Bring on the Weekend

If you were doing a PhD in identity politics, you’d have a field-day with New York avant-rock, Afro-beat, chamber pop, ivy-league college boys Vampire Weekend; four boys from the most educated and privileged milieu in the USA, singing songs about upper middle class college life to the beats, rhythms and reverby guitar-lines of the African oppressed.

That said, the quartet are smart enough to shoot holes at questions of authenticity.
“One of the first African bands I really got into was Orchestra Baobob from Senegal, and when I heard them I wasn’t struck by the fact it sounded exotic, or that it came from Africa, but that the guitar parts were like Dick Dale and other surf music I already dug,” says singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig. “So much African music is rooted in Western pop music with electric guitars and Cuban rhythms. Then you read rock criticism and they use words like ‘tribal’ all the time. Journalists and music fans don’t realise how condescending it is to imagine that in Africa there are these people cooking up original ‘primitive’ music, while in America you’ve got bands like Vampire Weekend who tinker with it in a colder cerebral fashion. Influences always go back and forth. Of course there are people in bands like Orchestra Baobob who listened to music from America and the Caribbean, and there are people in America grew up listening to music from Africa.”
So the quartet didn’t approach their fusion of baroque keyboard lines, Afro-beat guitars and a 1980s pop music self-consciously?
“I think we started as a lot of bands do – we were friends in college [Columbia] and just happened to do a lot of music stuff together,” says drummer Chris Thomson. “Ezra did a rap thing that Ros [keyboard player] and I were kind of a part of. We were just fooling around and then I think it was our last term in 2006 when I got a Battle Of The Bands gig and we’d been talking about doing an instrument group for a while. We had a practice on the Monday and played the show on the Friday and started from there. I think we played songs like ‘Oxford Comma’ that first night the same as we play them now.”
They never really felt like an indie band or that they were part of any particular New York scene.
“Columbia is in upper Manhattan between Harlem and the upper west side and it was very far from any area considered cool or hip,” Ezra reflects. “And none of us felt that connected to indie music in a specific sense. We all grew up listening to many different kinds of music, so the idea of indie was never really attractive – that 90s aesthetic of kind of, I don’t know, slightly detuned guitars... I mean, that kind of music can be cool and I really like Pavement, but we never felt like we were operating in a tradition that was defined by those sorts of things, because just as we listened to music that could be called indie only as much we listen to classic rock or reggae.”
The visual preppiness was self-conscious however.
“We wanted a unified look,” admits Chris. “And we were in college when we started... I do have a leather jacket though.”
“But it’s not an indie leather jacket,” Ezra notes dryly.
Another myth they wish to dispel is the notion that Vampire Weekend are thoroughly modern young men who rose to fame using the interweb.
“People want us to be a ‘blog band’,” sighs Ezra. “They make that into such a big deal. Yes, the internet is this huge revolution and certainly it was very important in allowing people to hear the music before the album officially came out. But because we were there the whole time, we can’t forget about how important traditional press was for us; how important touring was for us. That’s the oldest trick in the book – go out and play to people. The net was just a part of it.”
And no matter what they do, they’re resigned to the fact that they can’t escape their class and education.
“In America there’s always an association with education and class. That’s kind of unfortunate and it’s an issue that rubs people the wrong way,” Ezra resumes. “It does so worldwide, but in America class and education are particularly tied, because we have such a terrible educational gap, which is totally related to socio-economic status. So there’s this idea that someone who went to college is a spoiled brat, especially someone who went to the kind of private college we went to, which has this association as an old money network. So much of it is about perception. People prefer the idea that any kind of intelligence is totally unstudied and we can’t pretend that that’s true.”
He pauses for a moment, considering their swift rise to success.
“At the same time clearly a lot of people have given the band the benefit of the doubt,” he concludes. “They know we’re not the spoilt rich kids that some people have tried to make us out to be. The fact you want to sing about certain things and talk about a particular class and college doesn’t mean you embody the worst traits of those things.”