>> This week's "next big thing" in rock, Vampire Weekend, are at the Rock and Roll Hotel with Brooklyn songwriter Sam Rosen. The show starts at 8:30 p.m., but it's been totally sold out for some time now. For last-minute options, you can head over there and try to snag one from someone outside with the understanding that you might end up just playing free Drunken Jenga upstairs, or you can try Craigslist.

>> A free screening of Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes will happen at American University’s Wechsler Theatre (3rd Floor of the Mary Graydon Center). A post-viewing discussion will be led by Assistant Professor Scott Heath of Georgetown. 5:30 p.m.

>> McSweeney's celebrates the 50th anniversary of The Believer Magazine at Olsson's in Dupont Circle with McSweeney's editor Eli Horwitz and author John Brandon, who wrote their major spring release, the novel Arkansas. 7 p.m.

>> New York University professor David Levering Lewis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of W.E.B. DuBois, will be at Politics and Prose to talk about God's Crucible, a history of the rise and decline of the Islamic civilization in Europe. 7 p.m.

Photo by johnny greengrass