South African Terror MC, who mainly rhymes in Afrikaans, made Street Life (download for free), and hipster rappers 88 Keys brought out The Death of Adam. DC rapper Wale’s Seinfeld inspired Mixtape About Nothing. Two retro albums: Zimbabweans Green Arrows’ 4 Track Recording Session and Puerto Rican salsa singer Hector Lavoe’s La Voz. My top ten albums are rounded out by Imani Coppola’s The Black and White Album (my 3 year old loves the song, “Raindrops From The Sun (Hey,Hey,Hey”) and Santogold’s self-titled album.

I hate lists. And I am probably going to get some hate mail. But you don’t have to like everything I like. Make your own list.

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.

Over the last year Vampire Weekend built its hype all through the band’s Myspace page and concerts around the New York City area (full disclosure: I went to see them at Music Hall in Williamsburg … and enjoyed it).

Mike Powell in the Village Voice reminds us that the band’s pre-album hype was built on a catalog ‘… that was 14 minutes long‘ and that its all a schtick.

In the same edition, however, it is Julianne Sheppard who really goes after Vampire Weekend. Sheppeard accuses the band of consciously working to ‘… Westernize or “whitewash” an indigenous music …’ (the band borrows a lot from African music, while often deliberately downplaying that influence in public) and that their creative process involves: ‘… run[ning] their influences through a steam-cleaner—in sound, in texture, in language, in execution—until there’s nothing left but space and simplicity and precious little conflict …’ The result: ‘… I can’t down with [them] no matter how many times homeboys drop a Lil Jon reference.’

Ouch.

Of course I can see through the conceit and the odd aesthetic and old school politics. But does it make me a bad person if I like the music?

To hear more, listen here.

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.