perpetua asked: What do you think is the best song you've ever written and/or performed on a studio recording?

• DOWNLOAD | TEXAS IS THE REASON “A Jack With One Eye” Do You Know Who You Are?, 1996

Just so you know, I’m totally not one of those guys who says stuff in interviews like, “It’s like choosing your favorite child!” That’s cop-out. Some of my kids are uglier than others.

That said, I do have a bunch of different categories for this kind of thing — the impulse of which would become obvious if you saw how I organize all of my material possessions as if I were styling a catalog for The Container Store. Like, the best song that never got recorded: “What I Know” by New End Original. Or the best song in which I inexplicably borrow an idea from Tool: “I Refuse” by Ressurection. Or the best song that I wrote but didn’t record: “Are You Sure?” which looks like it will be included on the forthcoming album from Far.

But the best song I’ve ever been a part of — that’s “A Jack With One Eye.” I remember writing the original chord progression in a makeshift bedroom in Chelsea and then bringing it into practice like it was some kind of revelation. I also remember that the entire band basically finished playing the song all the way through without even discussing the arrangement or the accents or even the chord changes — and how everyone looked at each other afterwards and said, “That’s totally the last song of the album.” Also, J. Robbins plays piano on it and he means the world to me.

When Texas is the Reason got back together in 2006 for a couple of shows at Irving Plaza, we knew it would be the last song of the weekend. We chose to make it the last song ever.

Thanks for asking.

Random Notes on Vampire Weekend

I’ve been keeping up with last week’s internet back-and-forth concerning Jessica Hopper’s (apparently) incendiary write-up on Vampire Weekend, and for the most part, it’s been interesting. Nitsuh Abebe’s second response (the first being far more impulsive) is the best counter-argument you’ll find to Hopper’s essay — which is, essentially, a commentary on class, race, and cultural appropriation — but I don’t think you’ll find anyone who believes this is the kind of sociological conflict that can be resolved by music journalists. Which is why I won’t bother getting involved. There are, however, a few persistent points I needed to jot down:

• This conversation is fascinating because it is the polar opposite of the Jay-Z/Esquire debacle from last month in which Jay-Z’s cultural “blackness” was defined by his actual skin color, how little his demeanor mirrored Barack Obama’s, and whether or not he liked to curse. (He does.) In this case, however, “whiteness” is defined by education, family legacy, and whether or not Ezra Koenig’s admiration for Ralph Lauren comes from its position as a class signifier or, as he tells Rolling Stone this month, from the story of Ralph Lifshitz — the son of a Russian-immigrant house painter done good. No one, as far I’ve read, has thought to give him the third, most likely option: Koenig might just like how Polo shirts look.
• Aziz Ansari had an awesome joke in his recent special for Comedy Central. He talked about going to an R. Kelly show with a friend, and the friend turned around and said, “We’re the only white people at this show!” Aziz Ansari is, of course, not white. But some well-intentioned white folks have this weird tendency to speak to people of color as if we have attained some sort of honorary whiteness — as if we’ve been awarded with some sort of post-racial badge. “I know you’re not,” I’ve been told, “but, you know. You’re basically white.” I won’t go into the myriad of reasons why this is completely offensive, but I certainly feel for Rostan Batmanglij, who — despite his Persian background — has been forced to submit his sociocultural identity for amateur scrutiny.
• Absent from this conversation has been the recent disclosure of Batmanglij’s sexuality. Not that he needs to prove he isn’t on either side of the white heterosexist power structure to anyone, but let’s be serious: Being a gay Iranian-American is certainly going to afford one less privilege in this country than, say, that of either of the dudes in MGMT. Batmanglij is, in fact, less privileged than the overwhelming majority of writers who will criticize him this year.

rundontrun asked: When did you first realize you were gay and how difficult was it for you to emotionally process it?

This question has actually been sitting in my inbox for a few days now. I knew that if I thought about it hard enough, I’d start stringing together an essay that I probably don’t have the time to write very well. But then I read this coming out story earlier today and I thought, OK. I’ll try. For the sake of brevity, however, I’ll stick to the questions.

Growing up, I knew only three things about being gay: First and foremost, my mother let it be known that homosexuality was a sin against God, and that if there were a hierarchy of sinful behavior, being gay would sit near the top. Apart from that, I knew that masturbating makes you gay because my older brother said so. Also, I knew that Christians didn’t watch Three’s Company because Jack Tripper merely pretended to be gay, and that being gay is so horrible that simply feigning homosexuality is enough to spite the Lord. That’s all I knew for sure.

Of course, there were other things — things that I knew, but didn’t have a name for. Like the way I always seemed to linger around the underwear page in the J.C. Penney circular when nobody was looking. Or the way I pretended to watch Knight Rider for the car when I was actually hoping for David Hasselhoff to lose his shirt in a street fight. (Sad, but true.) But the feelings I recall most fondly were nonsexual and shrewdly intuitive.

I remember the day I met Mr. Warner¹. He was tall and lanky, with a slightly thinning head of hair. Like many men his age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he wore a mustache. Up to this point, my teachers at school had been exclusively female and typically keen on coddling their students. But Mr. Warner presented a masculine archetype that was both new and familiar to me at the same time. He was firm and demanding, empathetic without being indulgent. He could also be incredibly sensitive and thoughtfully encouraging. He was a wonderful teacher. Even as an eight-year-old, I was cheerfully certain that Mr. Warner and I shared more in common than a classroom.

One night, upon returning from a parent-teacher conference, my mother pulled me away from the television.

“I want you to be careful,” she said. “There is something about Mr. Warner that I don’t like.”

Mr. Warner was never inappropriate with me, of course, but I somehow understood that this thing — that thing I couldn’t find a name for — was most likely the thing that endeared him to me. It was most likely the thing that made me just like him. It was most likely the thing that my mother didn’t like about me. I knew I was a “fag” before I knew I was gay, but I realized I was “gay” as soon as I knew what the word meant. Processing this took time.

Some of it was literal fear: I came of age in the hardcore punk scene in New York City, which — as liberal as it might seem now — wasn’t very gay-friendly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I know of at least two kids from the local scene who, in fact, went to jail for murdering gay men. That’s how serious things were. But in the subsequent years, there was a sea change in attitudes about sexuality, and much of my fear subsided. Other friends from that scene were beginning to come out and no one was getting beaten up; no one was losing friends. For a while I played around with gay symbolism — a rainbow ribbon on my backpack, a SILENCE=DEATH pin on my jacket — to very little fanfare. My best friend Rob figured it out right away and always made it a point to stick up for gay people whenever the opportunity came up. Even my parents — who I didn’t actually come out to until I was 30 years old — stopped asking me when I’d be getting married. Somehow, it just happened where everyone knew I was gay without me ever really having to “come out.”

I look back on it now and my perception is that it was probably much harder than I remember. But I think that’s the most amazing thing about coming out: Before you actually say the words I’M GAY, they become the two biggest syllables in the world; your entire life feels as if it hangs on the balance of letting those words vibrate off your tongue. The first time I said it out loud — on a plane, coming home from Europe with a bandmate — I had to excuse myself so I could laugh and shake and clap my hands in the bathroom for a second. But once I composed myself and returned to my seat, it was as if I’d always been an openly gay man. I was already jaded by the second time I said it.

¹ Names have been changed, obviously. Unfortunately, I found out Mr. Warner died in the late ’80s — still a young man. They said it was “cancer.”

Thanks for asking.