Vampire Weekend romanticized privilege and borrowed world music tropes without hesitation or backlash

Evidence

Vampire Weekend eventually settled on an Upper West Side songbook that broke with downtown New York’s gritty, detached aesthetic. Lyrically, Vampire Weekend explored class anxiety without touching traditional class politics. Unlike the anti-wealth fury of Pulp’s anthem “Common People,” Vampire Weekend protagonists seemed to fantasize about rich girlfriends whisking them away to family estates. They reveled in the thrill of privilege: Louis Vuitton, Benetton, Oxford commas, Washington Heights, bleeding madras, and Cape Cod. … While artists like Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and Talking Heads had all faced backlash for previously dabbling in African music tropes, Vampire Weekend dove in headfirst. Critic Simon Reynolds found “the lack of hesitation with which they go about their borrowing” to be their most fevered transgression. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Vampire Weekend’s unhesitating cultural borrowing and its reception connects to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ essay territory — cultural gatekeeping over who may borrow what, and how context spares or damns the borrower.