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Rock and Posh
As a result of record companies’ continual search for something new to grab listeners’ attention, pop musicians now come in all shapes and sizes, and from every different background. Notable acts to have emerged in the last year include an Italian-American with a passion for Rilke (Lady GaGa), a Sri Lankan Tamil rapper (M.I.A.), and most famously, an ordinary middle-aged woman from West Lothian (Susan Boyle). Frequently, this diversity is a cause for celebration, as it suggests that music fans listen without prejudice. This makes all the more surprising the hostile reactions to an American band playing at this weekend’s Glastonbury: Vampire Weekend.
The group, singer Ezra Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bass player Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson, look conservative and inoffensive, the sort of young men who might work for Google. Like so many other bands, Vampire Weekend was formed at college, but the band’s alma mater happened to be the Columbia University in New York, part of the prestigious Ivy League. Musically, the group combines the clean and crisp guitars of the British New Wave with a sprinkling of African and Latin American sounds and instruments. The pop sensibility of the former means that the songs are catchy; the novelty of hearing the latter makes the band stand out. The group’s eponymous debut album, released in 2008, was a runaway commercial success, selling over 500,000 copies in the United States. Their sophomore effort, 2010′s Contra, reached number one in the United States and number three in the United Kingdom. However, both albums, and the band as a whole, have polarised fans and critics.
Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, which often delight in obscure etymology (“Walk to class/In front of you/Spilled kefir/On your keffiyeh”), give the first hint of why the band has proved so divisive. Their confidence of their fit within an intellectual hot-house hasn’t helped (“Raggedy wisdom falls from my hand/As the ladies of Cambridge know who I am”), nor has their description of their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto”. For Spin’s Andy Greenwald, Koenig’s willingness to cherry-pick from sounds from all over the globe is obnoxious: “He seems to possess encyclopaedic knowledge of every major era of pop music…but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon”; Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber sees the band as “globe-trotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring different cultures, despite being passively, naively invested”; while Village Voice smelt “the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society” coming from the group’s debut album.
These comments, particularly Greenwald’s, reveal that in spite of the wild popularity of shows like The X Factor and American Idol, which demonstrate how unashamedly calculated the music business can be, listeners still like musicians to be authentic, people who sing or start bands because of some pre-ordained talent or drive, those who were born to do it. To its detractors, Vampire Weekend is the polar opposite. Its members are boys with sensible college degrees who have a world of opportunity open to them, which they have rejected in favour of adventures in the crowded and cut-throat pop industry. No matter how prejudiced the view, its angry repetition by critics and listeners has revealed that music is still regarded as something that should be a destiny rather than a career option.
Furthermore, the Ivy League degrees and the (incorrect) assumption that the band hail from privileged, WASP-y backgrounds seems to have made Vampire Weekend’s interest in world music more unpalatable. Schreiber is accusing the band of an imperialistic cultural appropriation, of sucking the blood out of foreign musical styles without paying due deference. Beyond the inverse snobbery of such a comment, this is an anachronistic view. One of the consequences of our shrunken, globalised world is that we now have greater and easier access to music from each of its corners. If this flowed in only one direction, enabling the Ezra Koenigs of the United States to plunder the sounds of distant lands, Schreiber may have a point. However, cultural appropriation is practised by everybody, from the Tuareg nomads of North Africa, who have picked up the electric guitars of the West and used them to play songs about their desire for political freedom, to the aforementioned M.I.A., whose electro-rap combines sounds from at least five continents.
More relevant to Vampire Weekend is the idea of trans-cultural diffusion. It is because of its widespread appropriation that African music is having a moment in Europe and the United States, with acts, such as Amadou and Mariam, Tinariwen and Staff Benda Bilili, receiving greater attention in the media (and selling more records) as a result of their influence on a new generation of bands, typified by Vampire Weekend. After listening to African music filtered through the brains of Koenig and his peers, listeners are investigating the source material. However, Koenig himself has taken this line of argument further. Not only does he reject claims of appropriation (“the two main writers in the band are Jewish and Persian…We’re certainly not all fresh off the Mayflower”), he doesn’t feel like an agent of diffusion as much as a product of it: “We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.”
He has a point: the invention of the sampler, for instance, has meant that musicians can lift, steal, and appropriate from each other more easily than ever before, while the Internet allows music to be distributed further and faster. It is no longer a shock to hear two hitherto unconnected pieces of music, even those from different continents, stuck together as something new. But this fails to explain why Vampire Weekend, in particular, has proved so provocative. The reason behind it may be surprisingly simple. From the early days of Merseybeat, to punk and then rave, pop has always stretched the boundaries of taste and acceptability. Its edginess has been a critical part of its appeal to young listeners. But the music and images of these eras have since been absorbed into the canon, diminishing their power to shock. John Lydon (the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten) has become a reality TV regular, while it now seems inconceivable that The Prodigy’s Keith Flint was once considered a threat to society. The perennial search for something new that has thrown up both Lady GaGa and Susan Boyle shows how diverse the musical landscape has become. However, the reception received by Vampire Weekend has shown that listeners are still uncomfortable with music as a career option. The marrying of rock with education and opportunity shows there is one taboo that still has to be broken down: there is still prejudice against preppiness in pop.
Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.
