Here, Koenig alleges that he’s perhaps the only wealthy man on the planet whose treasures have brought real satisfaction. ![]() That song is preceded by one called “Rich Man,” which might put you in the headspace of Jesus of Nazareth and a certain young ruler. “Time to disavow the gold rush,” he sings, “and the bitterness that’s flourished in its wake.” It sounds like a plan. But what’s really telling is that, on an album where the dominant mood is a kind of millennial malaise, a sad sack aloofness, it’s in this song that Koenig seems surest about how to move forward toward something like peace and contentment. “We got married in the gold rush/ And the sight of gold will always bring me pain,” Haim confesses. “Married in the Gold Rush,” a Grand Ole Opry-styled duet with Danielle Haim, is a song about a union consummated in prosperity but destined to ruin. ![]() Surely it is telling that the song on which the whole album seems to hang is one about forsaking wealth. That’s never been truer than on the long-gestating fourth Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride, which finds Koenig litigating that privilege ruthlessly, both through drollery (he had to have known what we’d say about a Vampire Weekend song called “Unbearably White”) and through jaundiced melancholy. There is a certain audacity to how this Ivy League indie guitar band with a white male singer has routinely pilfered from the African continent– a certain cultural immunity, even– but it’s to the enormous credit of Vampire-in-Chief Ezra Koenig that he’s generally handled his privilege responsibly. And if you remember that then you might also remember a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” its title borrowing the language of Congolese dance music while also betraying the band’s upper-class roots. It’s been more than a decade since the release of their first album, but you can probably still remember the uniform of their earliest iteration to this day, no critic can mention them without also referencing the polo shirts and the boat shoes. To be fair, they’ve largely brought it on themselves. It’s hard to talk about Vampire Weekend without also discussing privilege.
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