Vampire Weekend "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"

At one point during Vampire Weekend’s set here in Bloomington last November (opening for Baltimore’s Celebration), singer Ezra Koenig remembered the last time the band came to our fair college town, as openers for the Dirty Projectors a few months prior. The bits of Koenig’s wistful reminiscence could have been taken directly from a dewy period piece: he recalled the crisp fall weather, his knowledge that a new semester was starting, and the sight of a guy throwing a football out of a fraternity window to another fraternity guy in the front lawn. He must have noticed, as I did, an audience staring back at him that more likely than not,defined itself in stark subcultural opposition to everything he was describing. If so, he didn’t show it, and the band started into another song.

Maybe that song was “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” which I heard at some point that evening; I can’t remember. It was one of the more memorable moments from their debut EP from a few months back, but its recontextualizing of a decades-old Congolese dance rhythm to an upper-middle class, educated, white demographic might make many think indie-style colonialism. It makes me think of what Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called “tourist realism” in “Maasai on the Lawn”: an account is of a British-run tourist trap in Kenya that hired and paid local tribesmen and women to perform their traditional rituals, every day, for rich visitors who watched them while drinking tea, before taking a bus back to Nairobi. Every bit of the performance was framed for the tourists’ amateur photographic lenses, which permanently fixed an essentializing gaze upon the tribespeople. The Maasai were required to clock in and out each day, before and after performing a stylized version, more or less, of themselves and their traditions.

“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is a similar form of colonial performance: a group of four Columbia-educated kids (three white, one Indian) making a bit of central African dance culture work for them, on their and their audience’s own terms. But it’s not Graceland, which was blinded by the straight-faced West-helps-the-rest ideology so pervasive in the mid-1980s, with Paul Simon parading Ladysmith Black Mambazo in front of American audiences, using their own cultural authenticity to reaffirm his own place in the pop-cultural landscape.

No, “Kwassa Kwassa” is a nostalgic song, like a lot of Vampire Weekend’s music, but one that, like the band’s on-stage garb of tucked-in Oxford shirts and deck shoes, purposefully plays with vanilla, upper-crust symbols of category membership. Within its first two verses, the song rhymes “Louis Vuitton” with “reggaeton,” and documents (like Art Brut’s “Rusted Guns of Milan” and a thousand other songs), an awkward, lusty, teenage experience. This one happened to be soundtracked by Peter Gabriel.

The phrase “Kwassa Kwassa,” of course, is to be taken metaphorically in a similar way that “rock and roll” originally was. This, of course, carries with it (for those who care to look) a swarm of issues surrounding the co-optation of black music by whites. Koenig is no dummy here, either: when he sings the word “Benetton,” and the lyric “but this feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too,” he’s explicitly laying at critics’ doorsteps the opportunity to run wild with theories about this fucking Ivy League motherfucker and how all he knows about Africa he learned from magazine ads and by listening to Us. Or: how this kid is creating the same sort of snow-globed, slickly-realized cultural cosmopolitanism that tourist companies and hotel chains make billions of dollars from.

In his retort to Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker piece regarding the perceived whiteness of indie rock, Carl Wilson noted, “(SF-J’s) consistent mistake seems to be to talk about musical issues as if they were nearly autonomous from larger social dynamics. It’s the blind spot of a genuine music lover, but it grants music culture too much power and assigns it too much blame.” What Frere-Jones misses, Wilson rightly argues, is class: “the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.” This sort of music “shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.”

Yet it’s this exact context that also leads to the sort of gumbo that Vampire Weekend creates in “Kwassa Kwassa,” which SF-J currently ranks as his #10 song of 2007. The song is, in Frere-Jones’ terms, “miscegenated” through and through, no question. At the same time, though, Koenig ensures through his strategic cultural references that it’s also bookish and ironic, the sort of “coffeehouse indie” of Wilson’s description. Most importantly, it’s also purposefully “white,” and, I would argue, “self-aware.”

In his Stylus review of the band’s EP, Mike Powell wrote:

“The question of whether or not four Columbia grads have a right to clumsily approximate African rhythms misses the point. Better that they exist in all their postcolonial glory if it means one less boring rock band. Furthermore, because they probably grew up in houses whose owners spun Graceland a lot more often than Can records or early disco, they come by their sound honestly—and, if not unpretentiously, under a pretense that a lot of people can probably share.”

I agree with Powell’s idea that calling out Vampire Weekend’s cultural authenticity is off-base, and I’d add that calling out this band for their (currently hip) African appropriations is just another form of genre gatekeeping. Yet while I can sign off on the guys’ affective engagement with this music coming from an “honest” place–just like Koenig’s in-concert collegiate reveries the other night–I also believe that Koenig knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes his lyrics. He’s speaking, like a lot of us typerly types are trained to do, in simultaneous dialects of ethnography and irony, playing with charged ideas that are bound to get people into two types of tizzy. One: the type of tizzy that calls the band a bunch of candy-ass indie-colonialist assholes, or, two: my current tizzy, which struggles with whether Koenig wants the first tizzy to happen.

I’m not saying that Koenig’s sort of wise-assedness—a geekier take on the private-school brand that the Strokes and Walkmen work so well—makes Vampire Weekend great, or that this sort of coyness doesn’t bother me (which it does). It’s just that I don’t think it’s giving a seeming purist like Koenig too much credit to infer that he thinks Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon watered down African music to fit within a Western pop template, and in the process made sappy pap that’s impossible to fuck to in your parents’ beach house.

I’m also not trying to say that Vampire Weekend is ammunition to shoot holes in Carl’s essay; he never says this sort of thing is impossible, and certainly theories come with exceptions. What I am saying, is that Koenig’s own virtuosic performance of clueless bougie cosmopolitanism underscores the fact that larger social dynamics can also show through indie music in ways that confuse the assumed wisdom about how they’re supposed to operate. After all, Vampire Weekend isn’t alone in their appreciation for a certain trendy bagmaker: fittingly, Wilson wraps up his piece with a reference to the self-proclaimed “Louis Vuitton Don.”