How Societal Anxiety and Kabbalah Mysticism Informs the New Visuals of Vampire Weekend
On the short lived podcast, FIT TEA, hosted by Rachel Tashjian, formerly of Garage Magazine before moving to GQ, she and her co-host Laia Garcia, a writer and editor at No Man’s Land, broke down the fascinating visual identity of Madonna’s Ray of Light period. They surmised that as Madonna grew into her 40s and Y2K was on the horizon, spiritual centrality became a personal, visual, and artistic priority of Madonna’s. She began observing Kabbalah Judaism, adopted denim heavily into her wardrobe, and began practicing yoga with Gwyneth Paltrow. With age, wisdom, and eerie apocalyptic undertones in the air, Madonna inadvertently created the ecosystem for celebrity mystic spirituality.
As time ticks on and cycles repeat, similar themes reveal themselves in the upcoming work of Vampire Weekend. Much of that vision can be attributed to front man Ezra Koenig, who’s stardom, while not even in the same stratosphere as Madonna’s, continues to grow through idiosyncratic projects and the departure of Rostam Batmanglij from the band. Batamanglij’s departure leaves Koenig as the singular artistic vision going forward for Vampire Weekend.
Much like Madonna, Koenig has entered a new stage of his life. Gone are his college years of Columbia literary magazines and taking the M79 across Central Park. He has a child with partner Rashida Jones, actress and daughter of Quincy Jones. His extended six year vacation in Los Angles has blossomed into a family and the beginnings of midlife. What has replaced the morose and gloomy questions of life explored in Modern Vampires of the City are more akin to Madonna’s Ray of Light period. Koenig considers the bleak future but his outlook on the present moment is deeply mystic. In a world spinning towards catastrophic global climate change, a country led by a nuclear armed game show host, and the anxieties of growing older Koenig’s imagery and music attempt to order his world and get his spiritual affairs in order.
The lyrics of Harmony Hall lament the dire political alignments. 2021 meditates on the nature of time, corrosion, and the metaphorical layers of rust of our lives as we grow older. Koenig shares a fascination with Kabbalah. Kabbalah imagery repeatedly appears throughout Vampire Weekend’s lead up singles to Father of the Bridge. The Tree of Sephirot, a sacred structure in Kabbalah, is mimicked on the 120-minute Harmony Hall video. Replacing the ten sephirot, or vessels, are symbols of peace frogs, bars graphs, and the sun.
The Harmony Hall video conjures a similar mysticism. In multiple shots, Danielle Haim as well as Koenig spin in circles. Haim’s hair and Koenig’s robe evoke the physical theology of Sufi mystics twirling to find inner peace.
Koenig was recently photographed for GQ by photographer Sarah Bahbah. Bahbah’s signature closed-caption-esque poems on the photographs create a context for the viewer to perceive the images. In his GQ shoot, Koenig wrote the captions himself. One stands out as evoking the zenned out sentiment of the ends days. “Nothing left to do but wait for Armageddon.”
All of these choices suggest a spiritual longing and search for meaning in the new and upcoming work. A longing that has long existed even in the major album releases of the biggest names in pop music like Madonna. A longing that seems incredibly pertinent in these confusing times and whose message and mystic interpretation is uniquely suited to the clouded nature of 2019.
