“Only God was above us!”
Those words, which are visible on a newspaper headline adorning the cover of Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, were spoken by a survivor of one of the strangest disasters in aviation history.1 On April 28, 1988, the passengers of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 watched in horror as their airplane’s ceiling was torn off mid-flight. Incredibly, despite a flaming engine, the aircraft landed safely at Kahului Airport on the island of Maui; aside from a flight attendant, who was sucked out of the plane by extreme winds, there were no fatalities. The statement above made the front page of the New York Daily News, and it expresses the mixture of fear and awe that the passengers must have felt, exposed to sky at 24,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean.2
This newspaper headline isn’t the only surreal element of Vampire Weekend’s new album cover. Behind the man holding the paper, another figure stands on the window of a subway car, appearing to levitate above the ground. Surprisingly, the picture contains no special effects. It was snapped by artist Steven Siegel at a subway graveyard in New York City, where train cars lay overturned.3 The reader in the foreground is actually lying down, and the entire photograph has been flipped on its side. Vampire Weekend left the image unedited, and it’s easy to see why. On Only God Was Above Us, the band explores a world out of whack – the chaos and confusion of modern life, where familiar structures implode without warning, where disaster looms around every corner, and where (in spite of everything) hope might still be found in unexpected places.
Siegel’s photograph is one of many allusions to Vampire Weekend’s hometown sprinkled throughout Only God Was Above Us. Songwriter Ezra Koenig elaborated in a recent interview with The New York Times: “Weird, half-baked memories and pictures and thoughts and family history… That’s the version of New York that’s floating through this record.”4 The album’s tone complements its subject matter; in many ways, the record reveals Vampire Weekend’s crew (lead singer Koenig, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Thompson) returning to their lyrical and sonic roots. Koenig’s cheeky wordplay is back (the album’s opener sees him rhyming “Albanians,” “Romanian,” and “Transylvanian” in the span of a couple lines), enlivened by playful classical flourishes that recall the band’s earliest work. However, these arrangements are also layered with shadow – gritty, piercing, distorted sounds unlike anything else in Vampire Weekend’s catalogue. Koenig framed the band’s experimentation this way:
With every album we have to push in two directions at once… Sometimes that means we have to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this record, it’s about both pushing into true maturity, in terms of worldview and attitude, but also pushing back further into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness along with some of our most ambitious swings ever.5
If Modern Vampires of the City was a sonic left turn, the new record is off the grid. Yet, for all its harshness, the soundscape is far more riveting than grating, thanks to brilliant production from the band’s longtime collaborator, Ariel Rechtshaid. The music captures the clash between optimism and cynicism that suffuses the album’s songs – what Koenig has called “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender.”6
In the introduction to this series of blog posts, I described a narrative through line that I believe connects all of Vampire Weekend’s work. Beginning with their self-titled debut, the band unfurls a coming-of-age story that focuses on our relationship to the world at large, asking how we might continue to love a planet that has repeatedly broken our hearts. While this narrative is visible in each of the band’s records, Only God Was Above Us is the album that enabled me to see it – the climax that ties long-running threads together. Last week, on Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend attempted to recapture their zeal for the Earth by pursuing social justice and embracing life’s mysterious gifts. Now, as the band members approach middle age (Koenig turned forty shortly after the album’s release)7, they confront their most difficult dilemma yet: How should we respond when our best efforts to mend the world – to make it lovable – fall hopelessly short?
Analysis
“Fuck the world”
You said it quiet
No one could hear you
No one but me
Cynical, you can’t deny it
You don’t wanna win this war
Cuz you don’t want the peace
So begins the opening track of Only God Was Above Us. Once again, as on Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend’s global focus is immediately apparent, as Koenig presents us with a bitter dismissal of the world. The narrator isn’t cynical himself; he has grown and matured, leaving behind the existential despair of Modern Vampires of the City. However, he empathizes with his unidentified companion, who complains that proposed solutions to the planet’s ills aren’t really solutions at all. The song quickly builds to a frenzy, depicting various forms of civil strife that haunt the narrator’s imaginings. The title of the track – “Ice Cream Piano” – is a homophone for the chorus: “In dreams I scream piano.” In musical language, piano represents something that is played or sung quietly. Here, the narrator is trapped in a nightmare from which he can’t awake, futilely calling for help. His dreams reflect reality, where the legacy of past sins wreaks havoc on the present: “We’re all the sons and daughters of vampires who drained the old world’s necks.” With this song, the narrator introduces the twin themes of the album: intergenerational conflict (six of the album’s ten songs reference “wars” and/or “generations”) and the fragility of hope in contemporary society.
Sustaining the disquietude of the album’s opener, the following track (“Classical”) examines the grisly underbelly of western civilization. Koenig recognizes that history is written by the victors, and he also knows that high culture often disguises dark secrets: “Untrue, unkind, and unnatural / How the cruel, with time, becomes classical.” Things are always deteriorating, and what stands the test of time is usually determined by power and privilege, not by goodwill:
I know that walls fall
Shacks shake
Bridges burn
And bodies break
It’s clear
Something’s gonna change
And when it does
Which classical remains?
“Capricorn,” the album’s third track, sounds like something straight off Modern Vampires of the City. Still speaking to someone else, the narrator muses over this person’s loss of faith in God and in society’s leaders, which has led them to a grim defeatism:
Can’t reach the moon now
Can’t turn the tide
The world looked different
When God was on your side
Who builds the future?
Do they care why?
In writing the song, Koenig was inspired by the idea of someone born at the end of December, unable to experience their birth year: “Capricorn, the year that you were born / Finished fast, and the next one wasn’t yours.” This simple metaphor evokes the alienation of modern youth – the struggle to maintain a stable identity in an ever-shifting society.8 This difficulty bleeds into the next song, “Connect,” which portrays the search for community in the internet age. Aware that technology can bridge vast distances, the narrator remains befuddled by his inability to form meaningful relationships: “Now is it strange I can’t connect?” His despondency in the chorus might sound like the grumbling of somebody kicked off the Wi-Fi, but the stakes are much higher than that. The song laments the loss of life-giving connection – intimacy with others, or a worldview that could provide him with an orienting sense of purpose:
I know once it’s lost
It’s never found
I need it now
The grid is buried in the ground
Hopelessly down
“Prep School Gangsters,” the fifth track on the record, alludes to a 1996 New York Magazine story about wealthy students selling drugs. In his interview with The New York Times, Koenig explained the reflections that this article prompted:
The prep-school gangster – these are the people who run the vast majority of institutions… It’s very possible, especially in America, that every now and then the prep-school gangster’s grandfather was once a disadvantaged youth, and that the disadvantaged youth’s grandson will be the prep-school gangster. And here they are in this brief moment of time, meeting together.9
Koenig’s quote highlights the complexity of family trees, which are shaped by disparities of wealth and influence. Social stratification doesn’t emerge from a vacuum; all too often, vulnerable people paid the cost of the privileges that we enjoy. In this way, the abuse of power creates a vicious cycle, generating fractures in future generations. The chorus of the song suggests that those who are oppressed often become oppressors, and it reminds us that many of our blessings are contingent on past injustices:
Call me jealous
Call me mad
Now I’ve got the thing you had
Somewhere in your family tree
There was someone just like me
“The Surfer” references Water Tunnel 3, an underground project that was designed to supply New York City with water in the ’70s and that remains unfinished.10 The reference has a dual effect, evoking the hidden fractures beneath our social landscape and also reinforcing “Capricorn”‘s sense of missed potential. Like that earlier tune, the chorus of “The Surfer” depicts characters who aren’t equipped to meet the demands placed on them by society:
Fake fortune teller
Scandalized by fate
Broke bodybuilder
Crushed beneath the weight
Lost and deluded
Trying to find your place
Inept long-distance runner
Losing every race
The opening verse of “Gen-X Cops” captures the brooding, apocalyptic anxiety of our age with unsettling precision. Forget about crises of meaning and identity. Today’s youth have scarier things to worry about: environmental degradation, climate change, political polarization, rampant inflation, information privacy, threats of nuclear war, and unchecked technological innovation, to name a few. Fear prompts restlessness – an inability to savor the comforts enjoyed by former generations:
Blacken the sky and sharpen the axe
Forever cursed to live unrelaxed
We make no bones, a house is not a home
And a home is nowhere we can stay
Despite his misgivings, the narrator is unable to avoid the conflict thrust upon him by his forebears: “Dodged the draft, can’t dodge the war.” He must bear the weight of history. However, while he could easily spiral into bitterness, Koenig chooses to engage in empathy, acknowledging that no generation is immune to pride and shortsightedness. He might not be equipped for modern problems, but that doesn’t mean that his ancestors were equipped for the struggles of their own time and place. Like those who came before, Koenig’s contemporaries will make their own share of mistakes:
It wasn’t built for me
It’s your academy
But in my time, you taught me how to see
Each generation makes its own apology
While the album’s tunes may be upbeat, the lyrics on Only God Was Above Us are weighty, illumined only by sparse patches of light. This trend continues on “Hope,” the album’s eight-minute finale (which features some of Koenig’s best lyrical work to date). In verse after verse, the singer lays out a litany of complaints against the world: injuries, deaths, prophecies of doom, hatred, secrets, broken promises, ruins, murderers acquitted, loss of faith, and more. Sandwiched between these disturbing stanzas is a refrain that, on first listen, might sound anything but optimistic:
I hope you let it go
I hope you let it go
Our enemy’s invincible
I hope you let it go
These lyrics recall the pre-chorus of “Capricorn,” where Koenig comforted a weary listener with these words:
Good days are coming
Not just to die
I know you’re tired of trying
Listen, baby
You don’t have to try
What is the narrator saying here? Is he urging us to abandon the fight for justice? Does he think that the world is irredeemable? In order to grasp the import of Koenig’s words, we’ll conclude by rewinding to the album’s eighth track, which I believe offers the narrative resolution of Only God Was Above Us (and which might be the best song that Vampire Weekend has ever written): “Mary Boone.”
The first verse of “Mary Boone” introduces us to a young artist who has just arrived in New York City. The youth’s naïvety and idealism are evident in their efforts to obtain work where there are no vacancies:
Painted white
New in town
You weren’t hiring
But I was looking
The artist, we soon discover, has come looking for a true-life art dealer named Mary Boone. Presumably, the youth feels a kinship with Boone, who moved to NYC from small-town Pennsylvania and was the daughter of Egyptian immigrants.11 The narrator waits for their art to be noticed by the famous collector, standing in the shadows of Boone’s gallery: “Mary Boone, Mary Boone / I’m on the dark side of your room.”12 They yearn to follow in the collector’s footsteps, shaping the city’s artistic legacy. However, NYC doesn’t hold the same promise for Boone that it once did. Injustice is on the rise (“Crooked crime / Petty cop”), and Boone has contributed to it, earning herself a 30-month sentence in federal prison for tax fraud.13 Her legacy has been tarnished irreparably, and her days are filled with regret: “In a quiet moment at the theater / I could feel your pain.” Standing in the ruins of her former life, she has plenty of reasons for cynicism. Now, in her exchange with the young artist, we witness the confrontation between hope and despair, between the restlessness of a new generation and the sins of the old guard, that Koenig has woven throughout Only God Was Above Us. And we’re left wondering: How will these characters move forward?
Koenig’s peculiar answer comes in the bridge of the song, where the young artist lists a seemingly random collection of objects:
Book of hours and
Russian icons and
Sand mandalas and
Natarajas and
Hex sign barns
Ando churches and
Whirling dervishes
Long exposures and…
Does this sound familiar? Here, Koenig’s lyrics hearken back to Vampire Weekend’s debut album, which reveled in similar flurries of exotic words. Like the narrator of that earlier album, the young artist of “Mary Boone” loves the items listed in all their particularity, breathlessly gushing about them the way a child would (notice the repetition of “and” between the lines). Each of these objects is an example of religious folk art, the kind of thing that an aesthete like Mary Boone would be fascinated by.14 Here, the young artist invites the famous art dealer to pause and notice beauty. It’s as if they’re saying, “Look at all these things! Aren’t they wonderful?” In doing so, the youth challenges Mary Boone to remember her first love – the childlike wonderment that led her to New York in the first place. This exhortation echoes the final lines of the chorus: “Mary Boone, Mary Boone / Well, I hope you feel like loving someone soon.” Aware of the many reasons for Boone’s cynicism, the youth nevertheless encourages her to open her heart again – to glimpse the glory that surrounds her, if only she has eyes to see it.
Like a beautiful tapestry, “Mary Boone” joins musical and lyrical motifs woven throughout Vampire Weekend’s catalogue. Descriptions of New York’s cityscape swirl together with artistic references. Classical strings and piano mingle with hip hop beats, occasionally giving way to soaring choral harmonies. The choir is a throwback to “Ya Hey,” the climax of Modern Vampires of the City. On that song, the narrator wrestled with God, venting his despair over the brokenness of the world. On “Mary Boone,” he reaches a kind of spiritual epiphany. The world may be broken, but its beauty remains undimmed, as worthy of exploration and celebration as it ever was. The narrator’s plea to Mary Boone sounds almost like a prayer: “Let me bring you my masterpiece / You’re the author of everything / Use this voice and let it sing.” Here, Koenig depicts a confluence of generations, one that spawns possibilities for spiritual and cultural renewal. Perhaps, Koenig suggests, old and young might have something valuable to teach one another, after all.
Observing the young artist’s quest to make an impression on NYC, one can easily imagine four wide-eyed Columbia grads with their world at their feet. Yet I believe that the members of Vampire Weekend see themselves in Mary Boone, too. The band has come a long way since the release of Vampire Weekend and Contra. Their enthusiasm for life has been chastened, and their efforts to make a lasting difference in the world may have fallen short. Yet, in recalling the idealism that once sparked their youthful creativity, they uncover an important truth: Childlike wonder may ebb and flow, but as long as this broken and beautiful globe keeps spinning itself around, spilling its colorful fragments together into kaleidoscopic patterns, that wonder can always be recovered.
Conclusion
This, in the end, is why Vampire Weekend’s work moves me so deeply (and why I’ve now written six blog posts about it!). Taken alone, each of their albums is musical masterpiece. Yet, when viewed as a whole, the band’s discography emerges as a profound work of literature – an epic, multilayered narrative that rewards thoughtful analysis.
On Vampire Weekend, we were invited to love the world as a child loves it: breathlessly, effortlessly, and automatically. Sadly, this instinctive love isn’t sustainable. As we saw on Contra, the planet we call home is a hostile place, capable of shattering the very dreams it inspires. Faced with the loss of innocence, we may be tempted to turn our backs on the world, as the band was on Modern Vampires of the City. Alternatively, we can take our cue from Father of the Bride, striving to make the world a better place. This activism might content us for a while, but our best efforts to improve ourselves and to repair social systems will inevitably fall short. When that happens – when sinister forces become overwhelming, threatening to erase everything we’ve worked for – how can we possibly continue to love?
The answer, offered by Vampire Weekend on Only God Was Above Us, is a decision. We must reopen our hearts to the world, as painful as that process might be. We must exchange the automatic love of childhood for the strenuous love of adulthood. We must choose to love life again and again – not overlooking the world’s defects in an effort to make it lovable, but loving it in spite of them, actively cherishing the beauty that makes life worth living. After all, as a wise old nun in Greta Gerwig’s film Lady Bird said, “Love is attention.”16 We demonstrate our fidelity to the world through the sacred act of noticing and appreciating its fragile glory, just as Ezra Koenig does in the bridge of “Mary Boone.” Failure to do so may numb our heartaches, but it will also rob us of life’s deepest, hardest-won joys.
Now, finally, we can properly appreciate the chorus of the album’s closing track, “Hope.” When the narrator tells us to “let it go,” he’s not advocating pessimism – not by a long shot. Rather, he’s urging us to turn our attention from obstacles we can neither control or surmount to the goodness that already surrounds us. It’s a simple, unassuming response to a tidal wave of suffering. Yet, faced with the sum total of the world’s wounds, what can we say except a weary, “Yes, all this is true, and yet you are loved still”? The future isn’t guaranteed; we may only have today. But isn’t that all we’ve ever really had? Sure, the roof of the airplane might be torn off. But, my goodness, what a glorious sky!
I’d like to close this series by sharing a poem by Ellen Bass:
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.16
Thanks, Vampire Weekend.
References
1. “Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us Track by Track | Radio X | X-Posure.” YouTube, uploaded by Radio X, 10 April 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPaxif0a1Fk.
2. Singh, Ritu. “The Miracle Story Of How A US Plane Landed Safely After Losing Its Roof Mid-Flight.” NDTV, 22 November 2023, https://www.ndtv.com/feature/the-miracle-story-of-how-a-us-plane-landed-safely-after-losing-its-roof-mid-flight-4592426.
3. “Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us Track by Track | Radio X | X-Posure.” YouTube, uploaded by Radio X, 10 April 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPaxif0a1Fk.
4. Pareles, John. “Vampire Weekend Did Not Make a ‘Doom and Gloom Record’.” The New York Times, 20 March 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/music/vampire-weekend-only-god-was-above-us.html.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. DeSantis, Rachel. “How Fatherhood and Turning 40 Helped Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig Finally Feel Like an Adult (Exclusive).” People, 5 April 2024, https://people.com/vampire-weekend-ezra-koenig-finally-feels-adult-exclusive-8625179.
8. “Capricorn.” Genius, 16 February 2024, https://genius.com/Vampire-weekend-capricorn-lyrics.
9. Pareles, John. “Vampire Weekend Did Not Make a ‘Doom and Gloom Record’.” The New York Times, 20 March 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/music/vampire-weekend-only-god-was-above-us.html.
10. Ibid.
11. “Mary Boone.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 May 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Boone.
12. “Mary Boone.” Genius, 28 March 2024, https://genius.com/31277256.
13. “Mary Boone.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 May 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Boone.
14. “Mary Boone.” Genius, 28 March 2024, https://genius.com/31277256.
15. Lady Bird. Directed by Greta Gerwig, A24, 2017.
16. Bass, Ellen. “The Thing Is.” Mules of Love, BOA Editions Ltd, 2002.
Words for Wayfarers 