No one can get away from talking about polo shirts. Last week I found some problems with Jessica Hopper’s Chicago Reader review of the new Vampire Weekend record. Mike Powell, on Pitchfork last month, defended what he sees as the image-driven nature of the band,

These aren’t ad-copy platitudes about the irrelevance of image— if image didn’t exist, he’d have less to write about. His point is simple: Image is important, but don’t think yours is better than anyone else’s, especially if it’s constructed by things you buy.

Which seems spurious and vague — it seems to me he overestimates the explicitness of their attitude toward “image.” It’s easy to run in circles when you seem to implicitly accept a supposition that you intend to attack:

For a band as superficially calculating and antiseptic as Vampire Weekend, the message is a challenge to accept that these guys — these very polite young east-coasters who grew up with ska, punk, and African pop — are exactly who they say they are.

What is “superficially calculating and antiseptic”? Is it music itself or its reception? If it’s “superficial” where does the rest come from — and what is it, exactly? And yet the sentiment is the same in the very good 2000-word review by Robert Christgau, who has very little difficulty taking apart the situation. Historically, he has been probably the best American music critic on class. In the Barnes & Noble Review, he writes:

As it happens, the kind of cross-cultural reappropriation that’s kicked up so much nonsense around Vampire Weekend is also the process by which, for example, captive Arab girls juiced the harem music of dynastic Egypt, or classically trained Creole sight readers spread jazz, or four Liverpool speed freaks beat Chuck Berry, rockabilly, Tin Pan Alley, and skiffle into a noise rude enough for the Reeperbahn. Historically, syncretism has been the main way pop musics have evolved. I began by dismissing the idea that Vampire Weekend are African, and they’re not. But definitely they’ve grafted tiny elements from all over the place, Africa included, onto a guitar-keyboards-bass-drums pop band. Instead of looking back, they looked around. Their music feels outgoing because that’s literally what it is.