Vampire Weekend, at once the product of the hipster hypemachine and the hipster backlash machine) is playing in the midwest this week so they got interviewed in the Real Detroit Weekly.
The band had a lot to say about grammar, Brooklyn, Columbia (Charles Tilly even gets a mention), among other things. Then there were the questions about Africa:
Have any of you guys ever been to Africa?
No.How do you guys capture that aesthetic as New Yorkers?
I guess we just try and make it happen wherever we are. We’ve had really good experiences playing our music in cold places. We played a show in Salt Lake City and it was snowing outside, it’s always nice to play outside when it’s warm but sometimes the opposite can be just as fun.With the role that African music plays in the band, do you have the urge to pull a Bono and become an activist?
It’s very important for me; I would like to do things in my life besides pop music that maybe would benefit people in a more obvious way. And yeah, I’m very interested in current events and politics and reading up on the political situations in Africa. Our music reflects our love of African music, but it doesn’t seem to be the appropriate venue to talk about African politics or issues. Sometimes it really isn’t good for anybody to make a heavy-handed political song, ultimately you’re making a worse pop song and you’re not even making the right kind of political statement, so I wouldn’t wanna mix those things up unless I felt like I really knew how.
Okay so Africa is a warm continent and they don’t want to be like Bono. And you can talk about Africa and not talk about Africans. Okay.
This guff is a little disappointing given how closely they have duplicated South African vernacular pop music of the 1980s. I understand that they don’t want to detract from the sunny appeal of their music, but they could at least pay homage to the sounds that must contribute in some way to their success (catchy lyrics about orthography, notwithstanding).