I keep trying to compile a list of the best 20 albums of the decade but I can’t get past how much the new Vampire Weekend album from 2019 is the opposite of everything I want it to be
This is my Apocalypse Now.
If I could take any reporting assignment in 2019 it would be to cover the Bougainvillean Independence Referendum.
I’ve always been fascinated by how people choose to govern themselves, and I’ll admit it there is a part of me that has that foreign correspondent mindset where I want to go to far off places and report. Seeing history in real time has its appeal, as does trying to contextualize it for a massive audience is a privileged job that reporters have. I understand that, and am not trying to sugar coat it. There is something great about being able to do that and working your ass off to not be patronizing while writing about it and being damn good at your job.
So, why bring it up since this newsletter is supposed to be about music?
Well, I keep getting stuck in Melanesia when I keep trying to rank my best albums of the decade.
Bougainville is an island that is the eastern most autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. After the Germans colonized the area it was transferred to the rule of Australia following WWI and then eventually to Papua New Guinea in 1975.
The island is actually part of the Solomon Islands ethnically and ecologically, but that’s not how the decolonization of Oceania worked. A brutal civil war ensued on the island and Papua New Guinea’s armed forces suppressed a revolutionary movement. It killed between 15-20,000 people on the island over a decade from 1988-98.
It is a region no stranger to the horrors that can be inflicted upon it by hostile powers. During WWII the Solomon Islands were smack dab right in the middle of one of the most brutal, long-lasting campaigns of U.S.-Japanese fighting. The siege of Guadalcanal, which is the island containing the Solomons administrative center Honaira, lasted six months where tens of thousands of soldiers died for a war that remade the world order.
In 1998 Terrance Malick made a critically acclaimed movie The Thin Red Line adapting a 1962 novel about the Battle of Mount Austen, which was part of the Guadalcanal campaign. The entire battle is about taking a hill on a remote island in the middle of Melanesia so far away from the United States or Japan, each power trying to control the strategic outpost as part of a decade conflict. Malick returned to filmmaking with The Thin Red Line over two decades after his acclaimed film Days of Heaven. It has an ensemble cast and lives in the pantheon of film lore. Hans Zimmer did the score. It did not win any Academy Awards, but is considered one of the best films of all time.
The score also features pieces of Melanesian choral music throughout. As a result of colonization there is a large Anglican presence in the South Pacific, one of those legacies of the British Empire that doesn’t just go away during decolonization.
A sample of some of the choral music was used in an interesting place in 2019, the first song off Vampire Weekend’s new album “Father of the Bride”. The song is a back and forth between Ezra Koenig and one of the Haim Sisters told from the point of view of a bride and her lover talking on the morning of the bride’s wedding to someone else. Their verses are interspersed with a sample of the song "God Yu Tekem Laef Blong Mi" from Zimmer on The Thin Red Line soundtrack.
This song is my seventh most listened to song of 2019 according to spotify and all I can think about when I am listening to it is “what in the actual fuck”.
I don’t mean to sound as if I am questioning the use of such music as a sample in an indie rock song in 2019. Far from it. In fact, I think it is a great sample. I keep coming back to it months after it was released.
The reason I keep coming back though is because Vampire Weekend has been one of my favorite groups ever, and I think Modern Vampires of the City is my favorite album of the decade. I really, really want to be able to write about it and a ton of other great albums that have come out over the last 10 years, but for some reason every time I keep trying to do so I keep coming back to how much I fucking resent “Father of the Bride”.
Critical reception for the album was positive, despite it being an eighteen-song double album about living in the moment and finding contentment after moving to the West Coast in the year of our lord 2019. This album came six years after Modern Vampires in a world that can barely be called anything close to the same as that time, and brings a much more relaxed Vampire Weekend singing about their love of living on Earth instead of pondering the cryptic messages of men of faith and wondering what could possibly be next if you lose the love that you are holding on to right now.
Even this review of the album from The Ringer does its best to not talk about how this album is a feel good album before ending this way:
“Ultimately, though, these songs find plenty to believe in: love, companionship, the primacy of the present moment. “Hallelujah, you’re still mine,” Koenig sings at the end of “We Belong Together,” one of the record’s most optimistic numbers. “If there’s not some grand design / How’d this pair of stars align?” Koenig’s songs are still explorations of faith (like the couple from “Finger Back,” the pair at the center of Father of the Bride seem to be reconciling their conflicting religious upbringings) but they’re also reminders that even secular forces like optimism, hope, and progress ask from us a near-spiritual level of trust. So maybe you bring children into a warming world because one of those kids is going to patch the hole in the ozone. Maybe some plants do move, if you sit still and stare long and hard enough at them. Maybe forever isn’t so scary when you realize it’s just a bunch of consecutive right-nows.”
This kind of acceptance of “consecutive right-nows” is not available to everyone in the world in 2019. The world is a real bad place for a lot of people living in it, which was reinforced by the latest British election. Despite a manifesto that aimed to protect the vulnerable in British society and rebuild some of the social safety nets that were dismantled in the Thatcher years, the Labour Party couldn’t convince people that these issues were more important than Brexit. Boris Johnson, the bumbling former mayor of London who probably owes his entire political career to the London 2012 Olympics not being a disaster and David Cameron’s utter incompetence will lead Britain in the future plunging into the unknown by breaking away from the European Union and becoming more insular.
Voting for Brexit was deemed an impossibility, but Britain chose the consecutive right-nows and gambled on its future on its own. The same could be said about the United States under Trump starting in November 2016. How is that working out? For a lot of people, nothing has changed. As someone about to start socially and medically transitioning soon, I worry if I’ll ever have access to the care I need despite the privilege of a nice employer health insurance plan. It is hard to find comfort in the consecutive right-nows, when the world doesn’t want you to exist, and the people that are ultimately responsible for your safety have never considered the steps that it takes just to live the life you were supposed to have, nor in theory should they have.
Instead, they get to go to California, settle down, have a kid, and rock out in a double album six years after writing the best album of the decade.
So maybe this is why I keep coming back to the sample in the opening song and trying to find some sort of acceptance and enjoyment in this album which just is thumbing its nose at me and saying “the world is okay dummy we’re allowed to live in it” when there are political decision makers out there that keep telling me “you shouldn’t be allowed to live in it”.
Even the opening song has rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Father of the Bride was released before I finally accepted I was trans, but my gender identity was very much on my mind during my first listens.
The opener is a song about two people who were once in love speaking to each other right before one goes off to get married. The man is pleading for the woman to take him back, and the woman tells him back that she’s made her commitments and he had his chance and blew it.
It is a fine song. A good song even. But the flippancy of the situation and lack of acknowledgement of any past misdeeds, while she just holds him and assures him things will be okay despite him literally trying to ruin her wedding day was everything that “Modern Vampires” was not. The more I thought about it the more it infuriated me, and yet I couldn’t stop listening.
I knew to fully understand this pull back to a song I so clearly did not like but genuinely wanted to, I had to go back and watch The Thin Red Line.
The movie is a fictionalized story about the beginnings of the Guadalcanal campaign in World War II. Men were condemned to die on a lush beautiful island in the South Pacific because, according to the army’s commanders, the Japanese decided to build an airfield there.
Throughout the film Solomon Islanders are shown in a variety of ways from living in peace among a deadly world-consuming war, helping the allied forces in a variety of ways, yet also being a roadblock for the American forces when trying to take this small piece of real estate in the South Pacific.
Their voices are rarely used in the film, except scenes in the beginning when two Army Privates have gone AWOL and decided to live amongst their village in a perceived bliss, and the use of spiritual songs of Christianity. The latter comes in the final credits and 21 years later in a Vampire Weekend album.
For three hours Malick tries to show the humanity within war while contrasting it with its pure brutality for the literal taking of one hill on the island of Guadalcanal. Throughout the film he showcases the natural beauty of where these horrors are happening, reminding us at every turn that decisions on the ground impact the men affected by war, but a world well outside their control seals their fates and the fates of everyone they have ever connected with at all times everywhere else.
Every decision taken by the men, and the one woman featured in the movie, leads to outcomes well down the line. Decisionmakers constantly assess these choices and some men are rewarded, while others die. There is celebration there is sorrow there is brutality there is mercy. Yet throughout the landscape stays the same even as two armies are trying to just fucking obliterate each other, while those who actually live in this landscape are forced to exist in proximity and rarely seen.
I don’t know what I wanted to learn from this film as it relates to trying to learn to like this album. The Thin Red Line is an incredible piece of work, but I think I always knew in the end it had nothing to do with “Father of the Bride” at all. Maybe the translated lyrics spoke to the band and it fit with the song of what they were trying to achieve. Maybe I just wanted to watch a Malick film this month.
The movie ends with the company we have followed for over 200 minutes departing Guadalcanal after securing Mount Austen. The company is needed elsewhere as the Pacific Theater was increasing in size and scope and the allies were advancing up towards Japan over the next two years. Their job was done, they had a new job, and it was time to move on. The battle for the island was not yet complete, but forces were moved around and war continued as a final shot takes showing the island of Guadalcanal, the one constant in this war epic. The land wins out in the end.
On December 11 the island of Bougainville voted overwhelmingly to become independent from Papua New Guinea. Over 98% of votes cast were for independence, and now negotiations will begin between the island and the PNG government. The referendum was non-binding, but PNG pledged to accept the results and act accordingly. Some media reports speculated that it could be up to 10 years before Bougainville is an independent country.
After writing the above 2200 words trying to reckon with a piece of media I really wanted to like, but just couldn’t I found an episode of a podcast that Ezra Koenig hosts where the producer of “Father of the Bride” discusses the use of the sample in the first song.
“Ezra was explaining that he’s always liked that bit from [The] Thin Red Line and you know, the chords were similar.”
Sometimes you want truth in the world all around you and are willing to go to great lengths to do so hoping to get some glimpse of understanding yourself in a better way. Sometimes, though, the chords just sound similar and sound good as a result.