The new Vampire Weekend is good, but comes with baggage
The new Vampire Weekend album, Only God Was Above Us, is here. It is the band’s first album since 2019’s sprawling, laborious Father of the Bride. It is better than that album, too, replacing its sprawl instead with a synthesis of the sounds that made their first three albums so indelible. You could call it a return to form.
Vampire Weekend have never been a confrontational band, but they have tended to approach their songs, which deal in privilege, religion and history, with a wry scepticism. I don’t get that impression as much from this collection of tracks. Only God Was Above Us finds the band accepting their lot fairly gracefully (aurally, with a bit of distortion) and imploring the listener to do the same. The eight-minute closer, ‘Hope’, plainly makes its case: “The enemy’s invincible / I hope you let it go”. On ‘Gen X Cops’, Ezra Koenig mulls over the line “each generation makes its own apology”, taking time to internalise its dour significance. And I really like the way ‘Ice Cream Piano’ answers its acerbic verses with such an earnest, abstracted resolution:
In dreams, I scream “piano”, I softly reach the high note
The world don’t recognise a singer who won’t sing.
In the third verse, Koenig’s voice goes up an octave and floats over the classically Vampire Weekend lyric “third generation Transylvanian”. It is an endearing rejection of pretense: reaching the high note, Koenig makes a quiet plea for the world to recognise him and his band.
He need not ask. Everyone is talking about Only God Was Above Us. Most are full of praise, rightfully so. But few have addressed the baggage that comes with hearing a new Vampire Weekend album in 2024. In 2021, writer and actor Tavi Gevinson published an essay outlining the abuse she experienced at the age of 18 in a relationship with a man understood to be Ezra Koenig. He was 30 at the time. The essay, which I discovered only two months ago, is astonishing; the reality is devastating. Since then, I have found it hard to appraise Vampire Weekend’s music. It leaves me without much more to say about the album. Instead, it seems more appropriate to share Gevinson’s writing.
Britney Spears was never in control
What ‘Tar’ knows about the artist as abuser
From the second piece, the following words felt particularly resonant. I can’t improve upon them so I will end the essay here:
I still value the sanctity of the artist-audience exchange, but it worries me when conversations about artists’ misdeeds end up centering on it. When an artist is revealed to have abused someone, we ask, “Can we still like their art? Is it still O.K. to?” These questions treat every individual’s response to art as a morality test. They confuse optics with ethics, muddying a useful distinction between reacting to a work of art—an act that, after all, is something visceral and involuntary, like laughter—and materially supporting it. Discussions around accountability and practical consequences for abusers get sidelined in favor of abstract exercises around taste and identity. Justice appears to have been served merely because a legacy has been tainted. I do not mean to suggest that art works can be divorced from social context, only that our reactions to them are not, in themselves, public statements, acts of harm, or good deeds.
Sam Gollings