Who Gives a Fuck About a Ska Revival?

VAMPIRE WEEKEND, ONLY GOD WAS ABOVE US TOUR, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, June 11, 2024.

When I was 15 years old, I ran away from my hometown of Sonoma, California. In my hurry, I took with me only one sweater and one treasured belonging. Hours later, the police found me in a pasture. I had fallen asleep crying, clutching my cherished possession: Vampire Weekend’s debut album on vinyl. I felt mortifyingly young, not to mention incredibly alone.

On June 11, I am no longer 15. I’m also no longer alone: I’m enveloped by a crowd at the Hollywood Bowl, one of 17,000 fans at the sold-out Vampire Weekend concert. The band is on tour for their fifth album, Only God Was Above Us (2024). The crowd is expectedly twee. No one is particularly well dressed. There are college sweaters and T-shirts advertising bookstores in Portland; there are slick men in Patagonia jackets (the kind of men I did not waste time on in college and have no interest in doing so now). It feels fitting that I run into an ex-best friend here, along with a guy I went on three dates with six years ago. I do not say hello to either.

The anticipation for the sold-out show is rousing. It’s the kind of event that brings out even young parents, buzzing couples willing to shell out for childcare on top of the actual tickets. A friend remarks that Vampire Weekend will probably become like the band Phish, but for millennials—a band that has soundtracked our lives for over a decade. I shudder at the thought. Of course, it’s tempting to launch into a diatribe on Vampire Weekend as an insufferably self-conscious, Ivy League–pedigreed, smug, New Yorker tote bag–carrying band for elder millennial creatives. And sure, you might say they ripped off Paul Simon. But I love Vampire Weekend. I don’t want their mention to become an invitation to roll your eyes at a dinner party.

The concert begins with a beloved classic, “Holiday.” Thrilled, the audience roars. Onstage, the set resembles a decaying spaceship—as if airlifted from a science fiction novel. The band plays a few more beloved hits before Ezra Koenig, the lead singer, announces that it’s “ska night at Hollywood Bowl.” The band ambitiously tackles fan-favorite songs like “Ottoman” with a ska reimagining, including saxophone and melodica solos. This is one of Vampire Weekend’s greatest strengths: their seemingly endless musical imagination that transcends genre and tone.

During the concert, I repeatedly liken Ezra Koenig to David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads. Tonight, Koenig sports a gray jumpsuit and floats across the stage effortlessly (à la Stop Making Sense). He’s a genius. Of this, I’ve had no doubt since I was a teenager, and I’ve never been more convinced than on this particular Tuesday. At one point, an enormous, lime-green monochrome image of a man in eclipse glasses looking towards the sky appears behind him—a photo of a friend, Koenig explains. The friend’s awestruck, heavenward gaze feels apt. After all, Vampire Weekend’s newest album often takes on a celestial, almost religious aura. Over the course of 10 seductive songs, we’re effectively asked to surrender to some imagined god—and, on a starry summer night above Griffith Park, it’s easy to envision that divine being. Koenig’s lyrics have never sounded more like prayer (albeit an occasionally tortured one) than they do belted out by 17,000 voices, in unison: “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die.”