The Walrus - Music With Big Fuckin' Teeth!

03/04/2008

Count Five Are The Original Vampire Weekend

Long before the Ivy League, deck-shoed quartet Vampire Weekend began borrowing ideas from Paul Simon and ultimately soukous music, Count Five, another group of madras shirt wearing academic musicians, borrowed heavily from the Yardbirds and ultimately American Roots and Blues music. The parallel I'm basically drawing here is that preppy intellectual musicians fundamentally need pre-existing inspirational models to adapt, and claim as their own.
Allow me to illustrate...Count Five performing their 1966 hit "Psychotic Reaction" from their album by the same name.

Sounds more than a little like The Yardbirds single, "I'm a Man" (which borrows more than a little from American blues)

On the flip side of things, let's take a look at an intimate club performance of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" from their debut self titled album.

Production value/venue location aside, here is Paul Simon's single "Obvious Child," from Rhythm Of The Saints.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, and for today's modern music it is increasingly more difficult to create something original. What one does produce should reflect ones beliefs. Count 5 were a departure from the time Lester Bangs describes as "one of those musical recessions we used to have every once in a while...like drowning in the kitschvats of Elton John and James Taylor." For Vampire Weekend, it isn't about their prep-school outfits, or their Paul Simon fetish, rather Julianne Shepherd aptly sums up VW by saying; "trust-funded or not, VW's music, lyrically and sonically, emits the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society. And I can't get down with that, no matter how many times homeboys drop a Lil Jon reference." Saaaah-nap!