Van Helsingism- hating Vampire Weekend

9 Feb

Indie darlings are easy to hate, or at least easy to hate on.  Vampire Weekend are certainly no exception to this rule. Three weeks ago I’d never heard of Vampire Weekend, or at least made no effort to hear of them, lest I remember a band with a stupid name.  But the shear volume of vitriol and the defensiveness it’s inspired has piqued my curiosity.  I’ve spent the past few evenings listening to their self titled debut.  None of this, I don’t know how to describe it other than controversy, makes sense to me.

Are they derivative?  That’s a silly question- pretty much everything that’s come out of the indie scene in the past decade has been derivative.  Modern Lovers begat Strokes.  Stones begat Hives.  Lydia Lunch begat Karen O.  For Vampire Weekend to wear there even just their western influences on their sleeves, from Sting to Strummer to Simon, isn’t exactly a capital crime.

The worst thing you can say about Vampire Weekend is that, essentially, the come off as preppy douchebags, over-privileged and over-clever: the indie band for lovers of both National Geographic and Gossip Girl.  Yes, there are only so many songs one can sit through about weekends on the Cape, but to their credit more than one of those are fairly catchy tunes.  So much of pop history is a story of appropriation; melisma and “high who” moving from gospel into the mouths of Mariah Carey and John Fogerty, the reggae pastiche of the Police, the hammy use of quasi-Eastern passages in Kashmir.  Indeed, American music, in all its forms, wouldn’t exist without the free exchange with (or perhaps open season on) other people’s ideas.  They certainly seem have studied up the ideas they were appropriating (they may be tourists, but they definitely spent the entire flight over reading the Fodor’s guide).  Vampire Weekend’s vaguely post-colonial melodies coupled with vaguely post-imperial lyrics surely can be ridiculed for, if nothing else, a certain political naivete, but no more so than the Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or even more directly, the Talking Heads.

But that really has nothing to do with their music.  Half the songs on their first album are pretty good.  Oxford Comma is well written and well-paced.  A-Punk is well put together and the instrumentation is very well chosen.  There is something a little twee about it all, and in trying too hard perhaps they put their foot in their mouth.  But they mean no harm, and certainly do no harm.  Maybe that is why they engender such a harsher reaction, like some sort of Edward Said musical Frankenstein, than the Talking Heads ever endured- they really want that gold star.

Then again, maybe the reason the Talking Heads got away with it and Vampire Weekend has yet to is that Talking Heads were just a better band.  One thing is for certain- all the back & forth will for sure prove the maxim that there’s not such thing as bad publicity, and I’m sure first week sales for Contra will exceed their publicists wildest dreams (it debuted at no. 1 in Billboard and moved 124,000 units).  Plow on, Blues Hammer.

No comments yet

Leave a Reply