Vampire Weekend interview

They stand accused of exploiting African music, of capitalising on economic oppression and of being over-hyped. In response they tell Karl McDonald “you can’t win with some people”.

How important is it really, in the après punk era that we live in, to pay your dues? Why is it that so many people need to see the false starts and battle-scars before they will admit to liking a band’s music? How easy is too easy?

Vampire Weekend adorned the cover of Spin Magazine before they had even released their debut. Nine months later, questions still abound about their bona fides. As Columbia University graduates, they are denounced as rich boys. The blog-based mega-hype monster that slung them into the public eye is derided as artificial. And the fact that these wealthy, upstart college kids could have the gall to incorporate the celebratory melodies and rhythms of African music into their sound has annoyed no small number of people, whether they be internet commentators or lead singers in indie rock bands.

Nick Thorburn, former Unicorn and frontman of Islands, was quick to separate his own African-influenced music from Vampire Weekend’s, which he denounced as “parroting the genre”. Stephen Malkmus was less critical of their music, but did feel that they “had it easy”. Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound pulled no punches, painting the band as the beneficiaries of economic oppression.
But politics, as is too easily forgotten, cannot play the guitar. And no matter how many people come out with criticisms of the band’s class or the legitimacy of their African influence, Vampire Weekend still made a clever, refreshing and addictive album. That is something that is too rarely factored into discussions on the matter.

This writer has been engaging in that discourse on the Analogue blog, in print and in the pub with his friends for as long as he has been aware of the band, and has found that there is no such thing as a neutral reading of Vampire Weekend. For this reason, and because the conversation was interesting enough to allow it, the interview will be left in mostly unedited question and answer format. To allow the band to speak for themselves, as it were.

So how’s touring going?

Chris Baio (bassist): It’s been good, we’re in the first week of the tour. It’s our last big tour for this album in Europe. We started in Iceland, in Reykjavik, which was really cool, and then we’ve been in the UK and the shows have been good.
Were you in Iceland before or after the collapse?

C: Yeah sure, the banking stuff. Well it’s hard to tell something like that when you’re just there for a day, but they were saying that the tickets were selling for the festival, and people seemed to be in good spirits.

Have you been playing any new stuff?

Ezra Koenig (singer and guitarist): Yeah, we’ve been playing a couple of new songs, but we’ll have a lot of work to do when we finally get home and start working on another album. We haven’t wanted to do too much stuff live.

One of my friends saw you play in Sweden, and he said that one of your new songs sounds like Animal Collective?

C: A little bit.

E: I could see that, yeah. Definitely more so than some of the older songs.

Is the rest of the stuff a lot different?

E: Well, we still have to work on it, because especially when you get into the studio, there are so many ways you could approach a song. Even if you have ideas for melodies, or little parts, you’ve yet to see how it’ll turn out. But I think the song that he’s probably talking about is fairly different in that it uses some electronic beats. But then, at the end of the day, the way the song is written has a lot in common with what we’ve already done.

Did a lot of the last album only come together in the process of recording it?

C: Some songs, yeah, I think it would depend on the song. We played Oxford Comma at our first show and it’s pretty much identical to how it’s recorded. But then there’s a song like “Kids (Don’t Stand A Chance)” where we didn’t really know where it was going to go until we started recording it. There was a lot of editing and Rostam added a string arrangement later on. The same with “M79”, Rostam finished writing it that morning and we recorded it. So it varies from song to song.

I was wondering, you get a thing with rappers where their first album is all about the struggle on the streets, and then their second album is just about money, because they’re not out there any more… if the first album is based in and around college then…

E: Our first album is kind of about money too. So I don’t know what the second album will be about. But you’re right, a lot of the first album was about college itself specifically, and being college-aged, and all sorts of the issues that surround that age. I mean, our lives have changed a lot since we made that album. That was reflective of what we were doing at the time, which was being students, and having all the time in the world. After that we had jobs, our first real jobs, and then we had this, starting out being a band, being on the road and travelling everywhere. So things have definitely changed. It’s still coming together so it’s hard to say exactly what it’ll be about, but hopefully it’ll still reflect the mental state that you’re in, a few years after the stuff that’s on the first album.

Do you have an opinion on the idea of hype and backlash in general?

E: I think it’s almost become this concept that people are talking about too much. Like I saw this thing recently where people were talking about if there’s going to be a Tina Fey backlash. I don’t know if people follow that here, but her impersonation of Sarah Palin is like this huge thing in America, and she’s really at the top of her game. And people are like, uh oh, there’s going to be a Tina Fey backlash around the next season of 30 Rock [i.e. Fey’s US sitcom]. You get to that point where anything that becomes successful, people start plotting its backlash, it’s almost like a cliché that people repeat. I think it’s very true that some bands can get over-exposed before they’re ready to release an album, and I think if you have all sorts of people criticising you, and breathing down your neck, and you haven’t even released an EP yet, that’s a lot of pressure. And I think some bands have wilted under that pressure. For us, we’ve had people hyping us up as the band you need to hear, your new favourite band, and also saying we’re never going to be able to sell out a two-hundred person venue, since the beginning. So at that point it’s like you instantly have hype and backlash. And I have a feeling that people are going to be talking about hype and backlash with us forever. “Oh Vampire Weekend, they’re still over-hyped”… it’s like, you can’t win with some people.

Do you think it puts undue pressure on the next record?

C: I don’t think so. At the end of the day, it’s going to be us making the record. We didn’t get to where we’ve gotten by worrying about hype or backlash, so why would it matter now?

You get a lot of artists, in our magazine and elsewhere, expressing opinions about you, or about how you came to popularity. Some people say you got it easy, some people say they have no opinion on the matter. How do you react to that, if there’s an artist you listen to, and they’re complaining about Vampire Weekend?

E: I mean, I find it, I don’t know, a little bit pathetic when artists start talking shit about other artists. It’s okay to have an opinion about things in general, and we try to be positive, but when I’ve seen people get into this NME-style shit-talking and bringing that into the world of indie music or whatever you want to call it, it just seems so silly. I think it undermines what you’re trying to do as an artist if you’re just constantly being negative, it’s pointless.

What about Nick Thorburn’s comments?

E: People ask us about that guy, but the truth is, we’ve actually never had any interaction with him. None of us know him, we’re only vaguely aware of his music, and the only time we ever had any interaction with anyone connected to him was other people in his band coming up to us at a festival saying how much they liked us and saying he was an asshole. There are always going to be people who have to get their anger out and express themselves negatively, and usually if you just let them say their piece, it fades away.

I don’t want to keep going on about this, but I have a quote from Bradford Cox from an interview he gave with us a couple of months ago…

E: Sure, let’s hear it.

“Indie rock to me is safe, like college rock in the 80s. It has a lot to do with economic oppression. It has a lot to do with rich kids. When I think of indie rock I think of the sort of bands whose names I won’t mention, appropriating African music.”

E: Well, he’s someone that we’ve met…

C: He was nice in person.

E: Yeah, he was very nice in person. So the truth is, if you hear people pretending that they’re some sort of class warrior, and that they view us as indicative of some sort of economic oppression, and then when they meet us, instead of saying “hey, what’s your background, I’m interested in talking about this”, they just say “hey, you guys are really good”, I mean, that just goes to show how shallow their feelings are about these things. I found that people who are actually interested in understanding what they perceived to be our background, or problems with our band, whether they were journalists or musicians, ended up talking to us, and usually ended up understanding better. I don’t know why someone would want to make those assumptions based on the way we dress or our lyrics. I think as an artist, they need to give people a little more credit than that.

That’s just Bradford I think. He went after a lot of people in that interview.

E: Those people exist outside of music too. They usually have some insecurities, and they express it through demeaning other people, rather than making positive statements about what they want to do. The truth is, if you’re a musician and you think music is boring, all you have to do is make interesting music. And the people who talk about it so much are usually, I find, not the ones who are pushing things forward.

In the context of that comment about oppression, but even outside of it, I was wondering about the idea of taking music born in really harsh circumstances and relocating it to a metropolitan, wealthy situation. What do you think about doing that, should it attract criticism, or should it not be read into that much, to take African music and relocate it to Cape Cod or wherever?

E: I think it’s worth talking about. I think the idea that listening to African music from the perspective of someone who is fortunate enough to live in America and making music that reflects your interest in it is somehow negative, is this twisted, angry way of looking at the world. Again, I find that people who are genuinely interested in talking about class difference and the inequalities of the world economy, tend to look at things in a more positive way, about how you could change things. And one small step towards making the world even a tiny bit better is just to stop thinking about different parts of the world as off-limits or exotic. I think the idea that you can only appreciate African music by associating it somehow with poverty is just as ridiculous as saying you can only listen to African music if you’re some rich safari hunter. It really is nothing to do with it. I hope that people who listen to African music, just because they like the sound of it, would also take it upon themselves to be a moral, ethical person. But, you know, those are two separate things. I find that the people who get angry about an American band being interested in African music aren’t offering any alternative. They tend to be the people who exoticise African music, and ghettoise it, as something that can only be appreciated in this particular way. And that’s not how we talk about the Rolling Stones, it’s not how we talk about Bob Dylan.

So how do you guys relate to African music then? You get a lot of British ska bands in the late 70s, early 80s, talking about bringing something that is sort of ghettoised to other people. And people would complain that they were just white boys ripping off the music, but they considered that they were just bringing the music to people, rather than trying to parody it or whatever. Do you see anything like that in what you’re doing?

C: We’re always quick to acknowledge albums that have influenced us, whatever the genre is, so I think that’s part of bringing it to other people.

Did you form as a band to do African music, or did you just form and it happened to come out that way?

E: More the latter. I mean, we formed as a band with an interest in a lot of different types of music, and one of them was African music. Part of the connection with African music is as simple as playing electric guitar. I mean, if you grew up playing electric guitar, why shouldn’t you be interested in a guitar tradition? Besides British blues rock or something. Like, why not? Why should that be off-limits to your listening or to your influences?

Is there any other influence outside of that that you wished people would notice more?

E: I think on the album, classical and baroque music plays just as much a part as African music, and I think it’s indicative of the mindsets of journalists that people would rather only talk about African music, because for them it seems like this kind of juicy talking point; because they can make it a little controversial, or try to weave in some lightweight politics around it. But the truth is, there are songs on our album where if you listen to the string arrangements, you’d probably be thinking of Beethoven or Mozart.

Did Peter Gabriel ever do the “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” cover?

E: He did, and we’ve heard it, and we’re very excited for it to come out. It’s just been getting delayed as it’s being worked on, but we know it’s going to come out some time.

Did he say “Peter Gabriel” in the song in the end?

C: You’ll have to see.