During 2008, New York based Vampire Weekend became one of the most talked about new bands in Indie Rock.  Four Columbia University grads came together to create the band in 2006, and garnered a loyal following and considerable press even before their self-titled debut CD came out early in 2008.  The band was instantly interesting to Afropop Worldwide because among the diverse elements they draw upon in creating their songs is electric African pop music.  We caught Vampire Weekend at their Central Park Summerstage concert in June.  Despite a torrential rain, the band’s huge audience stayed, got soaked and sang their hearts out during the set.  From there, Vampire Weekend toured heavily, and by the time they returned to New York for three nights at Terminal 5 in November, new songs had crept into to the repertoire, including one (tentatively called “Little Giant”) in which keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij picks up a guitar and he and Koenig engage in a riff that sounds straight out of classic South African mbaqanga.

Vampire Weekend represent an important stream through which Africa is moving into the American mainstream.  The rise of African rappers like Emmanuel Jal and K’Naan is another, along with a growing cadre of Africanized rock acts (Afrissippi, Markus James) and the success of African-inspired jam band Toubab Krewe. (Not to mention our recent presidential election…)  All of this puts new meaning to the phrase “Africa in America,” and these are sure signs that the Afropop story is now entering a new phase.  Banning Eyre sat down with Vampire Weekend guitarist and lead singer Ezra Koenig at Terminal 5 to talk about the band’s music.  Here’s their conversation, along with Banning’s photos of the Central Park concert.  You can also view Santiago Felipe's photo feature of the same concert.

B.E.: Let’s start with the story of how African music got into the mix with Vampire Weekend?  Who heard what and so on? 

E.K.:  Part of the back story on Vampire Weekend is that we had known each other long before this particular band started, and some of the other projects that we had worked on had been things like rap, electronic music, things pretty different than a rock band.  And I think that's partially because we found being in a rock band kind of boring.  I mean, I had definitely been in my share, but it kind of seemed like it would be easier to come up with more interesting ideas without using the standard rock instruments, you know, if you were using a computer.  So when we started this band, it was very important to us not to, I don't know, sound too much like just kind of a generic, alternative rock band.  And I think it's a hard tendency, especially when you grew up in the 90s, because when you get a guitar, you want to start playing grunge power cords, and when you get on the drums, you want to play like Dave Grohl, which is cool, but it's not what we wanted to do, so I think the minute our band started, we weren't exactly sure how we wanted it to sound, but we immediately looked to any kind of music that we liked that used rock instruments, but didn't use them in the same old rock way.  And I think African music is probably, to generalize, the best example of that.

And especially I think a lot of the African music that we were listening to at the time didn't even have a horn section.  It would be just guitars, bass, keyboards, and drums-- just exactly what Vampire Weekend is, what a lot of bands are.  So that immediately, from our first songs, kind of inspired me to not play power chords.  If you listen to the album, there really is not a lot of space taken up by the guitar.  It's a lot of just single strings.  It leaves more room for the bass to move, and the keyboards to move.  So that's kind of how it started.  “Oxford Comma” we played in our first practice.  That has almost no guitar on it.  And then we decided to put in a guitar solo.  When I was trying to think about what kind of guitar solo would fit on that song, I don't know if it really sounds like King Sunny Ade or anything, but I did try to make this kind of generalized version of what I thought sounded like some of these African guitarists that I liked.  So from the very first song, that was an element.  Then we had these songs like “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” where it became more explicit.  But yeah, it's always been kind of inspiration for this band.

B.E.:  Who are some of the particular guitarists or bands that first inspired you?

E.K.:  I think probably the single biggest influence, especially when I was in college, was Orchestra Baobab.  I think I was probably a freshman in college when they reissued those early albums [like Pirate’s Choice, (World Circuit/Nonesuch)].  I think very few Americans had probably heard those records.  I understand that they were kind of legendarily hard to find until they were reissued in the late 90s, early 2000s.  So not only did I hear those albums, but the first thing I thought of is that it sounded so much like surf music, which I was also kind of obsessed with when I was a kid.  So just hearing those reverby guitar leads going all over the place, I really liked that.  And then I also got to see them twice when I was in college.  They came and played a show in Central Park, actually at Summerstage.  That was the first band I saw at Summerstage.  And I also saw them at S.O.B.s.  It might have even been the same tour.  And I had never seen anything like that live, so definitely that was a big inspiration.  And then right when the band started, I found a compilation called Madagasikara 2 [1986 GlobeStyle release focused on popular music and featuring Rossy, Mahaleo, and the original lineup of Tarika Sammy, among others.]  It was compiled in the 80s.  I don't even know how I ended up with it.  The first album of that series is traditional, and this is the more electric stuff, and everything on that sounded so great to me.  Again there was a very distinct guitar sound.

B.E.:  Since then, I'm sure you've discovered other things.  Any other favorites you want to mention?

E.K.:  Since then, I guess we listen to a lot of stuff in the car.  What are some things that we got into?  I got this compilation of Kenyan 45s, where it's like side A and side B of the same song, and it fades out and fades in.  There's one group called Super Mazembe.  Is that Kenyan?

B.E.:  Yes.  Actually, some of them are Congolese guys, but they formed in Kenya.

E.K.:  I was particularly taken with that group.  And I think since then, we've also been listening to all sorts of other music.  I have been pretty interested lately in bachata, which I also see a similarity to.  I think, again, having grown up and been a kid in the grunge era, I automatically like stuff that isn't distorted.  So part of that is these groups we've been talking about, but also, bachata is like the ultimate cleanest guitar sound.  And obviously there is a lot of crossover between Caribbean music and African music, so that's something I've been into, but even with bachata, it is pop music, but if you don't speak Spanish, it isn't exactly pop music, because it flows in different channels, which is also something I find fascinating, especially in New York.  You have this incredibly popular music that is almost invisible to a certain segment of the population.  I really like this group Monchy y Alexandra [major Dominican Republic bachata duo since 1999].  They're like superstars, but to me, it sounds like the Talking Heads or something.  Because I didn't grow up with it, it has this totally different sound to me and I love it.

B.E.:  There's a great live bachata scene up in Washington Heights, and I know what you mean.  Most people who aren't in that community have no idea about.

E.K.:  Yeah.  I'd like to check that out.

B.E.:  It's interesting that your attraction to the clean guitar tone was a rejection of grunge music.  That is certainly one way to come by it.  I've seen that in your early interviews, you use to describe yourselves as "Upper West Side Soweto,” and “preppiness with West African guitar pop.”  Do phrases like that strike you as a paradox?

E.K.:  You know, sometimes it's funny when I see interviews where we get too intellectual about things, because the way we speak about things among ourselves, as probably is true among most bands, we start talking about vibes and all these very weird concepts that maybe only matter to people who listen to music.  So to me, and this is fairly distinct from the musical side of it, I have always been very interested in kind of cultural connections.  I spent a lot of time when I was in school taking especially literature courses about British India, which is in some ways a horrible time, but also important.  To look back at that period helps you to understand why India is the way it is today and the way England is today, and even the way America is today.  So in a cultural way, I don't think it's a paradox.  This is not the first time in history that people are moving around the planet and meeting each other, and being exposed to new kinds of art.  There is a serious history, and as you start moving further and further back, you start to see that what’s really paradoxical is that people think of different kinds of music as being opposite.  Especially with African music because you don't have to go back very far to realize that the electric guitar, which has become almost emblematic in African music, is an American instrument.  And you know, even with American pop music, you go back and people talk about the Arabic singing diaspora, and how it spread into Africa, and then on to blues and rock 'n roll.  Especially nowadays, people look at the Middle East and America as two extreme opposites, but then you can go back, and musically, they start to merge into the same thing. 

So I don't find those things paradoxical.  Those particular phrases... Upper West Side Soweto.  To me, my parents were total 70s, upper west side, liberal people.  So to me, my concept of the upper west side is this kind of American, funky, liberal bastion.  So to me I see a connection between that and Soweto.  It makes me think back to the 80s, and the beginning of this kind of multicultural concert.  But then, I started to regret that, because I realized that to a lot of people, especially today, the upper west side is not a funky, liberal, intellectual place.  It's a rich place.  So when I look at that phrase today, I think that to some people it sounds like we're these privileged Westerners who are just making a funny juxtaposition of a rich place and an oppressed, poor place.  I certainly don't want to pursue that.  So I feel like some people kind of get what we were going for with that, but we don't really define ourselves by that phrase at all.

B.E.:  I like what you said about the juxtaposition of opposites.  That's very interesting.  When you talk about the Arabic vocal diaspora, and the connection with the blues, I don't think most Americans are aware of that.  I think it seems like a complete contradiction to people that there's something Arabic about the blues.

E.K.:  Right.  And you look at the way that even the totally white-bread contestants on American Idol sing, with all the riffing, and that's a straight line back to Arabic music, obviously filtered through African American music.  But I think it's really interesting.  I guess it was around that time in college too.  I was in England and I went to this museum in Oxford where Brian Eno had made this map of the Arabic singing diaspora.  It was the first time I heard about it.  And then I remember Rostam, our keyboardist, was taking a jazz transcription class where he was transcribing Beyonce’s vocals, so we were talking about that whole concept a lot, about the way that people do melismas in vocals.  I still have a way to go with my melismatic singing, but in a conceptual way, I think it totally relates to what we do.

B.E.:  Well, your singing is excellent.  I'm sure you could develop that if you wanted to.

E.K.:  Thanks.  Yeah, yeah.  I think maybe I'll take some lessons.  It would be cool to take some lessons with a teacher who was just like totally not an American…  because you know, people when they give you lessons, they sometimes try to force you into a certain style.  You hear in certain stuff, even Jewish music, like you know the way the cantor sings, they are racing all over the place.

B.E.:  How aware do you think your audience is of all these international influences?  And does it matter?

E.K.:  Well, as I think you probably saw at Central Park, and you'll see again tonight, as our music is played for more and more people, the audience becomes more and more diverse.  So you have older people who like it, who have been listening to music their whole lives.  You have 13-year-olds, even younger kids who like it, who probably are only starting to develop cultural concepts of music.  So it really depends on the person.  We've had journalists and fans ask us very specific questions, saying "On your song ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ you really remind me of this is Zairian guitarist.  What do you have to say about that?"  And I have no idea who he’s talking about.  So that's one end of the spectrum, people who are familiar with this music and really want to make specific connections.  And then I've had people who say like the most general thing.  "There's something about your music that I find kind of tropical.  Is that on purpose?"  Well, we listen to music from places you could call tropical.  So people notice it in different ways.

Whether it matters?  I like to think that the way I listen to music and the way the other guys in the band listen to music—and you know, we're all kind of music nerds—when you really get into an album and you fall in love with this album, you really want to hear what the people are influenced by and what they listen to, and that usually introduces you to other things.  So I'm sure…  I know for a fact.  We’ve gotten MySpace messages where kids say, "Oh, I hear you guys really like African music.  I know nothing about it.  They don't play that music on the radio where I live.  What do you recommend?"  And in our limited capacity, it's nice to be able to say, "Well, here are some compilations that I like.  Maybe you would like them.  "  But if they don't feel that way, I don't really see a downside either.  People can raise criticism when one of your influences is some kind of non-American or non-Western music.  Because they kind of look at it as a zero sum game, as if like a 13-year-old kid in Nebraska if they listen to Vampire Weekend, then they'll be listening to Thomas Mapfumo.  It doesn't work that way.  Maybe they'll listen to Vampire Weekend and get more interested in African music.  And if they don't…  You know, it's a huge world, and they've got their whole lives in front of them.

B.E.:  I find it interesting, because I've been waiting for bands to do this for a long time, to take elements from African music, especially African guitar music, and use it in a completely non-world music context, maybe a little bit analogous to what The Police did with reggae.  I've known that this had to happen sooner or later.  So when I read about you guys, I was curious.  I see you guys as part of a larger emersion of Africa into the American mainstream.  I see it in the success of African rappers.  Also, do you know this band out of Asheville, North Carolina, Toubab Krewe?

E.K.:  No.  Actually, I don't.

B.E.:  Well, they are more of a jam band than you guys, but they have a very loyal following.  They're very successful.  They play traditional West African instruments and music, but they play it as rock 'n roll.  And as with you guys, their audience takes them on their own terms, as American music, certainly not as a world music act.

Let's switch to guitar.  What made you first want to play the guitar?

E.K.:  Well, I had already been taking piano lessons for awhile, then I guess I thought playing guitar would be more fun, cooler.  I guess once you start, when I first started listening to more like rock music as a kid, I kind of felt like my piano lessons had nothing to do with it.  At this point, I of course realize that I was wrong and I'm totally glad that my parents made me take piano lessons.  But at the time, it was like no band I like has a piano in it, so I wanted to study guitar.  But it was different.  In my piano lessons, I studied with a teacher and we played lots of classical music.  With guitar, I took almost no lessons.  I only took lessons very briefly, so it's mostly just messing around in my room, and to this day, I can't conceptualize guitar the same way I look at piano.  I honestly cannot... if I was trying to transcribe a Vampire Weekend song, I would have to spend a lot of time thinking.  Whereas at the piano, I know automatically what inversion, what chord I'm playing.  With guitar, it's almost just like shapes to me.  It's very different.

B.E.:  I know about that.  The guitar is so illogical in its structure.  So who were some of your early guitar heroes?

E.K.:  Well, right when I was in middle school, it was kind of the 90s surf revival.  So I liked all the people on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.  Dick Dale.  The Ventures.  I was actually at my parents’ house over Thanksgiving and I started looking at my old CDs and putting them on my computer, and there were these surf revival bands I really got into like Phantom Surfers, and Man or Astro-man, and The Bomboras.  And they were just so dedicated to the kind of like sound of 60s reverb, and you know they would dress in suits and do stuff like that.  So that was kind of the first guitar music I really liked.  And I remember teaching myself those early surf songs.

B.E.:  You know, that's another Middle East convergence story right there.  Because Dick Dale grew up with Arabic music in his household.  One of his parents was Lebanese I believe.

E.K.:  Oh really?

B.E.:  That where he got the idea of using all that tremolo picking. 

E.K.:  I was only vaguely aware of that, actually.  I never really totally put that together.  But that's like one of the few things I know how to do.  I do that a lot on the album.  That tremolo picking.

B.E.:  You grew up in New York, right?

E.K.:  I was born in New York, but I grew up in the suburbs, in New Jersey.

B.E.:  Did you meet the other guys at Columbia pretty early on?

E.K.:  I had met most of them by the end of freshman year, and then the band started in senior year.  So in between, we were doing other stuff.

B.E.:  Let's talk about how you guys write songs.

E.K.:  It really varies from song to song.  Some of the songs started as a guitar riff.  “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “A Punk.”  Those just started with their respective guitar riffs.  Other songs start with some lyrics, or some melody.  On some of the songs I wrote an A part and Rostam wrote a B part and we just kind of jammed them together and it worked.  Then there are songs where one person kind of crafted it by themselves and brought it to the band and we worked it out.  Nobody ever brings anything that's totally completed.  It's always kind of a collective process for us.

A lot of the songs only have guitar on the choruses, or on specific parts.  So “Mansard Roof,” I had this melody for the verse, and then I kind of remembered this old melody that Rostam had for the chorus.  We actually have a lot of these essentially instrumental choruses.  So yeah, this melody, this descending melody, I wanted to play some guitar on it.  So I did probably the simplest thing I could possibly do, which was just to play that melody and do that kind of Dick Dale double picking, which is the same thing I've been doing since I was in middle school.  And that's essentially what it is.  Just some surf music, but then I think the chords that he plays under it, and what Chris playing on the drums give it a very different kind of feel.  But for me, it's this kind of reverby fast surf on that one.

B.E.:  The rhythm section on that song actually sounds close to Congolese music to me.  And they really nail it.  I've heard a lot of bands try to play like that and not come nearly so close.

E.K.:  Well, specifically on that one…   during the making of the album, we were all kind of interested in reggaeton, which kind of blew up in a pop sense also when we were in college.  Daddy Yankee.  Gasolina.  And stuff.  Of course, the music has existed for years, but that I think was the first time it really took over the city.  Like Hot 97, for example, one of the biggest stations, they had never played reggaeton before that.  So, on that song, the drum beat that Chris is playing is essentially just sped-up reggaeton.  He just plays it so fast that it pretty much ceases to become reggaeton.  But that reggaeton rhythm I think definitely comes from Africa.  I also find that one really interesting because it's all based on one specific dancehall rhythm, dembo.  SINGS “Dembo, dembo, dembo.”  So even though we were specifically going for an African theme on that song, the music that was inspiring us was in turn inspired by Jamaican music which was inspired by African music, and I think that really appeals to the music nerds in us to kind of trace things back.

B.E.:  Interesting.  There are a lot of those kind of half-clave figures in Caribbean music.  They’re very flexible.  They all intersect at different points.  The Cuban rhythms are particularly interesting, African rhythms that go back to Africa and get re-Africanized.  That's basically what Congo music is.  Kwassa Kwassa.  Let me ask you this.  There was a new song he played in Central Park.  It was in a 12/8 rhythm?

E.K.:  Yeah, yeah.  We’ve been calling it “White Sky,” but all song titles are subject to change until the album drops.  I don't play guitar on that.  Rostam plays a little guitar.  We haven't even begun recording that, but the way we’re playing it live now all comes from a beat that Rostam made on the computer.  The direction of that song is going is almost like Kraftwork meets Orchestra Baobab.  I don't know.  The rhythms of it are similar to some things that we've done before, but the sounds of it are very different.  I can't wait to start recording it.

B.E.:  So you haven’t started the second album yet?

E.K.:  No.  We set the date.  January 4, will start recording.  Or at least we’ll start getting into a practice room full time.  We do have some new songs that we've been working on.  Tonight we'll play two new songs that we've been working on for awhile.  But we have so many other new ideas to we haven't really formalized yet.  The production is so important to us that it's hard to really consider a song done until we come up with specific ideas about how a song’s going to sound.  We'll add little ideas to it.  That's what happened on the first album.  We had songs we'd been playing live, but they always changed when we got in the studio.

B.E.:  Well, I look forward to it.  I was really interested in that one song, because that 12/8 rhythm is so typically African.  You can hear it either in three- or in four-beat time.  You have so many rhythmic possibilities.

E.K.:  Definitely.  I think we can feel that song a lot.  The percussion on that is going to be a lot of fun, because I think we’re going to try to mix electronic and real percussion and see what we can do with it.  There are a lot of ways that we could play the three and the four against each other.

Here’s something you might find interesting.  On that song "One," there are two parts.  In the first one goes like [STRUMS].  Then it goes into a very African rhythm.  But on that opening part, I had this idea while I was listening to Metallica.  They have their own song "One."  And towards the end there's the part that goes, "Darkness imprisoning me."  And then they just get into this grove where the drums and everything just go into this very intense do-do-do-do-do.  I don't even know how you would describe that kind of rhythm.  It's just like this kind of jackhammer thing.  So then I started to think we had all these songs that were inspired by rhythms of reggaeton and rhythms of African music.  So we thought about taking that rhythm and making it a part of our music.  Very few people saw this.  I used to say it more in concerts.  "This one is dedicated to Metallica."  But people don't pick up on it, that this song is a tribute to the Metallica song.  I think part of it is that that song has an excellent rhythm, and our song has a similar rhythm, but the chords that we're using are so pop [A  F#m  D  Bm] that nobody thinks of Metallica.  But, you know, that's all right.  But that song, the guitar part was totally inspired by "One," by Metallica.

B.E.:  So who is Blake?  [The song’s refrain is “Blake’s got a new face.”]

E.K.:  Blake.  Well I had the melody long before the lyrics.  And we had all sorts of stupid stuff that we were considering.  And then I met this friend of my girlfriend’s named Blake, someone she went to high school with, and it kind of just popped into my head after meeting him.  So there is an actual person named Blake.

B.E.:  I have to ask about one other lyric, the Peter Gabriel line, “But this feels so unnatural/Peter Gabriel too.”  You use it in two songs, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” and also “Ottoman,” the song from the film Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist.

B.E.:  Anything else you want to add about your approach to guitar and song writing?

E.K.:  Well, one thing that I think is kind of important is that a band I toured with a little bit before Vampire Weekend started was called Dirty Projectors, who I totally recommend checking out.  It's essentially one guy, Dave Longstreth who is kind of the mastermind behind the band.  But he is very into African music too, and that and many other influences have combined, especially on his latest album “Rise Above,” to create some really breathtaking guitar stuff, much more technical than I think I'm capable of, but also really inspiring.  So when I was on tour with him, and we would listen to African music a lot, and he was drawing a lot of ideas from it.  He was the first person I ever heard using the word “hocketing” to describe things.  I remember he told me all about the history of it, that it came from this Latin word, and it just means having different parts fill in spaces.  But what he found most interesting and what I also got excited about was that it can be used in African music, rhythms could kind of echo each other and fill in the holes.  So definitely, after not only being a fan of his getting to play with him, I think that idea was something we took into our music.

There are a lot of times with the bass and guitar when you can kind of play off each other and it's much more interesting than if you're hitting the same beats.  So on the song "M79," we wrote this kind of B-section where Baio [bass player Chris Baio] is playing on the downbeat, but I'm playing against him.  And that part is really fun because that's where we really start to feel like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  We’re kind of letting each other have our own space, but at the same time building a rhythm together that you couldn't do by yourself.  So I think that idea of hocketing, which came from Dirty Projectors, definitely inspires the guitar playing.

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