In 1992 I was dating a Jewish girl, a really sweet girl, for about a month and then I was over at her apartment one night and she broke up with me, and not for the usually too much drinking and partying but because she said she was Jewish and she believed in God and therefore believed the Torah was the word of God and had to follow it. I was, if anything, a Muslim, and there was no reason for her to date someone who would come between her and her God.
Go back to 1979 and I am living in West Beirut and the streets are in flames and the shooting isn’t at each other for once (if you’ve been around a war long enough you can hear the difference), it was just straight up in the air and the reason for the celebration was the Shah leaving Iran and Khomeini coming to power.
Four years later Rostam Batmanglij’s family left Iran for Washington, DC .
With me so far because I am coming here, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Rostam are a New York Jew and a Persian. Ezra writes the words, Rostam the music, mainly, and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires Of The City is informed by Ezra’s Jewishness and not Rostam being Persian. I have not really mentioned religion when writing about Vampire Weekend because it hasn’t mattered any. Ezra being Jewish is as important to “Cousins” as Paul Simon’s Jewishness is to “Run That Body Down” but it is so central to Modern Vampires it is Antisemitism to ignore it. It feels willfully ignorant not to state the obvious. Certainly, the Jew as blood sucker is a huge “Elders Of Zion” slur and comes back here in almost a gay/faggot trope when you think of the band name: it didn’t matter then… but now?
Look: in 2013 being Persian (which means Iranian, gimme a break) is interesting. Having your parents be chased out of what had been a Monarchy and became a Theocracy four years earlier is interesting. It informs you and no amount of Westernization will change that back story. And think of this: Rostam is gay, in Iran HE WOULD BE PUT TO DEATH. So OK, but Vampire Weekend is not about this, it is about Ezra because not the music but the words are Ezra’s vision.
By now I’ve read enough reviews to get the feeling that, well, like a herd of mooing cattle the same old death and faith is the ongoing story with little thought put to it: show me a ticking clock and I will show you time passing. But the reviews are like an Ezra lyric: a mix of the specific and the general (I got that thought from a writer yesterday but I can’t remember who), they signify through short hand. I know that sounds like a dig at Ezra but I am a big fan of his (this is the fourth time I’ve dealt with the new album) and I am noting not criticizing him, it’s the reviewers who drag me.
It seems to me that Ezra went through a change similar to that girl I dated. The move is forward, romance and faith time up from the Christian girl rejection of “Unbelievers” to the romance with a Jewish girl on “Hannah Hunt” to the embrace of Judaism on “Ya Hey”. It seems to me that the album isn’t about growing old, it is about grown ups and faith. The stuff that once felt like tradition and bullshit, becomes the way in which we become what we are. The band have claimed this is the last of a trilogy about New York City, it is a trilogy about becoming who you are.
In 1986 I wrote a novel about the Lebanese civil war and I had one character try to explain that it didn’t matter if she wasn’t Moslem, Moslem was she and if she was in the wrong place they would take one look at her ID and kill her for her religion. It is a sort of self-awareness unshakable from the heart of this album.
Modern Vampires Of The City – Vampire Weekend – A-
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