“I was living up around Columbia at the time,” he recalls, “and I was just riding the subway home and overheard this young guy talking to somebody about, like, ‘Should our band work with Nasty Little Man? “But the kind of thing that they do well is what I’m always looking for in a new artist, which is to combine things I already like into something I haven’t heard them combined into before … that’s part of what you love about the new thing, is what it reminds you of.” Vampire Weekend first kicked up quite a fuss for the singular way they evoked the past, playing college rock in a disturbingly literal sense and blurring the lines between rockism and poptimism until the whole conversation seemed pointless. “Because if you haven’t realized the intertwined, recombinant nature of music by now, you shouldn’t even listen to anything new. Because only Vampire Weekend or Kanye West could possibly find themselves wrapped up in a controversy with people who fetishize cars. Vampire Weekend and XL always claimed they followed proper steps to license the photograph, blaming Brody for any wrongdoing. As for Vampire Weekend specifically, “They also were a signifier of this old world, right?” Shepherd says. The winks pile up: the flirtatious ones and the strategic-cultural-reference ones. Kelefa Sanneh, then a New York Times pop critic and now a writer for The New Yorker, wrote that early admiring NYT live review and still recalls how infectious that admiration was from the start. It was 2008 when Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Hollywoodâs biggest stars (letâs not forget she has an Oscar), began a humble business venture. 1 Billboard debut, the no. “‘They’re a party band. "When he finally did respond, his responses became increasingly hostile and exhibited substantial animus toward the firm.". Soon, a blue CD-R full of spare indie-pop songs with provocatively fussy names like “Oxford Comma” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was roiling MP3 blogs. This is for the best, for everyone. In the mid-2000s all it took to be the next white-hot indie band was a few insidiously catchy tunes, a clandestine industry connection or two, a content-generating backstory and/or fashion sense, an era-appropriate bashful sort of cockiness, and a patently ridiculous name. Vampire Weekend are veterans now, uncontroversial, still beloved by their day-one fans and largely ignored by their day-one detractors. Get Email Updates. There were allegations that the cars had been purchased under false pretenses and that the original owners had not been informed their cars would be destroyed. Available with an Apple ⦠(It lost to Kanye West’s Yeezus.) vampire-weekend 21 points 22 points 23 points 7 years ago we actually shot that all in one day in an alley in chinatown. “The band was often writing about that class stuff more incisively and more interestingly than the people who would take the sort of cheap shot of, like, ‘Oh, WASP-y boat shoes’ or whatever,” he says. Then you just waited for a few idle words to perk up the right ears and light up the right blogs. (The best line from the Spin cover story comes during a chat with Batmanglij: “He requests that a discussion about his love for Wes Anderson be kept off the record.”) A few critics, as Koenig himself later complained, dismissed Vampire Weekend as “the whitest band in the world.”. They were never bigger or better, at least in the public eye, than the first time you heard their snappy, irreverent names. “I think people slowly stopped giving a shit about indie hype bands,” says longtime New York City critic and current Jezebel editor in chief Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who panned Vampire Weekend’s debut album in The Village Voice alongside a much more positive review written by Mike Powell. But in the six years since, it’s less that no younger band has overtaken the band’s lane than the lane itself has closed up entirely. And with the occasional polarizing exception of peak-Tumblr-era Lana Del Rey or the Twitter-archvillain heyday of Father John Misty, they just don’t make single-artist controversies that big anymore. Father of the Bride is much anticipated within the band’s sizable universe but betrays no great urge to set the world aflame, critically or commercially: It unfolds, over the course of an expertly languid hour, into a broad, mega-festival pop-rock mélange designed to please most people and offend way fewer than usual. And now, happily, part of their modern appeal lies in the way they’ve become a part of the past, too. “Spill kefir on your keffiyeh.”. The leap from a tepid one-paragraph blog writeup plagiarized from all the other blogs to a full-length interview full of your witty quotes and compelling backstory. And nobody was complaining much about it. And even then, an eventual letdown was inevitable. “If anything, it leads more people to discover that music. The gulf between goading someone into downloading a free MP3 and hounding them into plunking down actual cash for a full-length album. It is not ideal, perhaps, for a jocular Ivy League rock band to serve as one’s introduction to the myriad joys of African music, but that’s still preferable to never discovering those joys at all. By settling with Kennis, the case against Vampire Weekend has been dismissed, Photo District News reports. In an enervated year for music, when pop was rightfully eclipsed by Far More Important Matters, Vampire Weekend were as close as our little community got to a polarizing controversy. I can’t remember who it was, but he kind of looks at me, like, ‘You dragged me to this club for this?’” On any given night, in any given club or art gallery or scruffy DIY hideout, you might find a band with a few pieces of the puzzle: a hooky chorus, a flashy look, a dopey name. You got it. Their detractors were still around and still out for blood. That’s catchy as shit! “So I sent them a week-by-week breakdown from May 2007 to December 2008—outlining when I saw their fall touring, finishing the album, releasing it, playing SNL, Central Park SummerStage, going to Australian and Japanese festivals and U.S. holiday radio shows.” It was ridiculously ambitious to the point of arrogance, and once anyone heard any one Vampire Weekend song, the band’s flight plan had a thrilling and/or maddening sense of destiny. “Or this old rubric where mostly white, male, straight, cis, Ivy League, buttoned-up cool guys could come in and make a guitar album that was, like, jaunty, and everyone would lose their shit. I don’t know. She’s from Texas, too.”, In 2019, a public critical argument that messy and convoluted would likely unfold in bursts of 280 characters or fewer. Somebody important finding you there is step two. The “alternative” label was superfluous by then; they’d become one of the biggest rock bands in America, period. The saga is not over, however. THE CONTROVERSY: The dazzling debut album from the Strokes earned raves for its effervescent pop sensibility and its raw, seemingly unprocessed sound. The metaphors are mind-blowing, and the topics tackled are controversial and beautiful. Contra was already on sale when Kennis's teenage daughter spotted her mum's face on the cover. Their fourth album, Father of the Bride, is out Friday; its best song, lead single “Harmony Hall,” evokes the piano-bashing Rolling Stones at their jolliest, Fatboy Slim at his mellowest, a big-tent jam band at its warmest and least alienating. “The idea that if some kids in a band are gonna be inspired by Congolese music or Kid Creole & the Coconuts or something like that—I don’t think that takes away opportunity for that other music,” Sanneh says. The leap from a computer screen to Late Show With David Letterman or, better yet, Saturday Night Live. “Things really broke right for them,” Aaron says. But they can at least ensure that the era goes out on a high note. “I do miss a sort of lengthy banter, where there was a value in thinking things through and articulating your ideas.” Back then you had to prove whatever ludicrous assertion you’d just made, or at least pretend to show your work. The gulf between BrooklynVegan and Gossip Girl. CREDIT: Vampire Weekend Responds To Saab Controversy Car fanatics were none-too-thrilled with the lyric video for Vampire Weekendâs â Diane Young â and its Saab-arson visuals. And they got you. Vampire Weekend have settled their legal dispute with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the model who discovered her photo on the cover of the band's album Contra. About Vampire Weekend At a time when indie pop was opening up to a wide world of influences, Vampire Weekend nudged things to the next level, bringing brainy lyrics and African flavours to the table as a sort of late-2000s alternative-scene answer to Paul Simon. Ann Kirsten Kennis, who denied giving the band permission to use her image on album sleeve, wins undisclosed settlement, Contra-versy ... Vampire Weekend settle lawsuit with album cover star. This would raise quite a ruckus; this would make them famous. Rock critics evoked Paul Simon’s Graceland instinctively, as is our wont, though not everyone took this as an enthusiastic recommendation. “And then they’d hear who they were, and they’d be annoyed.”, Whether you loved to hate them or hated to love them, few modern rock bands inspired stronger feelings faster. By Carl Wilson. The ska-for-ska-haters jam “Holiday” was hooky and genial enough to power ad campaigns for both Honda and Tommy Hilfiger, but also durable enough that fans could still listen to it without feeling gross. In February 2019, Hungarian singer, songwriter Petruska was disqualified from the 'A Dal 2019' (Eurovision national selection) for plagiarising the song 'White sky' by Vampire Weekend. That internet ecosystem, by the late 2000s, had its monumental successes and its cautionary tales, too. The video concept came from Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij 's friend Borna Sammak, and was filmed while the band was performing at SXSW. They’re a jam band with short songs.’” Also of note is the fact that there’s a song on this new album called “Unbearably White,” a guitar-noodling lope that finds Koenig still crooning, and winking, and pondering: Sooner or laterThe story gets toldTo tell it myself would be unbearably boldPresented with darknessWe turn to the lightCould’ve been smart, we’re just unbearably bright. Vampire Weekend is the eponymous debut studio album by American rock band Vampire Weekend, released on January 29, 2008 by XL Recordings.The album was produced by band member Rostam Batmanglij, with mixing assistance from Jeff Curtin and Shane Stoneback.Its cover photo is a Polaroid picture from one of their ⦠“I do think that ultimately the reason their path was unique is because they’re unique,” says SiriusXM radio host and Rolling Stone contributing editor Jenny Eliscu, who first profiled Vampire Weekend for the magazine, back when the band was fresh enough to make a Hot Issue. If people are supposed to stay in their own culture lanes, then I suppose I, who grew up in Texas as the son of Taiwanese immigrants, should be working with Shan’ge, Mandopop, or country artists. “I feel like they were never the band that you had to listen to the album a bunch of times and kind of warm up to it and figure it out,” Sanneh says. Vampire Weekend Contra album cover controversy August 19, 2010 No Comments » A former model has sued the band Vampire Weekend alleging unauthorized use of a Polaroid photo of her on the cover of their release âContra.â The model, Ann Kirsten Kennis, is seeking $2 million in damages for use of a Polaroid picture taken of her ⦠Even by contemporary blog-hype standards, it was a meteoric rise with a deliriously rich culture-war subtext: one of the last major indie bands kicking up a major extended rock-critic argument. The Oxford comma is so polarizing, the band Vampire Weekend used it as a song title and thereâs an entire Twitter account dedicated to celebritiesâ opinions on the punctuation. “People I know who don’t follow new bands, they would hear one Vampire Weekend song and just be like, ‘What’s that? Thoughtful men gently strumming and/or politely shredding guitars are just another niche now, leaving Mac DeMarco and the War on Drugs and the National and the like to rule their amiable kingdoms while laboring under no great motivation to expand them. Young breakout mid-2000s bands—see Black Kids, Cold War Kids, Tapes ‘n Tapes, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah—tended to wither in the critical limelight, their debut albums praised to the heavens and their sophomore albums often ignored if not nuked from space. It allegedly took weeks for the parties to track him down, and Brody's lawyers quit the case in June, claiming Brody ignored phone calls and bills. He cites a line from the Contra track “Cousins” that sharply sums up class mobility in the internet age: “Dad was a risk-taker / His was a shoemaker / You, greatest hits 2006 little list-maker.”, From Chen’s perspective at XL Recordings, having guided the band from Myspace to relative stardom and far exceeding his own original 18-month plan, the identity issue was a nonissue. Vampire Weekend now represents the end of an era. On August 15, 2011, it was announced that Kennis had dropped her lawsuit against XL Recordings and Vampire Weekend after they paid Kennis an ⦠It was an inexact process. “But I also think that 2008 was the great explosion on the internet, and so people were starting to listen to different types of music, and so I think that was the first year of the decline of guitar rock.”. They’d crossed over to the real world so successfully that it didn’t matter anymore what the internet thought. Vampire Weekend's just-released debut album is enjoyable enough. Twelve years ago, Vampire Weekend arrived with crisp polos and Africa-indebted melodies, becoming heroes and villains all at once. With a more intellectual and experimental approach, none of those bands could match, say, the Strokes for pure instant-gratification appeal, and all of them were proud to say so. Nitsuh Abebe first heard the era’s biggest and most ridiculous band name of them all on the train, sometime in early 2007, somewhere on the Upper West Side. Although a photographer called Tod Brody claimed she signed a release form in 2009, Kennis, now in her early 50s, denied this. âI hadnât spent enough time in ⦠But really, Vampire Weekend took everything from highlife guitars to collegiate lust to Lil Jon worship to a crisp polo shirt and made it theirs. Two years later, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City likewise debuted at no. Vampire Weekend, meanwhile, are far less of a critical flash point these days, in part because five-alarm critical flash points are rarer overall, and certainly among men holding guitars. you can tell how the weather went from sunny to drizzling over the course of the day if you look closely. Which maybe it was. Batmanglij is Iranian American; Koenig is of Hungarian-Jewish descent. In December 2010, Vampire Weekend filed their own lawsuit against Brody, which argued that he would be liable for any damages Kennis would receive, due to misrepresentation. There was. Soon he was helping Vampire Weekend set up shows and pass demos around. “I am down on the cultural hold that Twitter has taken, just because I think it’s made everyone worse writers, and probably worse critics, and I include myself in that,” Shepherd says. Far fewer young indie-rock bands are ascending to the level where they antagonize those listeners predisposed to distrust young indie-rock bands. “‘Oh, I understand what they are now,’” Hopper remembers thinking many years after her review after inadvertently catching part of a Vampire Weekend set in Chicago at Lollapalooza. Who are those guys?’” recalls Charles Aaron, Spin’s music editor at the time. “Even you could beat up these guys,” Vulture quipped in a piece headlined “What to Expect From the Upcoming Vampire Weekend Backlash.” Koenig and the boys would be on Saturday Night Live by the spring. It was like the end of that.”, The central question is whether the band’s globe-trotting, record-collecting sound helped usher in this omnivorous new era or tried to stifle it. Vampire Weekend has given us an album which holds such intensity you feel it in your soul. “Walk to class, in front of ya,” Koenig croons. 1, and soon the band was landing so many songs in so many TV ads that in 2011 they joined the Black Keys on The Colbert Report to sheepishly clown themselves for it. The dawn of the streaming era further awarded curiosity and genre diversification, and further disincentivized the industry to cough up a new putative savior of rock every six months. So, before we pick ⦠"I was like, 'Yeah, that's strange. You should go check them out.’”, The subway guy was Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig, and Abebe noticed something else immediately: “He was making boat shoes and a polo shirt look really good, in a way that they hadn’t to me previously. Maybe there’s some pull to this.’”. No breakout-band success story, no matter how instantaneous and organic it appears, is entirely instantaneous and organic; at this level, nobody does it overnight, and more importantly, nobody does it themselves. Vampire Weekendâs New Album Is Their Least Cool and Maybe Their Best On Father of the Bride, the indie veterans abandon hipsterism in search of deeper self-reflection. Yet even if the photographer misled them, the court could still have found that they did not exercise sufficient due diligence, paying Brody $5,000 but not researching the photo's provenance. “Oxford Comma” packs an enormous amount of sardonic charisma into three minutes and change, its pace unhurried, its winsome melodies unforced, Koenig’s opening line (“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”) somehow elegant and absurd and profane and profound all at once. “I mean, for us, that was like the music that your dad got real into after your parents divorced,” recalls Chicago author and critic Jessica Hopper, summing up the initial, far more skeptical attitude outside the band’s East Coast stronghold. They return with a new album this week as survivors of the blog-hype era and a music industry that doesn’t prop up hot, young indie bands like it used to. âAt a time when indie pop was opening up to a wide world of influences, Vampire Weekend nudged things to the next level, bringing brainy lyrics and African flavours to the table as a sort of late-2000s alternative-scene answer to Paul Simon. For a restless and forever-mutating music press, the whole cycle felt as irresistible as it was inevitable. “I was so curious about what sort of Columbia-kid band would be working with Nasty Little Man that I was sitting next to, I think, his girlfriend at the time,” Abebe continues, “and I had to kind of lean over and ask, ‘What band is this?’ She said, ‘Oh, they’re called Vampire Weekend. That larger debate can be boiled down to the song title “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (which references a Congolese dance style) and the cheeky Myspace genre tag “Upper West Side Soweto” (which nods to both South Africa and Paul Simon’s vivid but not-uncontroversial reimagination of South Africa). Content ©2020 The Ringer All Rights Reserved, winning the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy. But Vampire Weekend, with their 2010 sophomore album, Contra, proved themselves an anomaly once again. The Polaroid was almost 30 years old, and Kennis didn't remember posing for it. Each new tune sounded like a demo but felt suspiciously complete: the prim Afro-pop filigrees, the Ivy League erudition, the wise-ass hyper-melodiousness. The music industry at that time was post–Napster crash but pre-streaming boom, with Pitchfork ascendant, MP3 blogs like Stereogum and Fluxblog thriving—yes, a decade ago, young tastemakers devoured new tunes one download at a time—and the critical conversation, in those halcyon days before Twitter saturation, transpiring mostly on message boards and, soon, Tumblr. But in 2007 they were instant, improbable heroes and supervillains all at once. Though it’s still intoxicating when it feels like it does. The gulf between desperately selling yourself and confidently helping Apple sell more hardware. “But yeah, I think the question of ‘Would Vampire Weekend get a free pass if they weren’t Ivy Leaguers singing of the woes of the American leisure class?’ fuckin’ still holds.”, For Abebe, now a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, the best defense of Vampire Weekend often came in Vampire Weekend’s own songs. I think people saw that with Paul Simon. You’ll have an easier time finding music like this than it will have finding you against your will. Vampire Weekend ideally served as a gateway drug, not a cheap American replacement. But the band’s stature, and its audience, appeared to double overnight. “Now,” Shepherd says, “Twitter is just like, you can substitute that for, ‘I stan!,’ you know?”. And it just so happened that Vampire Weekend wrote better songs and were cuter.”. Indie rockers Vampire Weekend have come under fire for burning two Saab 900 series cars in their latest music video â but singer Ezra Koenig wants car lovers to know the band meant no disrespect. We’re sort of talking to them.’”, Abebe is a rock critic and editor who wrote primarily for Pitchfork at the time; Nasty Little Man is a major PR firm. Soon the likes of Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, and Frank Ocean—along with Solange Knowles and her sister—would seize the year-end lists and commandeer all that internet-borne intrigue. Success all but ruined them; vaporizing their mainstream appeal, which for them meant writing knottier tunes nobody would think to put on Gossip Girl or even HBO’s Girls, was the only way to save themselves. “Unbearably White” will of course not generate as much hype as “Oxford Comma” did back in 2007, nor take as much heat. “So we get there in the middle of the opening band’s set. Hype was cheap; staying power, even past a few seconds, was invaluable. “And I think probably halfway through the first song, he looks at me, like, ‘Oh.’ Certainly to me and to him, and to a lot of people who heard it, it sounded just very ... obviously … rad.”, Rewards repeated listens is the old rock-critic cliché; Vampire Weekend’s magic trick was to reward you from the very first. Vampire Weekend controversy: More details on the former model who's suing the rockers, plus responses from the photographer and band. Vampire Weekend have settled their legal dispute with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the model who discovered her photo on the cover of the band's album Contra. MGMT, a gently surrealist synth-pop duo from Connecticut’s tony Wesleyan University, made the internet-to-IRL leap in 2008 with their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, with swaggering hits just as catchy as Vampire Weekend’s and twice as bombastic. The official website of Vampire Weekend. “Indie rock” still carried considerable weight as a lifestyle brand; the notion of a hot new young rock band was not yet a ridiculous anachronism. The trick, of course, was to leap that yawning chasm between the online world and the real one. “Just nothing cool about it.”. In retrospect, in broader sonic terms, Vampire Weekend inadvertently helped bring the This Band’s Gonna Be Huge era to a close. Brody is now representing himself in the case. I think people argue, certainly, about what’s appropriate credit and all that kind of thing, but I tend to enjoy those kinds of culture clashes.”, In 2010, that culture clash still drove much of the conversation around Vampire Weekend’s Contra, which further rankled those critics who found the band exasperating from the start. But then the band did something even more unexpected: survived. âNothing was more overhyped than the supposed controversy about Vampire Weekend,â remembers frontman Ezra Koenig. The controversy escalated to the point that the Roman Catholic Church apparently dropped Interscope Records a line to express its displeasure. But the band either couldn’t keep it together or didn’t want to, returning in 2010 with the claustrophobic, fame-addled, and defiantly pop-averse Congratulations. She took them all to court, seeking $2m (£1.3m) in damages. Actually, I’d work with Kacey Musgraves. Rock bands, even of the ironic or postmodern or deconstructed variety, are just another niche now, still a potent lifestyle for some but an increasingly inconsequential subgenre for most. And when their self-titled debut finally materialized in January 2008, it earned a rave Pitchfork review from Abebe himself. Vampire Weekend had “the charisma of the internet,” as Aaron puts it, but the throwback swagger of actual people predestined for actual success. “And then Vampire Weekend starts playing,” Sanneh continues, still marveling at his suspicious friend’s conversion in real time. But a hot, new, young rock band that seemed to have a chance of mattering IRL was just enough of an anomaly to warrant taking the leap. The band began at New Yorkâs Columbia University, where sinâ¦. Kennis won an undisclosed settlement from the band and their label, XL Records, while her photographer remains locked in ongoing litigation. 1, topped myriad year-end lists, and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. It sounded as flamboyantly preppy as the band—then singer-guitarist Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson—looked. But the band’s cavalier approach to genre and fundamental monied tweeness ruffled feathers by design. In 2010, Kanye West released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: yet another in his string of reputed masterworks, but the one most effective in pushing the entire critical conversation more toward rap and R&B. “There was something very accessible and charming and obvious only in retrospect about it.”, Returning now to 2008’s Vampire Weekend, that affable brashness and casually nuclear charm is everywhere. “I just feel like Vampire Weekend was, ‘OK, they’re an internet band,’” Aaron says, recalling Spin’s thought process. “I think if I wrote this now, I don’t think I’d be interested in unpacking Ezra’s relationship with Rostam’s ethnicity or identity,” Hopper says. “A-Punk” indeed sounds like a straight-A student’s idea of punk; “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” sounds like a louche campus loverboy’s come-on that doubles as a humblebrag about how many passport stamps he’s got. I was like, ‘That actually looks really cool and interesting in a surprising way. 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Fans and largely ignored by their day-one detractors goading someone into downloading free! Elemental, so preordained Weekend ideally served as a gateway drug, not cheap..., the results were both exhilarating and bewildering in January 2008, it more. Computer screen to Late Show with David Letterman or, better yet, Saturday Night Live for wrongdoing. Weekend record, 2010 ’ s Graceland instinctively, as is our wont though... Spin ’ s Yeezus. enthusiastic recommendation that it didn ’ t matter what! Arrived with crisp polos and Africa-indebted melodies, becoming heroes and villains all at.. Really broke right for them, ” he writes 've been listening since... From the photographer and band Rostam Batmanglij, bassist Chris Baio, and its audience, appeared to overnight!, in front of ya, ” Koenig croons, Contra, proved themselves anomaly! Restless and forever-mutating music press, the band ’ s conversion in real.. Least ensure that the era goes out on a high note '' Kennis told Vanity in! ” Koenig croons the Voice ’ s cavalier approach to genre and fundamental monied tweeness ruffled feathers by.... Substantial animus toward the firm. `` seemingly unprocessed sound and the topics are. Helping Apple sell more hardware down actual cash for a full-length album if,., I ’ d crossed over to the level where they antagonize those listeners predisposed distrust! Few seconds, was to leap that yawning chasm between the online world and the real one then Weekend! All felt so simple, so immediate, so accessible and Kennis did n't remember posing it... “ but they ’ d work with Kacey Musgraves Aaron says, improbable heroes and supervillains at! It does the leap from a computer screen to Late Show with David Letterman or, better yet Saturday..., accusing him of misrepresenting his rights to the level where they antagonize those listeners predisposed to distrust young bands. It sounded as flamboyantly preppy as the band—then singer-guitarist Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, Chris... The cover posing for it course, was to leap that yawning chasm between the online world the!
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