Vampire Weekend (2008)
11 tracks, 34 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes
I once heard Vampire Weekend referred to as ‘the whitest band in America.’ Aside from the fact that, in the iteration on this album, not all of the band are even white themselves – making such a statement kinda weird to be honest – I sort of get where that commentator was coming from. The band’s image is nerdy and ultra-preppy, their lyrics and imagery are full of references to the Ivy League, and their vocals are sung in ambiguous mid-Atlantic accents. But what really drew me to their music when I first heard it was how much it didn’t just sound like your average white-boy indie rock band.
The first song that I heard by Vampire Weekend – and I’d guess it would be the same for most people in the UK – was their single ‘A-Punk’, their first to achieve wide success over on this side of the ocean. I found it curious – it was very polite, and had none of the angry energy of punk that its title led me to expect, but there was an energy to it, bouncy and poppy without being pop music. Then there was a clear but indefinable African edge to the sound. The influences are a bit murky on this track, the high-pitched guitars echoing the sounds of Ghanaian highlife, Congolese soukous or Zimbabwean jit without obviously being any of these; the drum pattern was similarly vague. Nevertheless, the sound was there. I wanted to delve deeper, so I got their album – and there those influences flourished out.
They’re all the way through, and almost every track seems to take inspiration from a different African style. The highlife, soukous and jit are there in clearer tones, and so are Soweto jive and isicathamiya, and the Congolese sound of the electro-likembe (replicated on electric guitars) and the rhythmic patterns of Angolan kuduro and Burundian karyenda drumming. Perhaps the most obvious place that this influence shows is in the song ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ – not only is it in the music, it’s right there in the name: kwassa kwassa is a music and dance style adapted from soukous and made famous by Congolese star Kanda Bongo Man.
For all these African influences, they enrich the sound of the indie rock rather than take it over. They give Vampire Weekend a unique sound without making it just sound like an American band attempting to copy African musical styles – after all, a lot of their sound also comes from a whole range of other directions such as rock’n’roll, synthpop, folk-pop and even aesthetics of baroque chamber music. There’s lots of talk connecting Vampire Weekend’s music to Paul Simon’s Graceland but, if anything, I reckon the younger band do a better job of bringing the African styles in as part of their own sound, rather than just sticking them together as Simon did, albeit to good effect.
With all of these styles at play, from across the US, Europe and seemingly most of sub-Saharan Africa, I have difficulty understanding the critical mind that can listen to this album and define that sound as being made by ‘the whitest band in America.’ However, there is no disputing that what Vampire Weekend do is cultural plundering and appropriation with very little acknowledgement of their music sources – which I guess you can think of as the whitest things a band can do.
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