One afternoon nearly a decade ago, my older sister Binetou joined me in the kitchen of our new home and handed me an album. With equal amounts urgency and excitement, she told me that I must listen to it. Adding to my curiosity was the fact that it was a CD, well into the era of iTunes and Limewire. I remember this meeting feeling almost clandestine, like I wouldn’t be able to find this music anywhere else. Of course, that was far from reality: The album was Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut, which set into motion one of modern indie rock’s biggest crossovers after it was released 10 years ago this week.
My sister’s insistence made sense as soon as I listened. Her thrill for this new discovery—and her assurance that it would matter to me as well—had everything to do with the specificity of our lives. We had grown up in the suburbs of Paris in the late 1980s and ’90s, bathed in African music. Our father Ibrahima Sylla, who passed away in 2013, was a producer, and the independent label he created, Syllart Records (formerly Syllart Productions), had kickstarted the careers of artists including Diénéba Seck, Sekou Kouyaté, Ismaël Lô, Youssou N’Dour, Salif Keïta, Thione Seck, Sekouba Bambino, and Kandia Kouyaté. Coexisting in Syllart’s impressive discography was everything from Senegalese mbalax and Congolese rumba, to the jelis and griots of Mali and zouk mandingue.
My father’s productions were characterized by a push and pull between traditionalism and modernity, embodied by his most cherished project: Africando, a band that took a global view of salsa music by weaving together rhythms from South America, West and Central Africa, and the Maghreb. A constant search for hybrid sounds, along with a strong sense of our roots, are two things my sister and I inherited from him (and would also become constitutive of our identities as children of immigrants living in France). Perhaps it was inevitable that we would be drawn to musicians who reflected those same ambitions.
Congolese popular music such as soukous and rumba, influenced by Cuban music and popularized by artists like Tabu Ley Rochereau and Luambo Luanzo Makiadi, was also a significant part of my father’s catalog. In Vampire Weekend, my sister and I recognized the voices and hands that had been present in our various homes. It spoke directly to us, from the first notes of “Mansard Roof,” reminiscent of the syncopated sabar (traditional drums) of mbalax, to the springy rumba of “Bryn” and the call and response of “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)”’s chorus. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is the obvious tribute, borrowing the name of a popular dance style and evoking the work of Pépé Kallé and Nyboma (and their album Moyibi). The song’s simple and repetitive structure, led by the distinctly trebly tone of soukous guitar, reminded me of Soukous Stars’ “Marcory Gazoil,” though less hectic in rhythm. We felt pride in hearing our music echoed in this young band from New York. Vampire Weekend took us back to what was a sort of golden age for my family.
In the late 2000s, my taste shifted as my life changed. Puberty, a move to another city, and the resulting loneliness modified my relationship to music. I had always been an obsessive mainstream listener. But during this period, music came to replace everything that I had lost, particularly my sense of place and identity. Because these holes were immense, I demanded more out of music. I sought out other genres, my curiosity insatiable. I became studious. When I listened to a song, it was of utter importance that I didn’t miss a note, a change of mood, an instrument’s whisper at the back of the melody. Listening was an exercise in exhaustion.
Vampire Weekend was great for that because of its textures and its sonic generosity, all those violin sweeps and harpsichord squiggles that stick to the memory (I always go back to the sublime final minute of “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance”). Though the album made me feel nostalgic and melancholic, what I cherished most was that its sole musical purpose seemed to revolve around pleasure. You could hear how much fun they had playing together. Ezra Koenig’s voice was that of a young man who tried very hard to appear older and wiser than he actually was—always on the verge of irritating but amused and playful nonetheless. It made it easy to follow the story, even though English was not yet my second language. Ignorance was bliss, in this sense and in others.
Living in our little town of Gagny, we were far from the band’s breeding ground of Columbia University, and the budding controversy involving terms like “preppy” and “colonialism.” There was a certain mystery as to who and what and where, which was part of the enjoyment. Though I’d come to know the names and faces and specific roles of each member, in the beginning there was just a CD with a mysterious cover and this absurd band name. Vampire Weekend would become an embodied reality much later. At which point I found myself, on a trip to New York at 16, wandering around Columbia, listening to “Campus,” and searching for the silhouettes of band members I knew were long gone.
It is difficult to question or criticize a love harbored in complete isolation, formed by an idiosyncratic arrangement of private memories and sensations inseparable from one’s own life. It is only when I started being present on social-media platforms like Tumblr that I was asked to contextualize my taste ideologically and politically. This was something I was defensive of, that I thought was ridiculous. I thought, What ideologies and politics do sounds and rhythms represent? It was easy for me to criticize those very things in film or television, but my music was sacred to me.
I still feel this way to a certain extent, but in the case of Vampire Weekend, I came to a point where it was almost impossible to avoid the criticism. And really, they had it coming. It is all in the words they used to describe their sound—“Upper West Side Soweto”—which was gleefully repeated in the press, and later came to describe an entire wave of indie rock flirtation with African music. It captured, with a certain naïveté, the clash of sounds at the core of their album, but it also rings like the name of a military operation for colonial expansion. There is a hierarchy hidden in this juxtaposition of South African townships and the chic neighborhoods of New York. Also, why Soweto, and not Kinshasa, the Congolese town one should associate with soukous and rumba? Going through old Vampire Weekend interviews, the band’s members rarely shouted out African musicians beyond Fela Kuti, who has become the black best friend of the Western world when it comes to African music. This is something blackness and especially Africanness magnetize: generalization and neglect.
Growing up, I was ambivalent about what I perceived to be a general indifference towards African music. There was a rich history, a diversity of styles, and countless brilliant artists people didn’t seem to want to explore. It felt like people could only handle African music if it was mixed or filtered with something they recognized. But rather than calling out white artists who appropriate African music, I’ve always been more concerned that the African genres and artists that inspired them were given proper credit and financial support. I’m interested in the inclusion of African music in non-African publications, and in a passionate critical approach by African writers on the sounds that color their lives (look to Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe’s beautiful piece on Congolese music for a great example). This would result in a shift in language, new ways to write about African music that reject vague, lazy terms like Afropop, Afrobeats, “tropical,” or the evasive, catchall term “world music.”
Vampire Weekend invites a romanticizing of hybridity, the beauty of sharing sounds across international borders and bringing it to new audiences. The reality is that mobility can be unilateral. African artists have a hard time touring due to visa issues, which has an overall effect on their global visibility. In Paris Africain: Rhythms of the African Diaspora, James A. Winders describes the precarious conditions in which the Parisian-centered soukous craze of the early 1990s took place. Artists like Lokassa ya Mbongo, albeit part of the beloved Soukous Stars, were living in Paris undocumented. This is where the matter of privilege becomes pertinent. As always, we return to one paramount question: who profits from the labor of these musicians?
The cyclical return of African sounds in Western pop music—from Paul Simon to Bow Wow Wow, Radiohead to Animal Collective, Beyoncé to Drake in recent years—has sparked legitimate conversations about appropriation. At the core of these accusations is the need to question the structural imbalances that lead to the erasure of specific histories. But there also exists in me the desire to remind myself and others that symbolic erasure in books and on best-of lists is not necessarily fatalistic. In fact, one could say that the indifference reserved for African music preserved it from standardization and sameness—something that might be happening to mainstream Nigerian music now it has gone global. Furthermore, if I were to care too much about appropriation, then I would lose sight of what someone like my father gave me. African artists are immensely popular in their home countries—respected, recognized, named. In the end, I came to realize that this is what matters most to me.
It’s worth noting that the music that inspired Vampire Weekend’s debut is also the product of borrowing and mixing. Born in the late 1950s, soukous tells the turbulent and complex tale of not just one but two nations and its people: Zaïre and Congo-Kinshasa. As Mbembe writes, music was the way “Congolese urban society reflected on itself, on its own identity, and on the modes of representation it adopted. In many respects, music epitomized joy, festivity and happiness, elegance and serenity. It enabled the Congolese to sing what could not be spoken about in any other kind of speech.” Of all the indie bands that surfed on the so-called Afropop wave, Vampire Weekend is, to me, the one that most elegantly and precisely returned to these aspects of the original story. As removed as each of its member were from the roots of Congolese soukous, their music allowed that history, as well as my own, to take new shape.
