Jessica Hopper’s essay on Vampire Weekend in the Chicago Reader collects a variety of takes on the band, almost all of which revolve around the class-associations they bring up. Her penultimate sentence sums matters up:

The most interesting thing you can say about Vampire Weekend’s music is that it bears the wounds of America’s crisis—it’s stocked with cheap imports, a bit too sure of itself, and trying to bullshit its way out of trouble.

But much of the rest of this doesn’t work for me. I am interested that everyone addresses this as though class is the only thing worth talking about. (Which may well be true, but I don’t think goes without saying.) The principal problem is with sentences like,

Nevertheless, Koenig insists that Vampire Weekend are not what they seem—that their lyrics are pure satire. Well, maybe the fact that so few people can tell the difference between their supposed lampooning of affluence and genuine fascination with it is a sign that they need to sharpen their game.

… But modern satire is almost always the product of genuine fascination. If it were truly just lampooning it would be boring to everyone. I feel like this is obvious. So many of the digs here are unthought-out in the same way. And isn’t there anything to talk about than social backgrounds and the subject matter of the lyrics. (Are the lyrics, apart from their milieu, any good?) “An episode of Gossip Girl written by Jimmy Buffet” is cute but not really to the point. (How much Jimmy Buffet can be found in Vampire Weekend, apart from degree of white-breadedness? They are both musicians, so one wishes the comparison actually engaged their music.)

I’ve never had much of a reaction to the band, and the “imports” do indeed strike me as cheap, but I would that we had more criticism that establishes a positive argument for what makes the imports cheap, exactly; or how it is that the band is too sure of itself (which one expects to be fairly incompatible with “sheepish,” which is taken for granted as describing the band elsewhere). In writing like this, I find myself finishing articles still wanting to hear, in how their music works, or doesn’t work — rather than how they present themselves — what makes Vampire Weekend bullshit.