VAMPIRE WEEKEND

CHART ATTACK

Vampire Weekend score another hit with Modern Vampires of the City

 

by Matt Ashare |  
Published May 29, 2013

As I was hunkering down to spend a little quality time with "Modern Vampires of the City," the new album from the NYC-affiliated modern-rock foursome Vampire Weekend early last week, I received an interesting and somewhat surprising news flash from the band's pr folks: The disc had officially debuted at the top spot of the "Billboard" Top 200 sales charts, with "nearly 135,000 copies" sold in the first full week since its release on May 14. Not only that, this wasn't the first time Vampire Weekend had scored such an honor: The group's previous album, 2010's "Contra," had also debuted at number one, although with slightly fewer sales.
    At around the same time, I happened to catch an interview with erstwhile music critic Touré, who's perhaps better known to afternoon channel surfers as one of the co-hosts of the MSNBC talk show "The Cycle." He was promoting his cleverly titled new book "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon," and discussing the various ways in which the music industry has changed since the Purple One took his first steps toward iconhood back in the 1980s. One of his insights centered on MTV, the former music video platform and current reality television network, and how it had once been a cultural nexus for more than just aspiring teen moms. Indeed, back in the day, when video was well on its way to killing the proverbial radio star, an artist like Prince (or Madonna or Michael Jackson, to name the other two pop icons Touré mentioned) could reach millions of young consumers by simply getting one video into heavy rotation on MTV.
    In contrast, aspiring paragons of pop — like, say, Vampire Weekend — no longer have anything remotely resembling a central cable channel from which to launch their careers. And, the days when monolithic rock radio stations dominated regional markets with their 50-thousand watts or power are long since past. At the risk of stating the obvious, we simply no longer have anything resembling a reliably authoritative singular source for pop culture, much less pop music. Sure, you can find out who or what is trending on Twitter with the click of a mouse, check in on what your friends are listening to via Facebook 24 hours a day, or sample from a shared playlist on a cloud service like Spotify. But, who's running the show? Things truly were so much simpler in the pre-digital age. . .
    So, don't start questioning your cultural literacy, your "in-the-know" quotient, or your relative hipness, just because you thought Vampire Weekend might be the name of a steamy new teen supernatural drama on the WB. Or if, for example, you mistook "Modern Vampires of the City" as a potential working title for the next racy yet heartwarming cinematic vehicle for the very different NYC foursome of Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattral, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon. It may just be that topping the "Billboard" charts, such as they are, no longer counts as a leading indicator of cultural capital — that the "nearly 135,000 copies" of "Modern Vampires of the City" purchased in the third week of May doesn't necessarily amount to a zeitgeist moment. To put it in perspective, when Nirvana's sea-changing "Nevermind" ascended to the number one spot on the very same "Billboard" Top 200 in January of 1992, it was selling roughly 300,000 units a week. And, Madonna's most recent chart topper, "MDNA," moved a reported 359,000 units in its first week of sales, just over a year ago, in March of 2012.
    To be fair — and maybe even balanced — none of that has much to do with the relative merits of Vampire Weekend or "Modern Vampires of the City." Frankly, when it comes to music, I'm not sure that quantitative measurements have ever been a particularly accurate means of gauging artistic quality, or that the popularity of a song/album/band indicates much of anything beyond potential monetary returns. And, it kinda goes without saying that Vampire Weekend are not responsible for the failure of other artists — specifically, George Strait with his "Love Is Everything," and Demi Lovato with her "Demi," not to mention Madonna, who doesn't even have a new album out now — to outperform their sales numbers. On the other hand, the band should, along with the late great Abraham Lincoln, be made to shoulder some of the blame for perpetuating the cultural craze for vampires, even if they're just being ironic. And all four of them (excluding Lincoln) remain guilty of having graduated from Columbia University, a fact that became a topic of conversation among certain members of the indie-poparazzi when the fevered buzz about Vampire Weekend peaked close to a full year before the release of their self-titled debut in 2008.
    The Ivy League scuttlebutt had something to do with "authenticity," or maybe "integrity," but it often sounded more like jealousy. And, Vampire Weekend initially played into a kind of smartass stereotype by writing wry songs about grammar ("Oxford Comma") and architecture ("Mansard Roof"), and by playing mix and match with stylized neo-new-wavvy pop conceits and Afro-pop rhythms (see "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," which also isn't the only track on the band's first album to reference a fancy spot for New England summering). The group — singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, bassist Chris Baio, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, and drummer Chris Tomson — have moved beyond their infatuation with Afro-pop, which felt a little too much like a novelty to begin with, so that's a good thing. (Actually, it also sounded a bit like what Talking Heads were up to with Brian Eno on 1979's "Fear of Music," which was cool.) But they're still a quirky crew, with a penchant for pastiche, as in the deconstructed electro-dance groove, roller-rink organ tones, noise-guitar solo, and punning title of "Diane Young." Or, the fractured techno-psychedelic soundscape of "Obvious Bicycle." Or, the delicately frayed orchestral rock textures of "Hannah Hunt," which features one of the more quotable lines on "Modern Vampires of the City" — "Though we live on the US dollar/You and me, we've got our own sense of time. . ."
    More than anything, "Modern Vampires of the City" positions Vampire Weekend as progenitors of a smart brand of progressive, at times rather romantic pop, with an air of wistful mystery and a well defined sense of technical mastery. There was a time when I suppose you could have said something fairly similar about Prince. But, that was way back in the ’80s.