Vampire Weekend: The Graduates

Photographs by Matt Jones

The day after coffee in Greenpoint, I meet Koenig at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a student-friendly bakery blocks from Columbia's main quad. After a year living and teaching middle-school English in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, he has moved back to the neighborhood to be with his girlfriend while she finishes her senior year. Though he is likely to be carded well into the next decade, Koenig is cerebral and preternaturally self-assured. He seems to possess encyclopedic knowledge of every major era of pop music -- our conversation hopscotches from '70s Brit-folk to mid-'90s hip-hop -- but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon.

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Koenig played guitar and saxophone, starred in musicals, and had bands ranging from surf (the Aquatones) to funk (Groove Prophecy) to indie (Sophisticuffs). "He'd always be into something different than the week before," remembers Wes Miles, singer for Ra Ra Riot and Koenig's longtime friend. "African music, folk, hip-hop -- I don't think his curiosity was ever satisfied."

"By the time I was in high school, I had no genre allegiance at all," Koenig says. "I think sometimes people get caught up in the need to feel that by listening to indie rock, they're separating themselves from something," he says. "But it was the white kids flipping out to Nelly at the school dance. It wasn't anything to be diametrically opposed to. Whereas, maybe if you went to high school in the late '70s and the kids were listening to Toto or something, you'd really feel a tension."

While at Columbia, Koenig immersed himself in postcolonial literary theory and even started a blog of his own (internetvibes.blogspot.com) documenting his investigations into the overarching ideology that fuels Vampire Weekend's freewheeling cultural sampling. "It's like zeitgeist or gestalt," he explains brightly, "a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts." So his lyrics can reference both posh New England towns and Lil Jon, all from a musical sensibility that insists "the vibe from hearing interlocking African music is the same vibe you get from a baroque Vivaldi."

Koenig claims the right to cherry-pick across lines of culture, race, genre, and class because, as the descendent of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he is himself an outsider of sorts. And having wrestled with issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation as a deracinated fourth-generation Ivy Leaguer, he's concluded that he's allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. It's charming, but it's also indicative of the sort of confidence that only exists in the very young, the very successful, or both. Because he cannot imagine any resistance or skepticism to what he's doing, none seems to exist. At least not yet. "From thinking about it so much, you naturally know where the boundaries are," he insists. "Every once in a while, we've seen some things where people try to bring colonialism or appropriation into [talking about our band] in a negative way -- but that debate has already happened. We're in a context that's coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other."