How Vampire Weekend Burned Off the Bush Era

The year is 2006, and Vampire Weekend have just formed. George W. Bush is president. The first smartphone won’t be released for another year. Music blogs are flourishing, and the old recording industry gatekeepers are losing their power. The moment is ripe for nobodies to become somebodies.

By 2007, Vampire Weekend’s music is all over the web, and they’re touring the country. Rolling Stone names the song “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” one of the top 100 songs of the year. The next year, Vampire Weekend tours the world. They become the first band to ever grace the cover of SPIN before even releasing an album. Two short years from nobody to somebody, and Vampire Weekend became arguably the first band to launch to stardom based on nothing but blog support.

It was bound to happen to somebody, sometime. But why Vampire Weekend? Why then?

Vampire Weekend was formed by four undergraduates at Columbia University in 2006: lead singer Ezra Koenig; keyboardist, guitarist, and producer Rostam Batmanglij; bassist Chris Baio; and drummer Chris Tomson. The name Vampire Weekend was lifted from an unfinished movie by Koenig about a man named Walcott dealing with a vampire infestation along the East Coast.

Their first live performance came in a campus battle of the bands. They played early versions of two songs that would eventually make their self-titled debut album, “Oxford Comma” and “Walcott”. They did not win. There were only four bands competing, and Vampire Weekend came in third.

But even at this early stage, the band’s ethos was fully formed. Vampire Weekend creates an entire world, self-contained and self-referential. For example, it’s not strictly necessary to know that the Walcott in “Walcott” was the main character in a never-completed vampire movie, but it helps make sense of lyrics like, “Evil feasts on human lives.”

It’s also not required to know the geography of affluent Cape Cod to enjoy the song, but if you know that Wellfleet is well-known for its aphrodisiac oysters or that Provincetown is famous for its thriving gay community, this knowledge will add layers of meaning to “Walcott, fuck the women from Wellfleet/ Fuck the bears out in Provincetown/ Heed my words and take flight.

Already in use at that battle of the bands was what would become the Vampire Weekend uniform: oxford shirts, boat shoes, khakis, and cardigans — the very picture of East Coast privilege. This isn’t the standard rock-and-roll getup favored by the most popular indie rock acts of the time, the leather jackets and carefully mussed hair of The Killers and The Strokes.

That Ivy League image is one of the main thrusts behind Vampire Weekend’s meteoric rise, if only because it allowed them to stand out in the crowded indie rock scene. Every early article written about the band mentioned their clothing. Only in rock and roll could boat shoes be considered subversive.

But preppiness really can be an act of rebellion, especially the way Vampire Weekend employs it. Despite their reputation, the band have always looked upon the world of wealth with a satirical eye. Koenig’s lyrics admire the rich with one breath and scorn them with the next, in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Evelyn Waugh.

The first single off Vampire Weekend, “Mansard Roof”, is in this style. Mansard Roofs are an architectural staple of French chateaus and English country manors, as well as the most hoity-toity parts of Cape Cod. In the song, Koenig’s eye travels from the “Mansard Roof through the trees” to “a salty message written in the eaves.” After spotting this graffiti, he moves inevitably on to “hot garbage and concrete.”

The second verse, about the Argentines who “collapse in defeat,” seems to be about the Falklands War, fought between the British and Argentinians over a chain of islands in 1982. Taken together, the song is a critique of elitism and imperial colonialism, disguised as a harmless ditty about some pretty architecture.

Elitism and post-colonialism are the chief preoccupations of the album, Vampire Weekend. These themes even informed the band’s clothing. As Koenig told Rolling Stone, “Around the time the band started, I became very interested in the connection between preppy American fashion and Victorian imperialism.