Tpoint, I meet Koenig at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a student-friendly bakery blocks from Columbia’s main quad. After a year living and teaching middle-school English in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, he has moved back to the neighborhood to be with his girlfriend while she finishes her senior year. Though he is likely to be carded well into the next decade, Koenig is cerebral and preternaturally self-assured. He seems to possess encyclopedic knowledge of every major era of pop music—our conversation hopscotches from ’70s Brit-folk to mid-’90s hip-hop—but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon.

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Koenig played guitar and saxophone, starred in musicals, and had bands ranging from surf (the Aquatones) to funk (Groove Prophecy) to indie (Sophisticuffs). “He’d always be into something different than the week before,” remembers Wes Miles, singer for Ra Ra Riot and Koenig’s longtime friend. “African music, folk, hip-hop—I don’t think his curiosity was ever satisfied.”

“By the time I was in high school, I had no genre allegiance at all,” Koenig says. “I think sometimes people get caught up in the need to feel that by listening to indie rock, they’re separating themselves from something,” he says. “But it was the white kids flipping out to Nelly at the school dance. It wasn’t anything to be diametrically opposed to. Whereas, maybe if you went to high school in the late ’70s and the kids were listening to Toto or something, you’d really feel a tension.”

While at Columbia, Koenig immersed himself in postcolonial literary theory and even started a blog of his own ( internetvibes.blogspot.com) documenting his investigations into the overarching ideology that fuels Vampire Weekend’s freewheeling cultural sampling. “It’s like zeitgeist or gestalt,” he explains brightly, “a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.” So his lyrics can reference both posh New England towns and Lil Jon, all from a musical sensibility that insists “the vibe from hearing interlocking African music is the same vibe you get from a baroque Vivaldi.”

Koenig claims the right to cherry-pick across lines of culture, race, genre, and class because, as the descendent of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he is himself an outsider of sorts. And having wrestled with issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation as a deracinated fourth-generation Ivy Leaguer, he’s concluded that he’s allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. It’s charming, but it’s also indicative of the sort of confidence that only exists in the very young, the very successful, or both. Because he cannot imagine any resistance or skepticism to what he’s doing, none seems to exist. At least not yet. “From thinking about it so much, you naturally know where the boundaries are,” he insists. “Every once in a while, we’ve seen some things where people try to bring colonialism or appropriation into [talking about our band] in a negative way—but that debate has already happened. We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.”

Opening for the Shins in Paris, November 2007

“I THINK PEOPLE
HAVE THIS NEED
TO FEEL THAT BY
LISTENING TO INDIE
ROCK, THEY’RE
SEPARATING
THEMSELVES FROM
SOMETHING.”

— Ezra Koenig

OSTAM BATMANGLIJ, THE CHILD of actual immigrants (his mother is Najmieh Batmanglij, a cookbook author and leading authority on Persian cuisine), has a similar attitude. Growing up in Washington, D.C., he saw music not as an escape route or as

a higher calling, but rather as a problem to be solved. “I got really interested in theory,” he says, “in melodies and harmonies, and I just wanted to crack it.”

He’s also the man who defined crunk—literally. “I interned at the Oxford English Dictionary a few summers ago,” he says. “We each got to pick three new words to define, and I got crunk.” This seems highly

R

appropriate for a former flautist who is technical enough to scribble string arrangements in his spare time but also enough of a dreamer to believe that Discovery, his R&B side project with Ra Ra Riot’s Miles, will unseat Usher from the hip-hop charts.

He and I are sitting in the bedroom of his shared apartment in tony Brooklyn Heights. The room is spartan, with most of the space dominated by very serious equipment: multiple Macs, a microphone, keyboards, an electric guitar. The shelf above the bed is filled with various pedals and fancy-looking effects boxes. Batmanglij is friendly but reticent. Questions are often met with stony silence or one-word replies. He requests that a discussion about his love for Wes Anderson be kept off the record. After a long conversation about how a passion for postmodernism and his hero, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, infiltrated the planning of Vampire Weekend, Batmanglij suddenly pauses and announces that he eventually realized he “hadn’t had a single real thought about postmodernism in four years.”

A cynic could argue that it’s Vampire Weekend’s inflated profile mixed with their youthful precociousness that allows them to indulge in such intellectual conceits. But that seems shortsighted. The battles over authenticity, over appropriation, are ancient history to these guys. They are playing the hand they’ve been dealt, and their fast success is proof that they’re playing it expertly.

It’s hard to credit the rise of MP3 blogs with a revolution when they are in the midst of dramatic change themselves. While smaller blogs fight for exclusives, the heavyweights have begun sounding more and more like the old guard they seek to usurp. Listen to Stereogum’s Amrit Singh on Vampire Weekend’s long-term prognosis: “With the ball rolling and growing support overseas, there’s an opportunity to make some money on the distribution and larger-scale touring.”

In fact, when seen through this prism, Vampire Weekend seem like the steadiest yacht in a bumpy sea. They’ve recorded their own album, booked their own tours, designed their own artwork. They can play well-attended shows at home and abroad, and they own their master recordings. Their DIY aesthetic is punk, even if nothing else about them is. And though he may be reluctant to read too much into what all this hubbub portends for his band, Koenig is too thoughtful and studious to resist contextualizing it. “It’s not because of a lack of technology that those Black Flag–type bands had the lifestyle that they did. There was still a-ha blowing up off of one single, people getting excited and then forgetting about them.”

His eyes twinkle for a moment.

“And who’s to say we’re not more like a-ha anyway?”

 

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