When Vampire Weekend released their first album in 2008, I was kind of aware of it, but I did not want to get into it at the time. By having heard ‘A-Punk’ a million times on the radio, I thought it was just a rip off of Paul Simon’s Graceland, the lazy and obvious but also necessary comparison that probably not one single review has avoided. Just listen to ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’!
Why this unexpected urge to appropriate African rhythms? Suddenly some kids from New York are influenced by South African music? Did they observe the market and jumped on a bandwagon because of the popularity of world music these days?
So I am certainly late on this, they have already released a second album, but in the Daytrotter session I have listened to, they only perform songs from their first album ’Vampire weekend.’ Sure the tunes are catchy as hell and there is nobody who can resist to the high sound pitch effects of ‘I’ve seen those English dramas too-oo – they’re cruel-oo’ of ‘Oxford Comma,’ or to the intro of ‘M79’ with these killing chords and keyboard that sound almost like a beginning of a Wes Anderson movie (their video of Oxford Comma’ is apparently another rip-off, a steal of an Anderson’s movie according to many blogs). That’s weird because Wes Anderson has really nothing to do with African music! It must be all the Indian references in the lyrics: ‘I climbed to Dharamsala too, I did/I met the highest lama’ or ‘English Breakfast tastes like Darjeeling’ or even ‘Dress yourself in bleeding madras/Charm your way across the Khyber Pass.’
I have always wonder whether a particular style of music belong to a certain group of people. Is it legitimate and authentic for anyone to play any kind of music? Or are some kinds of music out of limits for some people? There are now many white rappers, it seems genres are all over the place in the music spectrum and fusion genre has always highly used.
The same question was already asked about the making of Graceland, which was and is still controversial for many. Did Paul Simon have the right to do this? In his case it was even more complicated because music appropriation as well as politics were involved. There were so many controversies at the time about the fact he did not respect the cultural boycott of South Africa, the fact he received a large amount of money and attention for the album whereas the African musicians did not, and the fact the album reinforced stereotypical racial roles (the Lady Black Mambazo were a backing band for a white guy).
However don’t African bands already borrow from each other all the time? Traditional music being traditional, music is passed from one band to another and you always have the impression they copy or steal from each other anyway. There is nothing more recognizable in music than ethnic music, and Mexican, Arabic or South African music are instantaneously recognizable by something, beats, guitar riffs or horn sections.
There is nothing new about this whole controversy. It has always been the case, borrowing, stealing, at the end only the result matters, the enjoyableness of the end product and the exposure to more people. And Vampire weekend just follows a long list of artists than have ‘stolen’ African music, it is not as if there were the first ones! David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, and Paul Simon are among the most recognizable in this area but I’m sure there are tons of others. And rock and roll was already stolen from African-Americans by Elvis Presley among others.
I wonder how long it will take for Afro beat not to be even noticeable in a pop song? Because right now we still notice it and attribute it to African rhythms, but may be there will be a time when this does not happen anymore. I don’t like categories in art and in music but I still do it because it is very well anchored in my brain. So when I listen to Vampire weekend, I automatically say, this is very much like South African music which is stupid, because at the end it is just music.
The band that was named after a movie the singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig did after his first year in college, has a very clever use of African beats and rhythms. And the battles over authenticity and appropriation, seem something from the past for these four graduates from Columbia University. They are so aware of the irony that, in the refrain of ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ they even use the name of someone (not Paul Simon) who participated into the making of world music as a genre: ‘This feels so unnatural/Peter Gabriel too.’
Just like Paul Simon who had found similarities between South African music and old doo-wop from the 50’s, Vampire weekend has managed to mix different musical styles, and the result became very accessible and enjoyable. In the Daytrotter session, the four songs (Bryn, I Stand Corrected, M 79 and Oxford Comma) are played with a real fidelity to the originals on the album, with less arrangement of course, and less volume on the guitars or vocals. Their lyrics are clever but cryptic and generally quite hard to figure out, they are about lies and relationships, between honesty, humor and sarcasm. I always have the feeling there must be a deeper meaning to the lyrics than what I just can catch up. Just like for this line ‘Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?’ which could be less about the non-importance of grammar than about not giving a fuck in general.
Despite the fact that the term ‘Upper west Side Soweto’ can probably be found in every single article written about them, there is much more than just African influences in Vampire Weekend, they are more than just a bunch of kids trapped in their rip-off of world music. Instead they have created a weird but charming combination of exotic and familiar sounds well grounded in their own lyrical reality.
I think it is Pablo Picasso who said ‘Good artists copy. Great artists steal,’ but he may have already stolen this expression from someone else. Vampire Weekend are thieves but admirable ones