The Saga Of Vampire Weekend
June 11th, 2008
If there is a better case study for the state of music in the Web 2.0 world, I have yet to see it. Vampire Weekend are a band who were hyped so much online that their backlash started before they put anything out. People had started to theorise the blogosphere’s reaction to the real world catching on to them before it happened. The Pitchfork-centred axis is slowly becoming self-aware. It’s a vaguely scary thing.
Beforehand, the NME could put a band on the cover, pick the name for the new genre out of a hat, ride it out until it stopped being exciting to anyone, and then bury it. So long as the NME were behind it, there were people behind it. Vampire Weekend backlash would surely have taken between three and six months longer if they’d come out of those hallowed pages first.
The difference is this: the right to reply. Blogs have comment features, generally. And a lot of people read the big ones, like Stereogum (or Analogue, of course). So after fifty people say “Wow, that new track sounds cool! I’d been waiting until it was acceptable to admit to liking Paul Simon!”, there’s going to be one guy who was at Columbia with them, and didn’t like the circle they were in or something. So he says they’re being derivative and colonialist.
That becomes an issue, when it wasn’t one. Because backlash is inevitable for any popular band, that’s something else it can latch on to. And things like that keep popping up. Comment sections start to fill with people saying “Vampire Weekend sucks”. Then blogs start to fill up with it too.
And then they release their album, and they launch into the real world as if the whole online power-shifting never happened. But the attainture is still there.
Even musicians weigh in. Bradford Cox’s faith in indie rock in general was rocked:
Cox: I’ve pretty much given up on indie rock. I hate indie rock. I never listen to it anymore. Because indie rock to me is safe. Like college rock in the 80s. It has a lot to do with like economic oppression. It has a lot to do with rich kids. When I think of indie rock recently I think of sort of bands whose names I won’t mention appropriating African music.
On Merry Swankster, Nick Thorburn from Islands bemoaned the insincerity of it all:
You know we didn’t write Graceland, we were just influenced by it. People who grew up around that time were. The difference between us and Vampire Weekend is that we’re not parroting the genre, going in and mining the territory that Paul Simon was in such a boring and uncreative way and just basically ripping him off. We were doing it in a way that wasn’t reducing it to … parody really. I mean when Paul Simon was doing it it was a discovery for him and we were trying to just get in sync with that same sense of musical exploration. I feel like with a band like Vampire Weekend is just seems so calculated, going through the same narrative styles and trying really hard to imitate. And it just sounds like an imitation. I don’t even liken what we did to what they’re doing. We had the same touchstone which was Graceland, which is a great starting point. That’s what Paul Simon’s great thing was is that he opened alot of people up to South African music and Brazil and all over and he was creative about it and you have to be creative in the way that you interpret and explore music. And I don’t think that band is a very creative band I guess.
Stephen Malkmus weighed in too (prompted by me admittedly - de gustibus non est disputandum), in an interview coming in the next print issue of Analogue. He reckoned people were just mad because they were rich kids who didn’t have to pay their dues.
He also said it was essentially just a pop record. Which it is. It’s okay to like Vampire Weekend without a copy of Das Capital in hand, or a collection of African pop in your CD rack. It’s also alright to hate them, for whatever reason you can come up with. They’ll probably be forgotten in a year or so anyway. Until then, the internet is going to keep examining itself through their trajectory. And it’s interesting stuff.
Karl McDonald Generally either listening to music or asleep. Sometimes both simultaneously. Those Geese Were Stupefied
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Fair points Karl. But for some reason I think Mr Cox would have reached his opinion independent of what way the blogosphere is currently tilting. I wrote about the vampire weekend album a while back. I still think its one of the most well-crafted and fun albums I heard in a long while. The stuff about them being colonial is the most retarded argument against a band’s sound I’ve heard yet. Lots of people don’t have real brains. Just vague half-baked political ideas that they think they should have, and loosely connected needles in their head that will only sway whatever way the ‘cool’ people tell them to. This is so evident in blogs. Like a huge flock of starlings, blogs all seem to be communally swaying one way or another. Normally in the direction of the King starling, Pitchforkmedia.com
Vampire Weekend sucks.
Sorry.
Have you read all of Tristam Shandy, young fellow? That’s no mean feat. I have too. Let’s go get tshirts made.
[...] heart, because he understands something that I understand, but very few other people do. Quoted in Analogue Mag: “I’ve pretty much given up on indie rock. I hate indie rock. I never listen to it [...]