-rock, synth-pop Batman soundtrack, driven by the currents of synth-bass.

At times, I miss the gnarly guitars of My Woman; the buoyant, raw energy of Burn Your Fire For No Witness; and the yodel-adorned folk of Strange Cacti and Half-Way Home. To call All Mirrors a step in the right direction feels wrong, but it’s a step nonetheless — and a great one, at that.

Olsen perches maximalist production atop exquisite songwriting that is both challenging and accessible; lyrics that are simultaneously heartbreaking and invigorating; and towering yet intimate vocal performances that manifest her divine moniker eleven times over.

Angel Olsen’s “All Mirrors:” Shadow and Light was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the beginning of the quest “Merlin’s Crystal,” in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) RuneScape, the player must talk to a non-player character, or NPC, named “King Arthur.” Though RuneScape takes place in the fantasy realm of Gielinor, Arthur notes that “Back in England, [Merlin] got himself trapped in some sort of magical Crystal,” and the player must help break him out. Much to fans’ amusement, this section of dialogue implies that England — and thus, our world — exists within the universe of RuneScape. Jagex, RuneScape’s developers, are no strangers to in-game “Easter eggs.” Most are occasional fourth-wall breaks, meta jokes, or references to real-life material, like the mythological King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot. These connections are mostly innocuous, and they fit within a well-established history of cross-referencing within the fantasy genre. One connection between the land of Gielinor and our own, however, is not so innocuous: money.

Real-world trading is the process of exchanging in-game currency for real-world currency and vice versa. Though strictly against the rules of RuneScape, it is a widespread phenomenon in-game, and its potential for real-world profit has given rise to entire industries of gold farmers and traders. Currently, the website “RSgoldfast” — an illicit but popular real-world trading website — marks the exchange rate at 1 million gold per .79 USD. According to Mod Mat K, a product manager at Jagex, “at any given time, 50 percent of all players are engaging with real-world trading.” Even if real-world trading is not a planned feature of the RuneScape economy, it is a feature nonetheless. Beyond the game itself, real-world trading has legal implications. As the RuneScape code of conduct explains, “Nobody has our permission to sell RuneScape accounts or any RuneScape related virtual in-game items. All RuneScape accounts and virtual items are the property of Jagex Ltd and players are only granted a limited, revocable permission to use accounts and virtual items.” The world of RuneScape and all exchanges within it are the property of Jagex; any real-world gain from the game belongs to Jagex, and thus, these activities are akin to theft. Moreover, real-world trading often occurs via hacking, phishing, or other illicit ways of obtaining access to players’ accounts. It also can involve real credit card fraud, as gold farmers use others’ credit cards to pay for RuneScape membership.

But before we analyze the RuneScape economy, let me bring you up to speed. Money — referred to in-game as “gold,” “gold points,” or “gp” — is central to a player’s progression, allowing them to buy items that make progression either more efficient or possible at all. The vast majority of economic activity in-game happens via the Grand Exchange, a commodity-exchange infrastructure through which players can anonymously place offers to buy or sell items in exchange for gold. It is both an in-game location, located northwest of the city of Varrock, and a global infrastructure. Before its release, players had to physically congregate in-game to trade, and trades were completed player-to-player. Now, the Grand Exchange allows near-instantaneous buying and selling between players, permitting trade across servers, time zones, and languages.

The magnitude of trade that occurs via the Grand Exchange is astounding. In the last six months, the top 10 most-traded items accounted for 167 billion coins in-game, equivalent to $132,000. The most expensive trade to occur on the Grand Exchange was a single “Scythe of vitur,” a rare drop from one of the game’s hardest bosses, which sold for two billion coins, equivalent to around $1,500. The Grand Exchange also allows for economic coordination between players in the form of “merching” clans. “Merching,” much like real-life arbitrage, is the process of manipulating prices in-game through buyouts of certain items, thus inducing a shortage in supply and raising the price. Given that items are subjected to “buy limits,” which limit the amount that a single player can purchase in a given amount of time, coordination among players is necessary to induce a change in price. Any given player’s ability to change an item’s price is also limited by access to capital. The Grand Exchange is a relatively free market, subject to the same forces and logics as the real-world economy. Critical to understanding the “realness” of the RuneScape economy is understanding the language that surrounds it. On the RuneScape wiki, the page “economy” features supply and demand infographics detailed enough to use for an ECON 115 study guide.

The rationale for the illegality of real-world trading is two-fold. Both Jagex and players argue that real-world trading devalues players’ legitimately earned progression. For context, a “maxed account” — an account that has level 99, the highest achievable, in every skill — takes between three and seven thousand hours to achieve. Given an infinite cash stack, a player could speed up their progression exponentially, as many skills in RuneScape are considered “buyable.” RuneScape is a game centered around “grinding,” the repetition of tasks ad infinitum as the primary means of progression. Even as players lament the monotony of tasks in RuneScape, a semi-ironic commitment to them is a badge of honor. The language of labor and economic metaphors permeates discussion of in-game achievement, even among those not participating in real-world trading. Most skills in RuneScape are most efficiently trained through intense repetition of a single task, and players often discuss these skills with half-hearted disdain. And yet, they still play. Much of RuneScape’s player base started when they were kids, enraptured by the magic of goblins, quests, and chat room abuse.

Many players find this current obsession with efficiency at odds with why they began playing in the first place. “There is a culture of efficiency, ‘no xp waste’… Why are you even doing this again?” one disgruntled player wrote in a Reddit post from 2018. The question remains: why do these efficiency-obsessed, jaded players still play the game? Are they “playing” at all?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi attributes this form of play to the psychological phenomena of “flow,” when “a person is able to concentrate on a limited stimulus field, in which he or she can use his or her skills to meet clear demands, thereby forgetting his or her own problems… at the same time obtaining a feeling of control over the environment.” Thus, the clear-input output relationship made possible by RuneScape’s mechanics is a form of play in and of themselves. The ability for a player to calculate exactly how many logs they need to cut or runes they need to craft to obtain a certain level allows a sense of perfect control over their environment. It is a world in which the rules are clear and the outcomes certain; thus, the only variable is the “grind” that a player is willing to commit.

The pervasiveness of this “grind” culture is evident throughout the RuneScape community but perhaps best exemplified in an exchange I witnessed in a chatroom:

PLAYER A: these quest requirements aren’t that high at all

PLAYER B: nope not at all / questing is a joke

A: I’m about it because it feels like every other quest gives me something new / Whether it is useful is irrelevant

B: im [sic] proud of you son / you are what we call weaponized autism

While players can oscillate between “efficiency” and “fun” modes of play, and while both modes of play can appear contradictory, the consistency of their internal logics is important to note. The grind is fun because the grind is fun, and aimless exploration is fun simply because aimless exploration is fun. How a player arrives at either mode of play depends on their knowledge of the game’s intricate mechanics, their age, and their participation in the game’s surrounding communities. These self-affirming logics of leisure and “play” are both socially enforced in-game and through forums like Reddit and Discord.

It is no coincidence that “flow,” as discussed by Csikszentmihalyi, manifests in both work and play. In fact, according to Csikszentmihalyi, “flow” is present more so in work than anywhere. However, just as “play” is a socially constructed term, “work” is a construction as well. Games like RuneScape, which seem to blur the lines between work and play, are apt sites to investigate these constructions and test accepted definitions of either. While Max Weber argued that capitalism emerged as a product of Protestant asceticism, restraint, and prudence, he also saw a universality in the desire for gain: “Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.” The fantasy world of RuneScape, thus, is fertile ground for the capitalist spirit to grow. It is a world where all resources are replenished in an instant, where all slain monsters are revived, and where death is little more than a calculated setback. The blurred lines between work and play that bring about flow, that occur as a result of some “Protestant ethic” of simultaneous restraint and unending ambition, make possible the form of play known as “grinding.”

Moreover, the blurred lines between work and play bring closer the fantasy economy of RuneScape and our own — an extreme example: the case of Venezuelan gold farmers.

In recent years, Venezuela has undergone an immense economic crisis. Inflation rates have topped over one million percent, with prices of common goods doubling nearly every three weeks. As a result, thousands of young Venezuelans have taken to gold farming in RuneScape as a means of survival. These players use the game’s most profitable money-making methods to generate gold, which they then sell in exchange for real money. Doing so has the potential to earn many times the average wage in Venezuela via traditional sources of income.

The language that surrounds “grinding” as performed by dedicated players is different from that which is used to discuss gold farmers. Despite the fact that gold farmers often undertake the same processes as regular players, many players view them as a problem. As one Reddit post, titled “JAGEX DO SOMETHING ABOUT THOSE VENEZUELAN [Real-world traders]” reads, “Since there is a serious IRL crisis in Venezuela for example the blast mine is overloaded with these cunts who crash the spot to sell money they have gathered.” One controversial post on Reddit, titled “Killing Venezuelans at East Drags [sic] Guide,” though since removed, stirred controversy for laying out a step-by-step guide for identifying and targeting Venezuelan gold farmers. In the divided, vitriolic comment section, the border between the RuneScape world and our own appears nonexistent.

Commenters are not discussing avatars, they are discussing the real people behind them. One comment reads, “I never thought I’d see a guide on how to efficiently kill poor people,” with another joining in, “This is kinda [sic] fucked that you are going out of your way to literally help people make already poor people who can barely afford clothes/food etc. struggle even more than they already are.” Some players seek to absolve responsibility through either in-game means, saying “RS isn’t a charity, it’s a game and property of Jagex, kill them all,” while others blame real-world structures, claiming that “Socialism killed them, this is just burying the carcass.” Along real-life fault lines of racism and classism, others take pride in targeting gold farmers, writing “I kill these guys when warming up my switches on my pure. They are pure offensive practice and some of the best people to kill… Also, you could just say ‘Trump’ while you attack them and that will easily get their jajajajaja’s going.” The real-world consequences of a Venezuelan gold farmer being banned or killed go far beyond a simple setback. Both by circumstance and intention, Venezuelan gold farmers do not enjoy the same insulation from the consequences faced in the world of Gielinor as normal players do. Death in-game can literally equate to death in real life, and the game suddenly seems less fun.

But what happens when the real economy starts to resemble a game?

The streamlining and abstraction of wealth and exchange in the RuneScape economy is corollary to that of the Post-Fordist economy. The geographer David Harvey, in his article “Between Space and Time,” argues that the advancement of capitalism in the modern world is predicated on a collapsing of space and time, an incessant drive towards the instant. This is on full display in both RuneScape and the financial sector. The Grand Exchange is dialectical in that, while it is a physical space, the exchange it permits has no grounding in said location. While the “Financial District” is a neighborhood, the business that flows through the stock exchange — and computers across the globe — is not bound to any one place. Whereas the market was once a location, it is now an idea. It operates not via bartering, but via logics of supply and demand, mysterious algorithms, and global exchange. And just as the financial sector’s ever-expanding consolidation of power combined with the digital revolution of finance has permitted its hegemony over the world’s economy, the Grand Exchange has permitted unprecedented abstraction in the RuneScape economy: the mystery of in-game algorithms, the instantaneous nature of trade, and the ability for real-world traders, merchanting clans, and other actors to manipulate prices and quantities with little regard for those on the other end.

What is critical to note here is that abstraction is born of concrete phenomena. Abstraction occurs in inconceivable amounts of money, whether that be item prices or trillion-dollar bonuses. Abstraction is found in the alienation of the worker from their labor, whether manifesting in the devaluation of a hard-earned, maxed RuneScape account or the increasing share of economic growth that goes to the financial sector rather than to workers.

Abstraction grows in the gap between cause and effect, action and responsibility. Just as responsibility helps shape the distinction between a game and real-life or play and work, responsibility (or a lack thereof) has been a critical component of the creation of the modern financial system. This diminishing liability is at the root of the corporate form. As theorist Joshua Barkan argues in The Sovereign Gift, “corporate power has always been articulated within the context of responsibility.” As Barkan proposes, the modern corporate form is designed to shield actors from liability. The “Limited Liability Corporation” is one in which no single person takes the fault for the actions of the whole. It is why CEOs can walk away from financial crises with no jail time. It is why multi-billion dollar fines for misconduct and other limited forms of punishment can be shrugged off as costs of doing business.

The consequences, as filtered through the corporate form, simply aren’t that severe. The same logic applies to risk-taking in RuneScape. For the vast majority of infractions, a banned account is the worst penalty one could face. They can simply make another. A death, loss of gold, or destruction of special equipment simply does not matter that much, as it is all part of the game. Even for individual financial workers, as anthropologist Karen Ho argues, being “liquidated” is a part of the job on Wall Street and constant instability is part and parcel of simply riding the market. On the contrary, the dire consequences of death or punishment faced by Venezuelan gold farmers or the utter destruction of being fired from a blue-collar job reinforce the distinction between play and work. This limited liability, this insulation from consequences, as Ho uncovers in Liquidated, is how the language and mindsets of games manifest in financial sectors. As one analyst in Ho’s book explains, “from a shareholder investor perspective, it’s all about playing the game.” This sentiment is echoed by businessman-author Andy Kessler: “[Investment firms] literally exist to pay out half their revenue as compensation. And that’s what gets them into trouble every so often — it’s just a game of generating revenue because the players know they will get half of it back.”

There is nothing consequential about an in-game murder when you can simply shut the game off, and there is nothing scary about death when you know you can respawn, whether in Gielinor or on Wall Street.

Workers’ Play, Players’ Work was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Solange Knowles’ last two albums, When I Get Home and A Seat at the Table, have garnered overwhelming critical acclaim and widespread adoration largely as works best consumed in full. Often, albums that put the “long” in “long-playing record” feature a standout track or three surrounded by filler. Solange’s music is unique, however, in that even the most bite-sized of tracks are beautiful both as particles and parts of even greater waves.

Solange’s records are peppered with mini-songs, all under two minutes, and among them are some of her most memorable tracks. For context, pop songs are short, but not that short. Right now, only three songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are under two minutes, and one of them is “Baby Shark.”

To understand how Solange encapsulates the beauty of her expansive, meditative music into 120 seconds or fewer, let’s look at the opening tracks of her last two albums, “Things I Imagined” and “Rise.”

Structurally, the two are remarkably similar. Both follow an AAAB song structure — three verses that repeat a central motif to its boiling point, and then a final Coda that delivers a payoff both lyrically and harmonically different. Between the final refrain of the A section and the beginning of the B section, there’s a transition. In “Rise,” this takes the form of a four-second pause, allowing the listener to take in what they’ve just heard and prepare for what’s to come. “Things I Imagined” achieves the same effect with an instrumental refrain of the previous verses, allowing synths to bubble up and burst.

“Things I Imagined” spirals around its titular phrase, shifting keys over cascading chords and percolating synths. Shifting time signatures and accents keep you from getting truly comfortable, and its repetition walks the thin line between hypnosis and semantic satiation. This goes on for 90 seconds until it reaches its climax, rewarding our trust in the song’s elusive groove and ambiguous harmonic direction with its final refrain. Solange finishes the sentence she’s been singing the entire time, triumphantly exclaiming her dependent clause, “taking on the light.” Up, up, and away into the rest of the album.

Whereas “Things I Imagined” feels like being blindfolded, spun around, and sent into a pitch black room only to find yourself somewhere within Solange’s hippocampus, “Rise” focuses on orientation rather than disorientation. It’s an outstretched hand, inviting its listener to crumble — as long as they wake up, rise, and pull up a chair thereafter. Amid a landscape of made-for-streaming albums that put the “L” in “LP,” Solange crafts digital albums that are impeccable from the first byte to the last.

Solange and the Craft of the Mini-Song was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An old-guard indie darling nearing 50 is an unlikely place to look for political fire, and yet Andrew Bird — in contrast to the reclusive domesticity that characterized his last LP, 2016’s Are You Serious — is unabashedly, and successfully, throwing his hat in the ring with sharp, pointed prose and melodies that ring out in the soul. My Finest Work Yet is a folky reminder that yes, you can still sing (and even whistle) about the world’s problems. Even if you enjoy the white male privilege of opting in and out of the political arena, please, opt in — after all, as Bird sings on “Sisyphus,” “history forgets the moderates.”

“Sisyphus” is a good place for My Finest Work Yet to start: it reads like a thesis statement. Sisyphus was a mythological Greek king condemned to rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down right before the peak, and so on for eternity. Bird, through his ever-clever wordplay laden with internal rhymes and dictionary-necessitating diction, paints a portrait of Sisyphus, and in the process finds his canvas a mirror. Camus found the moment just before Sisyphus let the boulder roll down once more a corollary to man’s search for meaning — futile and yet ceaseless. Bird places himself, and his listeners, in Sisyphus’ position, in a constant struggle to find meaning in a demoralizing world — against a demoralizing government, perhaps. However, he finds this task one of human invention, singing, “It’s got nothing to do with fate / and everything to do with you.”

What is this struggle, you might ask? Well, Bird has an answer, and a clear one at that, in “Bloodless,” the jazzy seven-minute allegory that directly follows “Sisyphus.” Bird, over a viscous backing track of swampy drums, upright bass, and swelling strings, paints an extended comparison between the Spanish Civil War and today’s political crises. This could come off as cringy — I mean, he does wear a fedora — but it really works. Between the verses of history is a wonderful chorus that really drives the song home. Bird paraphrases Psalm 37 (trust me, it works!), singing, “Don’t you worry ‘bout the wicked / Don’t you envy those who do you wrong / And your innocence will be like the dawn / While the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.” This careful balance of lucid storytelling and unrestrained calls-to-action make “Bloodless,” and the album as a whole, so great.

My Finest Work Yet is rife with beautiful, moving moments. “Manifest,” my favorite track, is an acoustic, existentialist question mark that paints a bitter-sweet portrait of the end of history. “Olympians” praises the resilience of those that speak truth to power; it’s optimistic without wandering into naivete. Bird shouts, “We’re gonna turn it around! / We’re gonna turn it around,” and by the end, you believe him.

Throughout My Finest Work Yet, the political and personal, the sincere and satirical, and the restrained and powerful dance over Bird’s trademark violin and whistling as songwriting that applies resin to your heartstrings and plays them, over and over. It’s music that deserves to be listened to outside. So, get out, put your earbuds in, and witness what you’re listening to. When you’re all riled up, hit pause, take them out, and get involved.

My Finest Work Yet was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At their best, Vampire Weekend’s new singles from their upcoming album Father of the Bride, “Sunflower” and “Big Blue,” are groovy, heartfelt ditties. At their worst, they feel unsubstantial, which — unless, like me, you spent the last six years in dire anticipation — isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

My first time hearing “Sunflower,” sprawled on a leather couch in Sterling in post-midterm exhaustion, was quickly followed by my second, third, and fourth (facilitated by its two-minute runtime and necessitated by its incessant catchiness). It grooves harder than anything Vampire Weekend has released to date, and Ezra Koenig achieves this funk by reaching both forwards and backwards. “Sunflower” is forward-looking: it’s the band’s first true feature, made in collaboration with The Internet’s multi-instrumentalist producer extraordinaire Steve Lacy (who produced a track off Kendrick Lamar’s last album, DAMN, and was nine years old when Vampire Weekend’s first album came out). “Sunflower” also looks to the past, featuring swirling, Grateful Dead-esque guitar riffs, a ghost note-laden drum break that just doesn’t quit, and some questionable scatting. It’s catchy and whimsical, but it feels more like a jam or demo than an A-side. This is coming from someone who has listened to it no less than 15 times today, so take my criticisms with a grain of salt.

The second track, “Big Blue,” is the more sincere one of the two. It’s sweet — maybe a bit sugary — and it feels like someone thawed and diced a track or two from their last album, Modern Vampires of the City, threw in some sunshine for flavor, and pureed it in their NutriBullet. Featuring chunky acoustic guitars, George Harrison-esque slide, and classic Vampire Weekend canned choir, it’s a quick mashup of all the things that make the band great. The problem: it’s too damn short! We know Koenig can tell a story, and while the song’s one verse is poignant, it just doesn’t quite satisfy. I should want to hit replay, not have to.

“Sunflower” and “Big Blue” represent the two wonderful sides of Vampire Weekend: fun and sincerity. However, neither live up to the classics of their respective categories: “Sunflower” doesn’t hold a candle to a song like “Cousins” or “Diane Young” in terms of hype, and “Big Blue” is nowhere near as heart-wrenching as “Hannah Hunt” or “Diplomat’s Son.” Don’t get me wrong, they’re great tracks, but I pray — out of sincere love for Vampire Weekend’s music — that the heavy hitters of Father of the Bride are yet to come.

“Sunflower” and “Big Blue” was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today marks 50 years since the release of the Velvet Underground’s 1969 eponymous LP. It’s also been just over half a decade since the death of the band’s lead singer, songwriter, and creative visionary: Lou Reed. Throughout his life and work, Reed constructed and deconstructed his own masculinity. How Reed dealt with masculinity, femininity, drugs, sex, and everything in between deserves both discussion and commemoration for just how forward-thinking, artistic, and — above all — honest it was.

I was first exposed to Lou Reed’s music in a Johnny Rockets. I was nine or 10, inhaling an Oreo milkshake, when the warm bassline of “Walk on the Wild Side” crackled over the speakers. Reed’s lyrics followed, and the exposure became indecent. The song features a deadpan account of a cast of characters curated from Reed’s time with Andy Warhol’s entourage: Holly, who “shaved her legs and then he was a she”; Candy, who “never lost her head / even when she was giving head”; and New York City — Reed’s favorite protagonist — the place where they say, “Hey babe / Take a walk on the wild side.” The portrait of police officers and firefighters on the wall suddenly seemed less Norman Rockwell and more Tom of Finland.

Much of Reed’s childhood probably looked like that Johnny Rockets. His upbringing as the son of an accountant in 1950s suburban Long Island — squeaky clean, family-friendly — proved a perfect backdrop for rebellion. By high school, Reed was playing gay bars on the Island with his band, writing homoerotic poetry, and smoking weed — still taboo, even within the budding youth culture of the time. He began writing. Never one to “go steady,” he attained a reputation for philandering.

Underneath his suave exterior, Reed was troubled. Panic attacks, anxiety, and depression plagued his teenage years. His condition only worsened during his freshman year at NYU, when his parents brought him home in a nearly shell-shocked state. Fearing that their child might be homosexual, his parents — loving, but products of their time — made the ill-advised decision to pursue electroshock therapy. Reed would feel the results of the treatment throughout his life, including short-term memory loss. He eventually resumed his studies at Syracuse University and by the time he graduated in 1964, he was practiced in sexual, musical, and poetic exploration.

After graduation, Reed moved to New York to be an in-house lyricist for Pickwick Records. During a one-off session for a Reed-penned parody song, he met multi-instrumentalist John Cale, with whom he would found The Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol discovered the band at one of their regular gigs on the Lower East Side.

While the world around him was undeniably saturated with creativity and freedom, Reed’s innovative spirit was present long before he joined entered Warhol’s scene. Let’s look at “Heroin,” off The Velvet Underground’s 1967 album Velvet Underground & Nico (ethical concern: it just happens to be my favorite song). Musically, the song features two chords played ad infinitum. In lieu of harmonic change, the tempo mimics a user’s heart rate while shooting up: speeding up, slowing down, ready to explode. Cale’s screeching electric viola punctuates the track, and it’s perhaps the gnarliest sound ever put to tape. Lyrically, it’s scarily lucid:

’Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man

When I put a spike into my vein

The song was written in 1964. In ’64, the Beatles were singing “Can’t Buy Me Love” in suits on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Leave it to Beaver had only been off the air for less than a year. No monikers or nicknames, no “Mary Jane.” Reed is talking about heroin, the drug he injects into his bloodstream to get high, the drug that’s killing him. It’s seductive, it’s honest, it’s terrible. Years before the Summer of Love with its romantic, tune-in-turn-on-drop-out conceptions of drugs, Reed was already over it. Forget diamond-lined skies, Reed was face down in a gutter. Sharon Tate was dead, Hendrix was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead.

America hadn’t even begun to be culturally de-flowered, yet Reed was burning his floral print and buying a leather jacket.

This is evident even in songs covering more traditional rock ’n’ roll material. “Pale Blue Eyes,” off 1969’s Velvet Underground, is a classic affair-with-a-married-woman confessional. In its archetypal form, the narrator is a masculine conqueror who sleeps with women while their husbands are at work. Drawn from a real relationship, “Pale Blue Eyes” is neither regretful nor celebratory of its affair. It is modest, painful, and candid. Absent is the machismo of the “Back Door Man.” Love was not a conquest to Reed, even when it was a sin. And in Reed’s youth, the love he engaged in was often quite sinful.

While the San Francisco flower-in-your-hair culture dominated the collective memory of the mid-to-late ’60s, a very different world was budding on the East Coast in Lou Reed’s life and music. He frequented sex clubs like the Anvil, Plato’s Retreat, and the Eulenspiegel Society, a suit-and-tie BDSM society. These sadomasochistic interests permeated Lou’s lyrics, especially salient in “Venus in Furs,” from Velvet Underground & Nico.

The seedy underbelly of the city fascinated Reed. He was both voyeur and subject, interviewing transsexual people, photographing clubs, and taking friends on “expeditions” through the night. In his personal life, he had relationships with men and women alike, living with a trans woman named Lauren for a few years. Reed treated relationships, sex, and masculinity in his work with a sense of simultaneous distance and intimacy. Just as femininity, sex clubs, and drugs were something to look at, so was masculinity. Take “Candy Says” off the self-titled Velvet Underground. Candy Darling was a trans woman who Reed met while part of Warhol’s world. The song explores themes of body dysmorphia and the inner struggles of being a trans woman in a time even more hostile towards non-binary folks than today. The song’s chorus longingly exclaims:

What do you think I’d see

If I could walk away from me

In this short life, one’s own identity is simply one of many pulpits from which to view the world. And one could only imagine what they’d see if they could step outside it. Reed’s explorations of identity — from rocker to strung-out junkie to effeminate songster to middle-aged man — are further evidence of this belief in fluidity. Unlike his most comparable contemporary, David Bowie, however, his explorations were never characters. There was no Ziggy Stardust, there was no White Duke, there was only Lou.

The understated beauty of his lyrics, the ceaseless boundary-pushing of his compositions, the undying rock ’n’ roll spirit that characterized Lou Reed all reflect a dialectic vision of the world: everything and nothing, beautiful and ugly, infinite and claustrophobic.

Reed was a schlub from Long Island who also happened to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Reed’s version of love, of life, and of masculinity was devoid of any sense of machismo. He was never Robert Plant, linen-shirt open, on stage soaking the crowd with a flick of his wrist. When The Velvet Underground closed up shop in 1970, he moved back in with his parents. He was never a cavalier perusing the New York nightlife with a sense of empowered aloofness, he was that world. He lived what he sang about: drug addiction, free love, hopeless love, body dysmorphia, botched medical operations, being a sad sap washed up rock star living in your parents’ basement at 28 years old.

As the world changed and Giuliani cleaned up New York and rock ’n’ roll died and was reborn and died again and the trans existence received (at least partially) the dignity it deserves, Lou was still Lou, taking it all in. In Reed’s last statement in his last interview before dying from liver cancer in 2013, he concluded: “There are nature sounds that are whooooo. The sound of the wind, the sound of love. Whooooo.”

Like the wind, like love, like life — ephemeral and passing. Rock ’n’ roll.

Lou Reed: The Man, The Mirror, The Music was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Though their manifestations vary, vampires exist in mythologies across the globe and date back to the Ancient Greeks, with the young adventurer Ambrogio who was cursed to burn at even one drop of Apollo’s light. And in the spirit of such sun-averse figures, Vampire Weekend’s two new singles, “Harmony Hall” and “2021,” from their forthcoming LP, Father of the Bride, dropped on a sunless, wet morning last Thursday.

I was sitting opposite a wall of windows in the Watson Center, as waves of students clambered through the door and made feeble attempts to wring out the dampness of the morning’s downpour. The rain fell in waves, carpet-bombing the small ocean that filled Watson’s courtyard. It was miserable.

And then I hit play.

Call me a romantic, but I swear the rain began to fall in 32nd notes, dotting “Harmony Hall’s” percussive opening guitar riff with a pointillist high-end. Lead singer Ezra Koenig’s voice entered the painting, smooth yet matured. It became clear: the band’s resurrection would not be — as ascribed by myth — half-hearted. Vampire Weekend, now indie veterans, are not simply undead — they’re alive and flourishing. The track is light, airy, and liberated. The instrumentation turns on a dime, often via jump cuts, and a menagerie of synths, filtered guitars, and voices deliver the song’s infectious melodies and meandering lyrics. And while it may come off as clean — maybe too clean — Vampire Weekend’s sound was never all that dirty, and “Harmony Hall” is a tour-de-force of alt-pop.

The single’s B-side, “2021,” is more of a vignette, running about a minute-and-a-half. It’s endearing and weird, marked by the pitch-shifted refrain and music-box synthesizers. It’s unlike anything the band has released before, but its quirkiness is not compensating for any lack of substance. Koenig’s delivery is again effortless, carrying the song’s lyrics — on the periphery of themes of age and change — with levity.

Both “Harmony Hall” and “2021” deal with themes of time, and rightly so. It’s been six years since Modern Vampires of the City (MVotC) was released, and in that time, Rostam left the band, Koenig had a kid with Rashida Jones, and Vampire Weekend entered the indie pantheon. Though “Harmony Hall” borrows a lyric from “Finger Back,” a song on MVotC, it feels less like recycling than rebirthing, allowing a changed world to alter the line’s meaning. Koenig acknowledges that “copper goes green, steel beams go rust,” and, rather than hiding from time and trying to fit into his old Columbia sweater, he looks both backwards and forwards with a sense of peace. The group is no longer the blog darling they were a decade ago, and they will never be again. But that’s okay. Time passes, things crumble, the world changes. But even if the world that Vampire Weekend has re-emerged in sucks, as long as the album is coming out, as long as there is new Vampire Weekend to look forward to, as put in “Harmony Hall,” “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t want to die.”

Vampire Weekend: “Harmony Hall” and “2021” was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever since Vampire Weekend’s 2007 self-titled LP bounced off the blogs and ricocheted into the vernacular of preps, alts, self-aware emos, and my father, the ivy-league-campus-as-band-incubator has been cemented in our collective consciousness. Upon arriving at Yale, I found myself looking far and wide for acoustic guitars in the grass and echoes of synthesizers past dawn. If Columbia University could produce Ezra and Rostam, then surely Yale — the artsy ivy — would be prime with internal rhymes. baroque pop, and soft rock. But, amidst the string quartets and chorus lines, I found little of the rock-obsessed, three-chord choirs that I anticipated.

My fixation on college as the place where classics were read, hammocks swung, and bands formed was not unfounded, however: the history of popular music in the last half-century — especially alternative music — is intertwined with the college campus. The Strokes formed at NYU, where Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond, Jr. cut demos in a dorm room. Talking Heads, the experimental, trailblazing group that shaped new wave and punk music in the 1980s, met as art students at the Rhode Island School of Design, eventually moving into a shared loft in New York post-graduation. And who can forget your mom’s favorite band when she’s wine drunk, R.E.M? They literally coined the term “college rock” in the early 1980s, gaining initial fame through college radio at University of Georgia, Athens.

With Yale’s track record, it is quite easy to find a slew of stars in almost every industry. We all know the actors and actresses, composers and presidents, but finding a Yalie who’s topped the Billboard 100 chart? That one’s not so easy. Yale does not have a pantheon of popular musician alumni — especially in the 21st century — but we do have one. Dirty Projectors — a trailblazing indie band based in Brooklyn — is headed by David Longstreth, YC ’05, who studied Art and Music here at Yale. Even he, however, only finished his degree years after dropping out during his Sophomore fall, citing Yale’s “lack of an indie scene” as the reason for his initial departure. Not a good look. Yale did make a guest appearance, however, on the track “Off Science Hill,” from his 2003 album, The Glad Fact. Of course, things have changed since the early 2000s, and the Yale indie music scene of today, though small, is a burgeoning community.

While a handful of groups and solo artists grace Yale’s stages frequently, students are hard pressed to name more than two or three bands off the top of their heads (myself included). For an institution of this size and creative potential, there are surprisingly few independent groups. And while a lack of chart-toppers is expected, even casual bands are in short supply. It is possible to bunk up in a practice room, bang out a few chords, and — one or two visits to rhymezone.com later — cough out a song, right? And if you play together, you’re a band! Right? The reality is much more complicated, and the Yale experience further complicates this complication. Let’s look at a few.

School Spirit

The first hurdle that independent music at Yale encounters happens before students even arrive. Few students planning to pursue popular music are attracted to Yale for its classically-oriented music program. While majors and non-majors alike participate in a miasma of activities in the performing arts at Yale, you would be hard pressed to find a theater production without a single Theater Studies major in it. There’s a certain congruity between what you’re study and what you do outside the classroom. The same cannot be said for performers at 216, likely majoring in something meta. The Yale College Department of Music’s website, in describing their curriculum, reads:

[The] Department of Music offers a full-scale, humanities-oriented program in the composition, history, and theory of music that is intended to provide an extensive background in the art form for students who will go on to professional careers as composers, performers, or scholars, or who may enter fields in which a solid grounding in music is essential, such as arts management, cognitive psychology, music production, publishing, or world music.

I’m sorry, but do you see the words “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll” anywhere in that description? (I even tried CTRL-F to no avail). The Yale Department of Music is proud of their classically-oriented program. With a focus on the traditional, the program lacks classes on recording processes or the music industry, unlike competitive music programs at schools like NYU Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. NYU’s program, in its core music curriculum, offers a slew of courses such as, “Engineering the Record” and “The Business of Music: Industry Essentials.” They also offer a series of “Topics” courses, with entire classes devoted to individual artists: J Dilla, Talking Heads, Prince, and Nirvana, to name a few. Of course, comparing Tisch and Yale is not a normative assessment of the latter’s curriculum, but it is no mystery to see why those dead set on a career in recorded music would flock to more contemporary programs. Charlie Romano, SM ’19, spoke of his experience songwriting in the music major, saying, “I really only got to hone my craft in a musical theater context. I know of other classes where you might get to write ‘songs’ instead of pieces, but that hasn’t been my experience really.” However, songwriting isn’t completely absent from the curriculum. Sofía Campoamor, ES ’19+1, the first woman Whiffenpoof, has been able to carve a path through the music major as a songwriter: “I’ve been able to integrate writing music into my academic life at Yale, by taking composition courses where I’ve had the freedom to work on my songwriting alongside assigned chamber or film music projects.” While the Music Department serves those oriented towards musical theater and classical music, those of us seriously pursuing a career in popular music will just have to wait patiently for the college seminar, “The Art of Songwriting,” to come back.

Time after Time

To assume, however, that all the musicians who use picks instead of bows are somewhere else would be a mistake. Yale still has a vanguard of musicians dedicated to writing, recording, and performing original music outside the classroom. Whereas dedication and talent are of no shortage, there’s one crucial yet limited resource here at Yale: time. Much like schoolmates, bandmates are predicated on a sense of camaraderie and a deep commitment to a communal life. Rehearsals, writing sessions, recording sessions, gigs, travelling, touring, signing autographs, press releases, co-coordinating speeches for your Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame induction — the life of a serious band is one of serious commitment. The Beatles’ infamous 10,000 hours in Hamburg required a complete uprooting of their lives: their families, friends, and careers were all exchanged for seedy dance halls a country-and-a-half away. Of course, not everyone is shooting for the stars, but even a casual group can prove difficult to coordinate.

The musicians I talked to almost unanimously agreed that conflicting schedules and a smorgasbord of commitments are the biggest obstacles to forming bands at Yale. Noah Gershenson, DC ’21, a member of student band January, explained, “It’s hard to be in a band at Yale because even though everyone in the band loves playing music and is dedicated to their instrument, we’re still students first. Busy schedules of schoolwork, extracurriculars, and jobs make finding practice time that can accommodate everyone nearly impossible, especially for a band with as many members as mine.” In a community where scheduling a meal requires a Gcal, accountant, and a degree in data science, it is no wonder why getting a band together at Yale often proves difficult.

However, plenty of activities at Yale require massive amounts of coordination: sketch comedy, improv, theater productions, sports teams, clubs. What makes band practice different? To put it bluntly: you can’t put a band on a resumé. Because bands are distinctly unstructured and independent, people find it hard to commit time to something that is purely for enjoyment. Sounds like Yale, doesn’t it? The members of Sargasso put it frankly, noting that the biggest obstacle their band has faced is “everyone being busy.” Bassist Maria Campos Saadi, BF ’20, reflected on the band’s origins, recalling that, “Before [Sargasso] recorded and had anything really solid, the time that I was spending with [the band] was kind of my leisure time, now I feel productive when I’m with them whereas before I felt very happy, but sort of guilty in my subconscious — like I wasn’t doing work.” Sargasso keyboardist and guitarist Soledad Tejada, DC ’20, added, “I also think that it’s [because of] academics, but it’s also structured extracurriculars… there’s no structure [with a band] — so it’s really driven by you coordinating yourself with other people’s schedules…we didn’t think we were going to record an EP, and Noah [Goodman, BF ’21, the frontman of Sargasso] did push us, and you need to have someone really pushing and having it be the main thing. Like when are we going to practice, how are we going to have a show, things like that.” Without a board, elections, Dwight Hall funding, or lemming-like “please unsubscribe me” email chains, what else is to keep a band afloat amidst the toils of Yale academic life other than an undying commitment to rock and roll?

This Must Be the Place

Even if you do get a band together, finding a place a place to put it is another problem. Yale College is proud of its facilities, and deservedly so; however, for student groups looking to rehearse, navigating residential colleges’ practice rooms can prove to be tricky. While every college has a practice room or two with a piano, not all facilities are created equal. Large spaces for band rehearsal are harder to come by. Beyond the space itself, practice rooms rarely guarantee access to drum kits, amps, or microphones. Chaz Okada, BK ’21, guitarist of January, described to me the difficulty of rehearsing with his band, “For example, the Berkeley music room is large and has a piano, but there are no drums, and the space is right next to a suite, so it is not ideal for band practice — which can get loud. You have to know someone in a residential college that has decent practice rooms, like Davenport-Pierson or Morse-Stiles if you want access to a good space. However, those spaces are limited and tend to be booked a lot.”

The politics of residential college affiliation are exacerbated even further with regard to recording music. Though Silliman, Timothy Dwight, Grace Hopper, and Ezra Stiles all have recording studios, they are only accessible to students within those colleges. Moreover, the studios all require special training to gain access in the first place, limiting the population who can use the spaces even further. Bands who lack the extensive equipment required to practice — amps, full drum kits, microphones, cables — or the wherewithal to transport said equipment to an empty practice room often feel disenfranchised. The spaces, however, to students who do have access, like Campoamor, prove extremely useful: “I’ve been really fortunate to have access to the Crescent Underground Recording Studio in Morse-Stiles, where I’ve been able to record my work and work with other student engineers on my music.” Romano, meanwhile is a frequenter of the Silliman studio: “I’ve used it countless times to record for composition seminars and independent music projects.”

Sargasso, recorded their most recent EP, Inlets, in the Timothy Dwight studio over the course of finals week last spring. Tejada,recounted the experience: “Well [Noah was] planning for us to record an EP, but we did Battle of the Bands for Spring Fling, and Noah was like, if we don’t get it, why don’t we record an EP instead? And this was reading week. I was like, yeah right, we’re gonna record an EP, i.e this is not going to happen. And then, we didn’t get it, and the next day we were in the studio.” The band, despite their investment in and use of the space, have since been barred access from the studio after members transferred from the college.

Students in colleges without recording spaces have found creative solutions. One exceptional case of innovation has taken place in Jonathan Edwards. JE-E18 used to be an empty, L-shaped practice room like any other. However, over the course of the last two years, a small group of students have worked tirelessly to convert the unused room into a (nearly) fully-equipped studio space. I sat down with David Townley, JE ’20, one of the founders and managers of the space, to talk about its development. “Dan Rudins [JE ’19+1] and I got the idea my freshman fall [2016], and presented it to HOC Saltzman. Over the course of that year, we ended up settling on a $10,000 budget for the space. Using that budget, we built the space from the ground up. We outfitted the room with bass traps and I worked with professional sound engineers to get it acoustically sound.” The JE studio — of which I am also a frequent user — has brought unprecedented access to recording technology within the college. Townley and Louis DeFelice, JE ’19, the studio’s current managers, are also working on a system to train those interested and develop the studio’s infrastructure to be on par with that of other colleges.

Live! In Concert

Now, even if you did get a band together, and even if you did practice, where to go from there? Yale Radio (WYBC) is the cultural epicenter for the independent music scene at Yale. Aside from their regular programs, the station hosts a live radio program called “Live! From the Moon,” which gives student musicians an opportunity to cut their teeth playing a radio session. WYBC’s “ANTE-Fling” event — a concert at Toad’s Place featuring “WYBC’s favorite established or up-and-coming musicians” — last spring drew over 300 attendants. WYBC provides a forum for fans of music to meet, collaborate, and discuss music both on air and in print.

Apart from WYBC, with regard to concerts, one need not look further than 216 Dwight Street. “216” is the primary venue for independent music at Yale, hosting weekly shows on Friday nights that feature independent artists from in-and-around Yale, and independent musicians at Yale agree. “The fact that a place like 216 can offer a real sound system and in-house drum kit is so inviting to bands that might not know how to put together something totally on their own,” Gershenson from January, told me. 216’s weekly concerts draw crowds in the hundreds, and the Yale indie scene’s growth is indebted to the hard work that venue staff have put in over the last few years to develop that institution.

Beyond 216, however, the live scene is less consistent. Goodman, Sargasso’s frontman, noted, “I do think it is true that there’s not really a music scene here for the kind of music we play. There’s kind of one, a little bit, but its very small, and its basically isolated to 216. In different places, there will be people who have a party and they’ll have a band to play at that party.” While 216 might not constitute an entire “scene,” other venues are increasingly entering the consciousness of the independent music crowd at Yale. Venues like Stella Blues, Koffee?, and the occasional house party are all increasingly featuring acts from Yale students. The New Music Collective, a student organization dedicated to the development of original music, is expanding its outreach and resources to songwriters as well. The effort, headed by Campoamor, aims to provide a network through which musicians can collaborate and perform. Moreover, the potential expansion of the Yale music scene into venues that aren’t exclusively Yale-oriented, like State House and Cafe Nine, could lead to an increased integration of Yale and New Haven music communities, tapping into the immense talent, creativity, and passion that our school and city exhibit. And until the day Yale trades lux et veritas for rock et roll, we’ll always have the Guild of Carillonneurs — at least we can put that on our resumés.

Rock et Roll was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.