Vampire Weekend: Fame & Theology

By Alif Omar Mahfix • 07 Jun 2013 in Review

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While we like the band, we don’t particularly find Vampire Weekend to be awe-inspiring. Holy sh!t though, what the hell happened with ‘Ya Hey’? You’d think a song title that subverts the most popular song of the ‘00s could only mean fun Vampire Weekend, but here Ezra Koenig decided to go profound.

On the onset and a more obvious level, the song is about religion’s rapid obsolescence in the modern world (Ezra sung that Zion, Babylon, and even America don’t love ‘you’ anymore).But much like Lauryn Hill before them, the religion as a motif has been used in songs by musicians struggling with fame. Suddenly Ezra’s flip of ‘Hey Ya’ as a homophone for Yahweh makes sense; the definitive song of last decade was also something of last hurrah for Andre 3000, fame can lose its believers too.

So when Ezra sung “I could never love you,” he really meant he doesn’t believe in the band’s own celebritydom. How long until America doesn’t love Vampire Weekend and care about the importance of the Oxford comma anymore? They already don’t with the latter.