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Genius Annotation

Characteristically batshit textedit file Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig wrote for his 30th birthday and published to his Twitter feed. He probably wrote this joke, which requires no explanation, in, like, 5 minutes. It’s pretty great ! But it is a “teachable moment”…

“2 CHRONOS” is an example of common metre. Many Vampire Weekend lyrics (“A-Punk,” “Hudson,” “Everlasting Arms”) are variations on ballad meter, though the unusual vocabulary may distract from that, which is what makes them clever. Scansion rhymes with mansion, and not even just slant rhyme.

During the writing of Modern Vampires of the City, Koenig was getting really into Emily Dickinson in a way he hadn’t before, or so he said somewhere on the Internet. Title is something like a Blake or Keats poem, or maybe even an Allen Ginsberg sutra. His favorite poem, it is said, on the Internet, is said to be “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, and ee cummings his favourite poet. Yes, William Blake’s. But that’s an example of linguistic anaphora, whereas this text uses anaphora as a rhetorical device. And we all know how much Koenig loves devices…
https://twitter.com/arzE/status/443403884330242048
https://twitter.com/arzE/status/439182006568488960
Chronos is, per Internet, “the personification of time,” which was the whole premise of “Diane Young.” It is also the name of a father figure in Sailor Moon manga series, specifically the father to Sailor Pluto, who guards the door to the underworld. The usage here may recall Koenig’s recent tweet of a photo of himself sitting backstage at the Tonight Show next to an unidentified man (said, on the Internet, to be his father, whose interest in Japanese history inspired “Giving Up The Gun”) asking, rhetorically, in the caption, “when will senpai notice me?”, as if the man were a Zen master or something. More literally, “when will senpai notice me” is like a Japanese schoolgirl wanting her older crush in manga, but here like wanting somebody to explain the mysteries of life with him with that childlike intensity of feeling, maybe, requiring reunification of lives.

https://twitter.com/arzE/status/453633983079669762

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