VAMPIRE WEEKEND CONTRA (XL)
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The curious thing about Vampire Weekend is that many of the same music critics and bloggers who helped the band achieve this coup are discomfited by prominent aspects of their aesthetic. Almost every review of Contra makes this clear. The New York Times notes that Vampire Weekend’s pairing of preppy panache and Afropop dabblings “smacked of cultural tourism.” The Village Voice observes, simply, “This band drives people nuts.” The New Yorker points out that despite their popularity Vampire Weekend are widely perceived as “avatars of bourgeois lameness.” Pitchfork proprietor Ryan Schrieber describes the image the band projects as “Globe-trotting sons of distinguished men, clumsily exploring distant cultures despite only being passively, naively invested.”
It comes down to class. Would the reggae tinge of “D’yer Mak’er” seem like an offensive affectation if Jimmy Page had gone to Oxford instead of art school? Would Vampire Weekend get a free pass if they weren’t Ivy Leaguers singing of the woes of the American leisure class?
On Contra Koenig launders his privileged perspective by casting a series of nameless women with high-class aspirations as the protagonists of his songs. In that same Guardian article he cops to making fun of rich girls—the sort of sport few object to, since women who want it all are such easy targets. But what does it say about you when your eyes are trained on a girl who’s set on movin’ on up? On “White Sky” Koenig sings of a woman who imagines her Wolford tights (they run about $50) balled up on the sink inside a piece of prime Upper West Side real estate that looms above the two of them. He disdains her desire for luxury and comfort, but he wants it just as badly—on the album’s best song, “Run,” he suggests to a girl that they skip town with her trust fund for a permanent vacation. It’s like a sheepish sequel to Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime.”
