From Cape Town to Cape Cod

Pop tastes are funny. One thing that a lot of music critics don't like to acknowledge is that 95 percent of the music-listening public cares very little about the art of music making.1 They want to listen to stuff that's catchy, danceable and performed by an artist or band that would look really good on the cover of a magazine. That music could be Nirvana or it Could be Beyonce. It's all catchy. It's all pop, isn't it?

Exhibit A is the much-heralded Vampire Weekend, which released it's sophomore record Contra this week. A spirited mix of early Police, Paul Simon's Graceland, King Sunny Ade and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this band of Upper West Side prep school kids and Columbia U. grads has become one of the most unlikely band of underground heroes since that other big group of NYC upper-crusters: The Strokes.

But unlike The Strokes who were traveling a pretty easy-to-read path to big record sales, Vampire Weekend is unlike anything being praised in indie circles today. In fact it's not like any music being recorded on this continent right now. Vampire Weekend -- Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Tomson and Chris Baio -- draws a little from electro-pop and ska and a great deal from afro-pop, including snaking guitar lines that recall Ali Farka Toure. Koenig sounds an awful lot like Paul Simon here and at times like Sting in 1977. It's definitely played through an American filter, but it could easily pass as world music to the casual listener.

That this music is being played by upper-class white kids -- songs on the band's debut ranged in subject matter from avoiding a college fling at Columbia to the physical and psychological difficulties of getting off of Cape Cod -- is hard to reconcile, but it doesn't seem to bother this band's growing fan base. Despite all the obvious things to hate -- the wealth, the polo shirts, the biggest white appropriation of world music since "Roxanne," Vampire Weekend is a fun band to listen to.2 The second single on Contra, "Cousins" played a week ago on David Letterman, is a frenetic, infectious explosion of a pop song. It may be the best single I've heard in at least a year.

On first listening to Contra, I felt a little let down to not hear more of that same energy. This is not to say the rest of the album is bad, but it is not as great as that single. For most of the record, the band sticks to a much more mid-tempo bounce with tunes that rely a lot more on synthesizer sounds. A first impression is that a lot of these songs might not sound out of place on a Postal Service album.

A few other standouts for me are the driving (almost a rocker) "Giving up the Gun" and the ska romp "Holiday." A lot of the others songs are on the slow side but they are tuneful and well conceived. Overall, the album has a unity of sound and style that make for a great album. While I am still feeling a bit let down that nothing grabs me quite like "Cousins," I think it's a record that will grow on me with more time.

We could debate the appropriateness of a band of rich white kids playing African music for a long time, but it won't change the fact that Vampire Weekend is a pretty good band that now has another really enjoyable performance under its belt in Contra. I've never been comfortable to find myself on a bandwagon, but this is good music and well worth listening to.

Footnotes

1. Sound Opinions host and Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis blasted the band for its affluent origins and similarly themed song lyrics, stating at one point that the band "had nothing to say." I found it a really curious complaint. Most lyricists, particularly since 1990, write exclusively about themselves. Maybe most people can't relate to the sudden need to escape Cape Cod, but a lot of great bands have sung about little more than sex, drugs and partying in Manhattan (The Strokes)... so I don't get the point. If you're looking for good social commentary, you're not going to find it (in great supply) in music. In fact, I think its safe to say that most bands have had nothing to say since about 1968.

2. The band members called their music "Upper West Side Soweto," which could be seen as cute or stupid depending on who you talk to. Soweto is not strictly a a type of music, as far as I can tell, but is a place where great African music is made. Soweto is historically black section of Johannesburg in South Africa that was repeatedly cracked down upon by that country's old Apartheid government. It was the site of the 1976 Soweto Uprising in which 23 people were killed when black students revolted against an edict by the government to teach in Afrikaans instead of English. My guess is that the irony of that area's history was lost on the youthful members of the band. To them it's just where Paul Simon got his band. ... Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.