Vampire Weekend – Contra [Review]

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Vampire Weekend is so easy to hate. They are gentrification in musical form, unabashed cultural exploiters. Sure, they aren’t the first clean-cut, intelligent white guys to appropriate “world” music (Brubeck, Simon, Byrne), but they are certainly the most annoying. And now they are #1 on the Nickelback-affirming Billboard charts.

I should state up front that I thought the first Vampire Weekend record was refreshing. There was very little of it at the time. A-Punk was a great pop tune. The record had good hooks, crisp production, and simple instrumentation. Some have suggested that the Vampire Weekend project is really just a tongue-in-cheek take on white privilege. If so, with Contra, the joke has gone too far.

Listening to Contra is like having a hangover on a sunny day. I don’t care how happy it is, it’s too much. Slow down, try playing in a minor key, use your natural voice. Who are you, really?

Perhaps I’m overthinking the whole thing, but to me this album sounds like the byproduct of an ethnography thesis. This is a conscious appropriation of cultural styles not their own, both African/Caribbean and experimental.

First, there’s the “world” music (a loathed genre if there ever was one). The clear first point is that this music is not something that comes out of the natural noodlings of a well-off 13-year-old learning guitar.

It is well known that Paul Simon has been accused of brazenly claiming credit for the culturally-authentic work of his collaborators. Similarly, Vampire Weekend has internalized Simonesque inflection and stylistic exploitation. As such, if we’re looking at links in the chain, Vampire Weekend is at least two steps away from honesty.

Of course, artists are free to explore new and interesting styles, and reappropriation has been fundamental in the development of art in the West. But there is a core difference between exploitation of an other and a good faith appropriation of styles. It’s not hard to see where Vampire Weekend falls.

The second exploitation apparent on Contra is its pillaging of modern experimental music. While artists like Animal Collective utilize new tools to challenge listeners to rethink how pop music can be made, Vampire Weekend is appropriating the superficial outcomes of those earnest efforts in such a way as to simultaneously suck out its experimental value and inject something designedly commercial.

Examples abound. There are those god-awful yelps in the background on “Cousins,” the harmonized ays on “M79,” the arpeggiated synthesizers on “White Sky.” The most clear-cut (clean-cut?) case, though, is “Horchata,” which sounds like a poor man’s “Summertime Clothes” mashed with Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Rugrats” theme. Again, too much. It’s OK to show your influences, but not to milk them.

And so, with Contra, Vampire Weekend becomes the band that the frat kids name-drop to get in with the indie girl at the party, the “jam” they play at the Nantucket barbecue, squeezed in between “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and “No Woman No Cry.” Great.