I THINK UR A CLASSIST

Two years ago, I wrote this thing about Vampire Weekend. Here it is, reproduced in all its blinkered glory:

listening to vampire weekend oh god have you guys heard this fucking record i mean it’s not the second coming but it is fun and you know how i am a fun guy who enjoys pretty much only fun things and that these things are universally fun because i deem them so so download and buy the vampire weekend record and dance with me because we are only alive in this moment and it will pass it will PASS people come on

at least listen to “a-punk” which is totally on my myspace page which is totally way cool daddy-o one of those tasty grooves inspired by paul simon’s graceland and the talking heads’ remain in light except its heart rate has been accelerated to unnatural levels because it ate some goddamn spicy food and must say what it needs to say in the shortest amount of time possible or else it will explode midway through and no one wants to be covered in unfinished song entrails so it was kind enough to blow your goddamn mind instead

It betrays all my old writing transgressions. For one, my fascination with improvisation. I felt the need to write from the precipice of a sudden, violent reaction. This has something to do with Jack Kerouac. I don’t know. I was in college once. There is also a sense, in these two old paragraphs, of how I worked my small giggles into the woodwork—I forced a personified song to have gorged upon spicy plates until near flashpoint. I may yet backslide.

I first heard about Vampire Weekend from this guy. I listen to this guy about most everything. When he opens his mouth, horses come galloping out. Horses with good taste. These horses also bear a remarkable sense for how things connect, or how they battle for connection. Even in the desert, abandoned wires may rise from the earth and search for their mother tower.

This guy was right about Vampire Weekend. Some strange and terrible work or ritual gifted them with adept tunes. Future scientists who have mapped the music genome will scrutinize Vampire Weekend and realize, again, their propensity for good tuneage. Then the bell will ring, and they will clear their tables and embrace each other with their robot arms. In the future, a bell ringing signifies the hour of embracing. I should have mentioned that.

I don’t know what this has to do with Vampire Weekend. What does the future have to tell us about them? Maybe we should just hug each other more. Carry one another through the fast darts of life. Nitsuh Abebe seems to prefer this over an inherently broken play for power. Which is performed among people who already possess the power they deride.

Deconstruction is good, yes. Chipping away at our status-quo keeps up from rotting internally. We need to observe our tiny actions in a system that transforms them into large, thundering effects. Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t use them to trip others lest we meet them at eye-level one fathomed day.

What am I saying. There is a new Vampire Weekend album. It is called Contra because something something The Clash. I woke up this morning with a fist in my mouth. This second album is not so removed from the first in that it is innocuous pop music that could accompany your eating some sort of vegetable. This is not a judgment. It is a fun kind of music, made more fun by the new stabs of percussion that gore Contra throughout, if only to remind us that it is alive.

As with the last record, their sound and song structure borrow liberally from “world music,” a term used by people who, I imagine, do not live in the world. At times critics have reduced this qualification to “Afrobeat” or “Afropop” or “African.” There is surely stuff from other continents in Contra, and there is danger in conflating and coalescing cultures into some signifying and sufficiently “exotic” guitar line. I would numerate them, but I do not possess the knowledge necessary to unravel these songs of their appropriated skins.

In lieu of this appropriation, though, there has been talk of exploitation. Vampire Weekend steal from the ever-afflicted Africans. Its a complaint that ignores rock and roll’s long history of theft in which every goddamn band has some tangential hand. Jessica Hopper acknowledged this, as she acknowledges most every stark reality that scrapes against an objection, with Led Zeppelin. It doesn’t make it right. It just establishes a historical pattern. Meanwhile, Nitsuh also disassembles the critique by first avoiding the word “steal,” because, unlike Zeppelin, there’s no obvious theft here, and also avoiding any talk of Vampire Weekend. Instead, he deconstructs the dichotomy between influences “near” and “far.” How bland would Vampire Weekend be were they to only exploit their nearest influences, in the senses of both of geography and genre? The fist knew me, knew my mouth well enough to consider it home.

There has also been talk of class. Of establishing fronts from which we may freely discuss out-of-context lyrical trademarks and how they may or may not be establishing a front diametrically opposed to our front. Our front sympathizes with the poor and exploited and the plight of non-white, while theirs seems entirely preoccupied with Williamsburg and designer socks and the plight of fucked-up rich. Privilege, I mean. Perhaps the collision of the two talking points inspires our daily rages against a band that makes really slight pop music. They steal their music from Africa, and then, atop, conniving grins fixed to their faces, they sing the anthems of the gentrifying youth. Also, they went to college once.

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The fist communicated to me through its salt. Its instructions and cautions come in its own sharp language: I read Jessica Hopper’s article and followed its birds of thought into their ill-prepared nests. I said, “I want to be Jessica Hopper when I grow up.” And I do. For many other reasons, most having to do with this article and how it shakes down all who reside in the emo tree, from which heights women are small casualties of their big gestures of hurt. But lo, Robert of Hardcore for Nerds and Nitsuh righteously bristled over some clear misrepresentations of the real live identities of those Vampire Weekend fellows, and I stared at my shoes real hard over this whole exchange. There are values in which we deposit ourselves and I’d like to think that I’m not invested in quotes warped and played for the full power of their zing. The fist in my mouth is my own.
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The problem with this critique is its emphasis on “white” as a signifier of privilege, which simultaneously presupposes a disadvantaged “black” or “non-white.” The problem is conflating these racially-bound terms with class critique—though race and class intersect it is dangerous to confuse them for the same social ill. The problem is this incredible and strange ability of some people to consider each member of Vampire Weekend white because of the tax bracket they occupy and the school they went to. The problem is that most of the people on this side of the discourse are upper middle-class white people who fear their own reflection and who, by some casualty of white guilt, have made the continued separation and delineation of people according to barriers of class and race their unconscious desire.

I don’t mean to idly summarize what Nitsuh has already pointed out in respectively mad and ornate forms. As suggested by others, by this point in the argument, we have traveled a motherfucker of a distance from the actual music to the land of societal representatins. Regardless of The Game’s inherent fallacy (according to Nitsuh), Vampire Weekend still grow this discourse on their every new branch, and it ventures in this direction so often as to seem a function of what they have brought to our table.

Everyone is quick to single out the lyrics, as the superficial African sonics would hardly register offensive if married to any other monologue. The defense, as given by most fans I’ve talked to, is that the lyrics are satirical; Hopper notes this in her article, too. I’m not sure who said the word “satire” first. An I Love Music thread leads me to believe that it wasn’t anybody in the actual band who stood up and clarified to a misunderstanding world their subtle damnation of the upper class.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND: “HOLIDAY”

But even if they did, how to trust people who haven’t mapped out their intentions on their whole body? How to place good faith in those who do not possess recorded evidence of follow-through, committed to ancient technologies that are impossible to massage? I do not know. I am just a guy with a blog and a flag. Regardless, there’s a passage in Contra‘s “Holiday” (oh, a privilege of class!) that determines my lean. There’s a clear engagement with the upper class here, but one that inflates into absurdity. Witness their typographic unfurl:

A vegetarian since the invasion
She’d never seen the word “bombs”
she’d never seen the word bombs blown up to 96 point Futura

This is hilarious! Everything hisses beneath Vampire Weekend’s lens and sun. You may remember Futura from such films as anything directed by Wes Anderson. The words “invasion” and “bombs” change radically when employed in a context in which their historical realities are impossible—one can emerge from an “invasion” knowing the pleasures of a specialized diet. One can only know bombs as a fat, aesthetically-pleasant word on a poster and not as an imminent threat to your continued walking or living.

This isn’t to say that this is so ridiculous, it must be a joke. Rather, to not consider some form of play going on here, from the apparent exaggerations and damning focus on its characters, is to insult and condescend to its auteurs. Which, okay, is sort of our function sometimes as music writers! But here, regardless, I think it’s misplaced. To find Vampire Weekend essentially empty of appeal is a totally righteous stance that I somewhat share! To flank this opinion with class war based on the band’s preoccupation with the abortive actions of people with money, without regard to the possible contexts of that preoccupation, seems a lazy sort of dismissal.

There is also “I Think Ur a Contra,” which maybe amounts to a mission statement. I don’t know. I think everything is a mission statement. This is a mission statement. I am saying to you, “See, I have engaged with something I don’t care about and I have found the light that spits from one of its sides. That’s a mission.” I don’t really care about Vampire Weekend. They are a good singles band, but I audibly sighed at the debut’s every mention on the decade lists, and my friends rightly chided me for audibly sighing at the internet. Though Contra is not as entirely front-loaded as its predecessor, it’s got a similar bland stretch to the end.

But oh, what an end.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND: “I THINK UR A CONTRA”

You said,
“Never pick sides
Never choose between two”
Well I just wanted you

There’s a very small and boisterous part of me that would not tell you this outright. This part of me believes that somehow, probably knowing the vehement reactions to their first record, they preemptively anticipated this path of discourse for Contra and, instead of loading up on tools with which to see their enemy’s wiring, have chosen gorgeous disarmament. “I Think Ur a Contra” is probably about someone you believe in, someone whose beliefs you share, but whose beliefs prove to be a brief fortune of that person’s position. By all this “mission statement” talk I largely refer to the song’s interesting parallels with all this critical second-guessing of Vampire Weekend’s stance. There you go. I am transparent.

But there’s more here than that! Vampire Weekend aren’t victims and they should stop committing the cardinal sin of responding to their critics! The song also details the spark of initial connection, how that is something to move toward even if it is a two month sort of deal. We are desert wires that lean toward their nearest analogue. You should prepare yourself for more “we should just take care of each other” hippie shit because that’s where I am landing.

Also, the narrator oscillates over the actual “Contra” status. It is suddenly a fluid distinction upon his intended’s desires for “good schools and friends with pools.” How tenuous our own small positions are! The rest of the record, all these keening eyes toward privilege, seem the result of our severed attempts to connect. Vampire Weekend engage with this disconnection, and they make it the most ridiculous prospect, so that maybe we can fight through these absurd signifiers and get to some real ribs and hearts. Which is why I stand by my sophomore-in-college avatar, blinkered and awkward and given to spicy food metaphors as he may be, because that is exactly what he retrieves from “A-Punk,” and most music that sets his heart in electric tremble: a sudden, violent desire to relate through it.

Tags: class, Contra, Jessica Hopper, Nitsuh Abebe, race, Vampire Weekend