“Harmony Hall,” by Vampire Weekend, Sunday, August 20, 2023

 

I hope you've been having a nice Vampire Weekend. Honestly, the band is one I've never gotten into, like other heady rock bands such as The National and Tame Impala. Formed in 2008, a time when vampires were all the rage, many rockers took issue with the band calling themselves a rock band, which singer Ezra Koenig addresses in an episode of Song Exploder discussing today's song, "Harmony Hall." Part of that controversy comes from a featured interview with Koenig in The Guardian titled, "Rock music is dead, so it's more joyful to me." In the article, Koenig talks about the state of the genre as well as the band's extensive hiatus over the 2010s.

ANGER WANTS A VOICE, VOICES WANNA SING. The four original members of Vampire Weekend boasted an Ivy League-educated band, leaving a critic to call them "The whitest band in the world." Ezra Koenig responded to this biting critique, saying, "Nobody in our band is a WASP." Koenig is Jewish-American, and the other members come from Persian and Eastern European families. Whereas the critic was looking to call out Vampire Weekend on their lyrics coming from a position of privilege, Koenig stated that the band members got into Columbia university on scholarship and were paying student loans. When Koenig declares "rock music is dead," he feels free to play with genre even more than when the band was enjoying the heights of their success in the late '00s and early '10s. No longer boxed in by stereotypes, Koenig speaks of how freeing it is to wear Ralph Lauren, un-ironically as an indie band headlining Glastonbury. But fashion and musical style are just the aesthetics for the message that the band now conveys. 

I DON'T WANNA LIVE LIKE THIS, BUT I DON'T WANNA DIE. In 2019, Vampire Weekend released their first set of songs after a hiatus. Despite one of the band's founding members, Rostam Batmanglij, dropping out of the band to pursue other musical endeavors, Batmanglij would be involved with some of the writing process for the band's fourth studio record, Father of the Bride, but he would no longer tour with Vampire Weekend. Releasing two singles at a time before the album's full release in May, "Harmony Hall" and "2021," kicked off the release cycle of Father of the Bride. Both singles "Harmony Hall" and "2021" sound like classic rock in ways that Vampire Weekend hasn't sounded like before. In fact there is an organic Credence Clear Water Sound on Father of the Bride in their sunny melodies. Lyrically, "Harmony Hall" deals with the loss of idealism toward human rights issues. In the episode of Song Exploder, Koenig also talks about how the title of the song comes from the name of a plantation in Antigua named Harmony Hall. Later it became a resort, but kept its name. Koenig points out that "calling something 'harmonious' doesn't make it harmonious." He took this thought and applied it to other paradoxes in modern life. The chorus of the song raises an impasse: "I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die." It's the socially-aware stance that points out the problems with modern life--the contradictions. The problems we are too small to solve because they are systemic. We don't want to live like this and keep them going, but we also don't want to die. We can fight, but not all the time. "Harmony Hall" is a call for us all to remember to do the right thing.  

Official Audio:
BBC1 Performance:
Austin City Limits performance: `

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