Vampire Weekend : Campus

Yeah, I'm gonna kick this thing off with Vampire Weekend. "Vampire Weekend?!" I hear you say, assuming you are a follower of the indie scene and read Blender or AP or Pitchfork or whatever else the hip kids are reading these days to get their musical views. "They totally suck, because they're, like, indie wannabes and posers and everybody who likes cool music hates them."

Or, maybe you have no idea who they are and actually what I heard you say was, "What?"

Vampire Weekend has this weird cachet as the indie band that everyone loves to hate. See, if you like "indie" music, then you're not allowed to like this band. I'm not sure why. I think because they are from well-off New England families. Or maybe it's because your mom and little sister can stand them. Or maybe it's because you should hate everything that even remotely smacks of potentially being related to Twilight. Or maybe it's because they were in an Apple commercial... No wait, not an Apple commercial, but a Verizon commercial mocking iPhones... even worse.

But the problem with this whole "sell-out" line of thinking is that it completely ignores the music. How can you say a band sucks just because they were used in the credits for Step Brothers? How does that change the quality of the music? I mean, if they were good before, then they end up on the cover of Rolling Stone, how can they suddenly be bad?

That's stupid. Almost as stupid as the whole concept of "Indie" music. I mean, if it's coming out on a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Sony Megacorp, it's still not really 'independent' is it?

Regardless, the entire album is excellent, and finding a single representative song is an impossible task. I picked "Campus" because it's a great song, it sounds like them, and it's in the middle of the album. So if you've heard them, you've probably heard "Mansard Roof" and "Oxford Comma" and "A-Punk" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa". If not, go buy the album, or maybe borrow it from your indie-music-loving friend who has a copy, whether or not they claim to despise the band, because frankly, it's just a great album.

"Campus" can be found on their first, eponymous album. They've got another album coming out in a week too. How serendipitous! (No, really, it was. I only learned about it today!)

* For the record, I prefer the oxford comma in lists of phrases (see above), but I dislike it in simple lists. Just so you know where I stand.

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