With the release of their first album, Vampire Weekend, the preppy, self-conscious pop group made up of Columbia University graduates are coming in for a bit of stick (that is to say it mildly) from hipster music critics.
Over the last year Vampire Weekend built its hype all through the band’s Myspace page and concerts around the New York City area (full disclosure: I went to see them at Music Hall in Williamsburg … and enjoyed it).
Mike Powell in the Village Voice reminds us that the band’s pre-album hype was built on a catalog ‘… that was 14 minutes long‘ and that its all a schtick.
In the same edition, however, it is Julianne Sheppard who really goes after Vampire Weekend. Sheppeard accuses the band of consciously working to ‘… Westernize or “whitewash” an indigenous music …’ (the band borrows a lot from African music, while often deliberately downplaying that influence in public) and that their creative process involves: ‘… run[ning] their influences through a steam-cleaner—in sound, in texture, in language, in execution—until there’s nothing left but space and simplicity and precious little conflict …’ The result: ‘… I can’t down with [them] no matter how many times homeboys drop a Lil Jon reference.’
Ouch.
Of course I can see through the conceit and the odd aesthetic and old school politics. But does it make me a bad person if I like the music?
To hear more, listen here.
Leo Africanus 