We Went: Vampire Weekend @ Neumo's
Standing outside Neumo's Wednesday night, a friend of ours started ruminating on his recent house-hunting experience in the Central District: All the new places being advertised, he said, were townhouse style units with garages below them. The effect reminded him of frontier forts, with their wooden walls separating them from the wilderness. How exactly our conversation led from Vampire Weekend's concert inside to this is a little hazy, but it nevertheless summarizes the band pretty well: Much like those urban fortresses in the CD that keep their residents safely above street level, Vampire Weekend, notwithstanding their tightness and pop transcultural experimentation, is also about making black people's stuff safe for white people.
Charles Mudede had an excellent piece about the band in last week's Stranger, so we won't go into the theory of all this except to say that while we initially took Mudede's critique with a grain of salt, having seen the band and the ecstatic crowds of white people who packed out Neumo's (that's the least pierced and tattooed crowd we've ever seen there), we feel he may have been too charitable.
But to begin with the positive, we'll admit: these four Columbia U. kids are a tight pop act. Their recycled Seventies African pop sound is infectiously catchy. And the audience ate it up; twenty-something women danced about joyously as their over-protective boyfriends, apparently unaccustomed to the fact that the social contract of packed clubs may require the minimization of personal space, rudely threw elbows out to protect their space and their women, which was adorable its own "we're not from the city" way.
But there's an odd psychic dissonance that arises between the music--with its chiming guitars and blaring synth-organ--and the lyrics. Most people associate the sound of African pop with low-budget Eighties movies set in "ethnicky" parts of New York, if anything, but as lead singer Ezra Koenig's voice rises above the musical din, you realize he's singing about leaving Cape Cod with some chick, and you begin to wonder about what it is, exactly, that's being expressed here. Surely, an artist seeks for some sort of artistic synergy between music and lyrics, content and form? But here's an artist trapped in a genre of his own making (or resuscitation, at least): the affluent white American's Soweto pop music. Lyrically prosaic, musically an anachronistic fetish, this is cultural miscegenation of the interracial softcore porn variety.
If our assessment seems unduly harsh, we'll admit: we wonder at our visceral reaction as well. Partly it's driven by the fact we just don't want to admit how racially uninclusive American indie rock is (we're desperately calling out for a Bloc Party here in the US, except, you know, good), but partly it's also because we increasingly feel that maybe Americans should be more adventurous culture consumers. We haven't forgotten that while white kids pack Neumo's for Vampire Weekend or the Showbox for Femi Kuti's retro Afropop, people freaked when Buju Banton was scheduled to play Neumo's, and this site even played a role in the public outcry that got the show canceled. Not that we have any desire to promote Banton's brand of anti-gay rhetoric (and the violence associated with it), but we still recoil at the racist tack that, apparently, black (whether African or part of the diaspora) art has to be sufficiently acceptable to white tastes to get an airing, even at the expense--as in Vampire Weekend's case--of actually being black at all.
