As the sun dawns upon the Park Blocks, you’ll need something to dive out of your AirPods and into your eardrums while you walk around campus. PSU Vanguard on Vinyl is a new column here to serve the cultivation of your music tastes. This week, I will be recommending the self-titled debut album created by a band of Columbia educated prepsters, “Vampire Weekend.”
Nothing screams “college” more than relaxed melodies mixing with the vernacular of newly minted university students, believing to know everything, saying nothing at all and feeling every single emotion.
This album is bright and provides the ambiance of a frat party that makes one wear ties and an Oxford button up to attend. The first song is named after an architectural feature, with lyrics such as “the ground beneath my feet / the hot garbage and concrete” immediately bringing to one’s mind a summer of youthful urbanity.
As an AP-style abiding journalist, I am particularly fond of their song “Oxford Comma” which espouses their hatred of this punctuation staple.
“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” is spit out over a relaxed keyboard and drum beat. I personally found this song to be displaying a bearable pretension, easy to walk to, sound and a relatable ideological tilt regarding grammatical features.
In the sunshine, everything looks better on campus—including the people. Songs such as “Campus” sound like the flutter of a student’s heart who sees that professor they make sure to attend every one of their office hours. While “I Stand Corrected” brings that youthful, lust filled arrogance down to earth by reminding the listener that college is about constantly identity building and making mistakes in that process.
This album exudes that endearingly insufferable collegiate pretension that every liberal arts student aspires to embody. While we may not be attending a university that has the mahogany tables of an Ivy League, the great landscaping of Reed College or the social scene of University of Oregon, that doesn’t mean we can’t indulge in the aesthetics of college life.
So, stream a little Vampire Weekend on your walk this week. Suck the Park Blocks of all the collegiate zest it’s got. And on that next essay you have to turn in before the term’s end?
Fuck the Oxford Comma.
