Worst Albums Redux: Paul Simon goes to Columbia

Listeners remain incredulous as to whether Men at Work were attempting to channel worldbeat's nascent influence on 1980s pop music or paying homage to their genocidees languishing in the Australian wilderness when they released the paradigm destroying album, Business as Usual. Either way the record's popularity proved that truly new and vital forms emerging from afro-beat and no-wave to dub and hip hop were no match for the fulsome colonial thrust of pop music. Of course the form itself is built upon the sediment(s) of so many local musics, interpreted and translated into a palatable product, giving birth to the colonial conception of the catchy. Yet simple recognition of this fact and serious engagement with the source material is all too often lost on the translator. While remaining faithful to the source is by no means the measure of a true artist, abstracting the form from its context and any meaning previously attached to it is an even more dangerous proposition.

And so stand the poster-children for this abstract condition, the pastel-stained Gap Ad that is Vampire Weekend, a band who's sound could just as easily be described as High School Musical goes to Africa as Paul Simon goes to Columbia. Either way and unbelievably so, the immeasurable amount of pure vapidity buried within these tidy, catchy pop songs has been lost on almost every single critic to date. Yes the music is undeniably catchy but the smarmy, flippant particularity of their Cape Codian landscape could be no further from the universalist highlife of Lagos or Accra from which they borrow so heavily.

Short films about vampires. English Grammar. Lil' John. Fascinating stuff. The only thing missing is Chevy Chase. And maybe Peter Gabriel.