Bernice's music for the evening of february the thirteenth in the year of our lord two thousand eight.
Vampire Weekend - M79.
This song is pretty bitchin'. Vampire Weekend is officially my flavour of the week, and by that i mean i am about three weeks behind the people with real music blogs who matter, and think themselves to be cooler than us.
tells me what ya think
B.
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2 comments:
So this band, Vampire Weekend. Bad name. Sounds like the new Arctic Monkeys record. Their deal? I explore.
The guys' name for the genre of music they play is "Upper West Side Soweto" (the former is even richer than most of Manhattan and full of colonial brownstone houses; the latter is a poor black area in South Africa) and their hit Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa is named after a quaint American peninsula and a mostly Congolese popular dance. So these guys are obviously setting themselves up, before you even hit play, as a band with feet in two worlds. Very multicultural. Very chic. And their influences, at least on CCKK, seem legit. Not that I'm an expert, but that tune's got some sounds that straight Afro to me--impressively so for four white Columbia grads. What are we dealing with, then? The Graceland comparisons are obvious; we've got South Africa and other atypical musical influences. I'd suggest they even go further than that: this song is a call for reconciliation and the end of separation and distinctions like the ones the band tries to straddle. Like Graceland... except apartheid is over. In this case, I think the song is definitely an anthem to global citizenship and humanism--maybe even with some stuff about Iraq. I'm serious.
The sound of the track, obviously, is a poppy intersection of Western classical/baroque and some Afro-ish mostly reggae rhythms. So we're in familiar territory there. The title of the track, M79, refers either to an American-made grenade launcher used first in Vietnam or to a hugely uninteresting state highway in Michegan. I tend to opt for the latter, given the words to the first verselet "..Backseat on the 79", but there are less ambiguous allusions to war and conflict later in the tune, so bear the other meaning in mind. Check the lyrics so you can follow me.
It's going to take a little time
While you're waiting like a factory line
I'll fly across the park
Backseat on the 79
Wasted days you've come to pass
So go, I know you would not stay
It wasn't true, but anyway
Pollination yellow cab
You walk up the stairs
See the French kids by the door
Up one more flight
See the Buddha on the second floor
Coronation rickshaw grab
So go, I know you would not stay
It wasn't true, but anyway
Racist dreams you should not have
No excuse to be so callous
Dress yourself in bleeding madras
Charm your way across the Khyber Pass
Stay awake to break the habit
Sing in praise of Jackson Crowter
Watch your step along the arch of glass
It's going to take a little time--wasted days you've come to pass--go, I knew you would not stay--these are all pretty clearly linked to a sense of having given up on something that might not have been a good idea in the first place. This much is obvious. There are also subtler images of infiltration and penetration into places you shouldn't be in the second and third verses. The juxtaposition of French kids and Buddha, never meaningfully linked in history, gives the sense of an uncertain ascent through some kind of cultural zoo; this is fitting, because it is at this point that the song becomes "exotic" and its normative implications start to coalesce.
"Coronation rickshaw grab," along with "wasted days you've come to pass," is part of an odd structure which allows for a line to sit metrically alone, tacked on as a kind of verse and a half. What does it mean? Monarchial ostentation and humble indigence, linked by an almost playful "grab". That's a power gradient and an bullying theft.
It should therefore be noted that racial tension is introduced in the second chorus--don't be fooled, this isn't part of the Africa theme. It's more directly related the content of the third verse. Madras, for those who don't know, is a light cotton cloth originating from the Indian city of the same name; it is popular abroad as grotesque patchwork plaid (coexisting colours, baby, see below) and it is also worn less garishly in the region. The Khyber pass is the mountain pass that connects Pakistan to Afghanistan; everybody from Alexander the Great to the Muslims to the Mughals to Rudyard Kipling has fought through while trying to invade India at some point. (Not that anybody's invading India, but the Afghani-Pakistani "border" is certainly a hotspot right now.) What does it mean, to ask that the unknown "you" dress in relatively local clothing and charm, rather than fight, across the Pass? Duh, it means walk a mile in the shoes of the exotic rickshaw guy before you try to invade his country, and see if you can't avoid force to get what you want. Stay awake--vigilant--to break the habit--of violence and ethnocentrism--and watch your step along this hugely delicate arch of glass upon which you now walk. Through this lens, "I'll fly across the park" maybe becomes "I'll fly across the Park," i.e. to Harlem, and the song becomes a giggling kind of declaration of the band's dissociation from the white supremacy and American hegemonism that characterizes the "you" of the song. "Go, I know you would not stay/ It wasn't true, but anyway" is a shrug of indifference; these boys have figured out how to live in harmony and make pretty cool music that recognizes no cultural divides, chilling out with the French kids and the Buddhists and the Indian rickshaw dudes--and if the world can't follow them there before it's too late, then that's no big deal. In a sense it's typical of the freewheeling kind of indifferent, wanderlusty bohemianism that is precisely the luxury rich white kids like you and I--and Vampire Weekend--dream of.
Incidentally, I think Jackson Crowter is the conceivable name in the world that receives no Google hits that aren't related to this song.
Also. "It wasn't true" obviously refers to WMDs.
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