after the vampire weekend is over
is your bed made? Is your sweater on?- I caught myself in the mirror the other day and had a thought that made me sick.
I discovered Vampire Weekend in the TV section of Best Buy in North Carolina. The Cousins music video was being played on the back wall displays.
I had rainbow-colored brackets on my braces, and I was still straightening my hair when it was semi-dry. I had just learned what irony was, and I wore an XL Slytherin hoodie I got from Hot Topic most days because it was just long enough to keep my developing butt unexposed.
I was 12.
My Dad stood beside me comparing the sizes of the too-big Samsungs, as I stood back and tried to catch what I could, listening for a lyric that stuck out enough for me to latch on to it for later. Shazam didn’t exist yet, and my cellphone was an LG Xenon. If I wanted to listen to a song I heard in public I had to keep a lyric in my head until I got home to my Dell. It’s not like Cousin’s was much of a challenge though, I’d won much tougher battles by then, it took me two years of misremembering and research before Of Montreal’s Grolandic Edit was on my iPod.
On the ride home, I remember struggling to keep a conversation going with my dad which was usually easy for us at the time, my brain was too busy trying to hold on to the portion of Cousins I heard earlier.
Me and my cousins and you and your cousins.
I can feel it coming.
We parked the car, I ran up the back stairs and headed straight to my computer to get what I needed.
When I’m talking about Vampire Weekend, I’m usually never referring to Chris Baio or Chris Tomson, sometimes I’m referring to Rostam, but mostly, to me, Vampire Weekend is a term that is interchangeable with Ezra Koenig and his affect. The other boys are talented, but mostly vibe-dressing when it came to the overall aesthetic appeal of the band. Ezra Koenig is Vampire Weekend. Vampire Weekend is Ezra Koenig. Vampire Weekend’s aesthetic would be nothing without him- and for an internet-age teenage girl, does good music even exist without something to emulate aesthetically?
The Vampire Weekend look is approachable; soft enough to comfort the wallflowers, ironic enough to lure the wellread, and classic enough to inspire the Tumblr girls to make black and white edits that suggested the romance of another era. The Vampire Weekend look is the place between an owl pendant necklace and American Apparel disco pants. Before preppy becomes a hazing ritual, and before twee becomes Zooey Deschanel & Joseph Gordon-Levitt singing What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve (x).
Vampire Weekend is and isn’t. The vibes are easy to pick up.
The early days of my standom were spent clocking in after middle school, only accompanied by the sound of my hot thighs peeling off of the pleather chair we kept in the attic, the only space in the house where I could use my computer unbothered. There, I could go online and catch up on the music I missed while I was busy being a kid.
It was all so formative.
I remember how horrified I was when I found out that I had misheard the central lyric to Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, mistaking “fuck” for “run” in the first chorus. I had completely glossed over it. I’d never had to contextualize “fuck” as a verb before, and even though I understood what that meant immediately, the young part of me didn’t want to—It kinda scared me.
I saw it there in plain English on Songmeanings.com; Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa is about banging.
Is your bed made?
Is your sweater on?
Do you wanna fuck?
Like you know I do.
But I listened over and over and over again, curbing my reservations until I felt no fear. Soon, I wanted to be the Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa girl. I wanted to use “fuck” as a verb and be on the other side of that bed.
Well, isn’t that the crux of being a teen?
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