Irreverence and the Ivy League
bishop allen and the cambridge aesthetic
Ivy League schools boast some of the most intelligent, motivated, and creative students of every generation. So it is no surprise that the schools also kindle some of the most incredible, unique musical talents as well. Columbia’s graduates include Art Garfunkel, Lauryn Hill, and Alicia Keys while Harvard has produced cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Redman. But what exactly is it about the schools that attract and develop these musical talents? While Vampire Weekend may be the greatest Ivy League indie rock success to date, Bishop Allen, a Harvard-bred indie rock band that shares their affinity for effete lyrics, is quickly growing in popularity.
The two band members, Justin Rice and Christian Rudder, met as DJs for the Record Hospital, Harvard’s underground rock radio station. Since graduating Harvard in ’99 and ’98 respectively, they have played in a number of different bands together including their first band, The Pissed Officers. After college, they knew they wanted to be musicians, and so they moved to Brooklyn and formed the band that is now known as Bishop Allen.
Just as Vampire Weekend is intricately tied to New York and Columbia, Bishop Allen still holds on to its roots in Cambridge and Harvard. Justin Rice claims it was the Cambridge music scene that first sparked their interest in being musicians. “Around Cambridge,” Rice says, “there was all kinds of crazy music happening that was mostly kind of punk rock, but was definitely intellectual too.” Rice cites Harvard’s Record Hospital as “informing the kind of music that we [Rice and Rudder] make” and also laying the “common foundations to be able to work together.” It is the underground, indie nature of all the Cambridge music that influences the voice in Rice and Rudder’s music, even as they work in Brooklyn.
But it wasn’t just the music scene in Cambridge that had a huge effect on the members of the band, but the culture of the city itself. The greatest influence the city had on them was in the way they approach the world. Rice mentions “parties in people’s basements ... art galleries in weird dorm rooms” and other “pointless shenanigans” that were part of the Cambridge collegiate culture. “I remember having vegan Easter parties every Sunday that had nothing to do with religion,” Rice explained in reference to the Cambridge scene of the early 2000s. This irreverence finds its way into the band’s music, as they mix both pop and power-punk with clever lyrical turns.
In this spirit, of approaching the world with unique perspective, Rice and Rudder also find their place as musicians in the present. To illustrate, the band claims no place or genre classification in the music industry. According to Rice, “I do it because I have some sort of seed planted in that pure soil that grows the joy we try to bring to the music we play.” And listening to the band’s most recent full-length album, The Broken String, that joy is apparent. Songs such as “Like Castanets” and “Click, Click, Click, Click” exhibit the band’s simple, fun, and blissful pop aesthetic to which they claim to aspire.
The band’s ideals are not only expressed through their actual music but also in the way in which they function in the music scene. “We always try to do things outside of the industry standard,” Rice says. “That comes from the way that we learned how to appreciate music. ... “We don’t want to be doing things the way every band always does it, so we’re always trying to find something fucked up to do that keeps things interesting and different.” In the spirit of the low-fi, low budget atmosphere of their collegiate days, Rice says, “We were in one band, and we would play 17 songs in seven minutes and we would plug into a darkroom timer, and when the timer stopped the amps would shut off—it would shut off the power and we were done.” Through these moments, ideals and music fuse to create a new and different kind of pop band.
If you are wondering what kind of “fucked up” things the mellow indie band from Cambridge could possibly be doing, look no further than the band’s “EP project.” In 2006, drawing on their experiences as undergrads, Bishop Allen released a four-song EP every month. Each EP was titled for the month in which it was released. They successfully completed the project in December, having recorded and produced 44 original songs and an EP of live recordings in one year.
But a series of EP’s isn’t enough for a band whose very nature is to be subversive and different. Right now, aside from writing new songs and recovering from their tour, the band is working on another unique project: writing a musical.
Aside from that, the band has repeatedly collaborated with director and screenwriter Andrew Bujalski, who shares their interest in the pursuit of the atypical. Both Rice and Rudder appear in Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. The films prominently feature the band’s music as well. Rice does not contain his enthusiasm for the films, which are at least partially influenced by a shared Harvard camaraderie.
Ultimately, Bishop Allen is always looking for something new and slightly seditious. It is the culture of Cambridge that made Rice and Rudder the people they are—it gave them the capability to do things for fun and irreverence, which defines the band and translates to their lyrics. Rice and Rudder have achieved in their music what they learned to do at Harvard: to embrace the originality of unfettered thought. “I can remember on Columbus Day,” Rice says as he recounts his favorite memory of Harvard, “everyone got together and made these parking tickets that looked just like ‘The City of Cambridge’ parking tickets, but they added a little extra check box that said ‘parked on stolen lands,’ and the fine was some irreparable damage. And we made all of these and people put them on thousands and thousands of cars and there was no point to it. It wasn’t like protest, it was just kind of funny and it was like that sort of slightly punk-rock protest, but mostly just weird, pointless, shenanigans that define the culture that we learned to play music in.” \\\