Africa is a Country

I’ve been obsessing now about the New York City band Vampire Weekend for a while.
Vampire Weekend may have nothing to do with Africa, apart from being African in a postmodern way. The group’s songs play around with African (mostly South African) sounds made obvious by how they reference their musical style: “Upper West Side Soweto.” But it also comes through in their catchy song titles (“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” for example).
New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones recently summed up (including incorrectly tracing their style mainly to Paul Simon) their gimmick (they very popular among New York music journalists, hipsters, bloggers, and the residents of Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg):
‘The four recent Columbia University graduates who make up Vampire Weekend describe their style as “Upper West Side Soweto.” Paul Simon’s “Graceland” has been, until now, the working definition of Upper West Side Soweto, but twenty-somethings must be making rougher and stranger music, right? Not really. Vampire Weekend is the first band to pick up where Simon left off, combining various Afro-pop forms with Western book learning. The band makes sunny, almost weightless music and is confident enough to play without noise or volume. The guitarist and singer Ezra Koenig makes references both to a background of privilege (arguments about punctuation, a trip to Dharamsala, and Benetton, a label so out of fashion no rapper would dare name-check it) and to things teen-agers anywhere might recognize (reggaetón and the hip-hop artist Lil Jon). I’ve seen people born after “Graceland” dancing at Vampire Weekend shows. The band plays at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sept. 8.’

* Image taken from the New Yorker’s website.