Fran Magazine: Issue #113

A guest post from Weston Leo Richey

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Last week in the woods

Hi hi hi hi — it’s Fran. This is the last week of my residency — actually the last day, but I’ll explain more about that next week — and I will be back stoking the flames of Fran Magazine myself starting next Wednesday! What will I write about? I don’t know! Thank you so much to Nicholas Russell and to Phil, both of whom wrote such great pieces. We’re closing out this guest series with — can you believe it — yet another excellent piece from a former Rutgers pal of mine, Weston Leo Richey. Weston is an excellent poet and writer — we got to work together on their essay about Orlando for Bright Wall/Dark Room — and they’re currently getting their PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin. I love reading their capsule reviews of movies and romantic poems, and when they reached out to write about Vampire Weekend — a band we both love — I said yes yes yes yes! Please enjoy! See you all soon!

Their Foot Shall Slide in Due Time
by Weston Leo Richey

The past three holiday cards from a friend have praised me for surviving a bad year. I’m sick of having bad years and I mean I the way Walt Whitman might: I as me but I as you and I as my friends and I as the world. Confronted by the shock and awe of an ongoing, brutal genocide in Gaza, by the crackdown on protestors at my own university at the hands of police armed with pepper spray and stun grenades, by my state intent on wiping out gender variance, and even by the largest sect of the largest faith in the world declaring the existence of trans people to be an affront to human dignity, I grow anxious. Retreating into myself doesn’t help. Despite successes in my academic career, I feel lonelier than ever: I rarely see friends and I still, just after my twenty-eighth birthday, have never had a romantic relationship. Truth be told, between a world that wants nothing to do with this self of mine and that self having nothing with which to relate, I often approach the brink of Kierkegaardian despair, “not wanting to be oneself.”

Into this despairing cloud of my life Vampire Weekend released their fifth studio album, Only God Was Above Us, and for a moment I felt something like joy. Vampire Weekend was the first musical love of my life, the strongest and the deepest. They were the first band I discovered independently of my parents—a friend of mine recommended them to me. They shaped my aesthetic outlook, my writerly voice. In a meaningful way, there is no Weston as Weston exists now without a Vampire Weekend. As I listened to their album the minute it came out—then listened to it again and again and again—the kinship I felt for their music at fourteen burbled up. My despair finds a twin across the album’s forty-seven minutes and ten tracks. But why?

We might begin the album’s title, in huge, desperate, grimy block letters in a newspaper headline on the cover art, a photograph by Steven Segal. In the declaration that ONLY GOD WAS ABOVE US lies a deluge of mixed feelings: there is nothing between us and God, but we also have nothing left except that God who is God knows how far away. The disused, graffitied, dirty, broken subway car where the foregrounded figure reads this newspaper signals decay, but not far in the background, an infusion of the miraculous: a figure in a jean jacket, blurry, walks along the car’s wall. Here disuse, destruction, and divinity commingle. The album’s title and its artwork birth an emotional chimera of hope and surrender, a hybrid affect in which the entire album bathes.

Or we could begin with Only God’s two lead singles, “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops,” twin harbingers of those twin feelings. Listening to them for the first time, the distance between their gritty production, and the bright spunk of Vampire Weekend’s very first single, “Mansard Roof,” seems immeasurably huge. “Gen-X Cops,” guided by seethingly loud guitar and relentless drums, roils with discontent, its lyrics violent from the start: “Blacken the sky and sharpen the ax, / forever cursed to live unrelaxed.” And, in kind, discomfort inevitably gives way to violence: “Forever cursed to live insecure. / The curtain drops. / A gang of Gen-X cops assembles, / trembling before our human nature.” 

“Capricorn,” slower and more melodic, textually reaches for comfort, with the speaker reassuring the addressee in the prechorus, “I know you’re tired of trying. / Listen clearly: you don’t have to try.” But still there is a squirming, a searching, a sense that the grasping hand comes up empty. The chorus presents the addressee as existing in an interminable purgatory, “too old for dying young, / too young to live alone, / sifting through centuries for moments of your own.” Even the song’s first verse seems to admit some kind of defeat: “Can’t reach the moon now, / can’t turn the tide. / The world looked different / when God was on your side.” But tense is important: only God was above us. God was on your side. Was, but is no longer.

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In Vampire Weekend’s invocation of God, I cannot help but recall the (unfairly) infamous Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, who, over two hundred fifty years ago, in a blaze of ardent zeal from Massachusetts to Connecticut, delivered a sermon that would cement his image forever as an unkind, fiery, judgmental preacherman. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is the one and only piece of writing any layperson would know him for. The sermon’s doctrine seems rageful enough: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” But in this sermon I see an anxious hand-wringer instead of a steadfast judge. While he entreats his audience to “consider the fearful danger you are in,” there lurks beneath this danger deep uncertainty, the fact that “you probably are not sensible of this.” God’s wrath is a loaded gun without an obvious target. Rather than see Edwards wielding the weapon of divine punishment against the sinners beneath him, I sense in every word the fear that he is in its crosshairs, too.

It is a cruel trick of fate that only one pillar of Edwards’s theology—the darkest and most salacious—is how he is remembered. His other sermons demonstrate a faith in and desperation for joy, love, and peace, even in the fear of God’s wrath—his almost never-read “Heaven Is a World of Love” and “A Divine and Supernatural Light” are mirror images of “Sinners.” Where those unworthy of God’s grace are held in his angry hands in “Sinners,” everyone may have “a spiritual and divine light immediately imparted to the soul by God,” and the heaven to which one might go is endlessly beautiful defined by love that is “always mutual” between its inhabitants, and, rather than the fear Edwards insists upon in “Sinners,” a very different conclusion is reached: “If you would be in the way to the world of love, see that you live a life of love.”

I linger on his ideas because of how acutely they echo across the centuries Vampire Weekend’s own preoccupations on Only God. Edwards’s imagining of heaven’s love and his conveyance of God’s hate for sinners cannot be extracted from each other—they are the same belief, and the joy and despair of each are the same feeling, enabled by the Protestant view of individuals being in direct connection to God. The exasperation with cruelty’s tragedy—an energy that thrums beneath Edwards’s sermon—is rendered most explicitly by the song perhaps most characteristic of Vampire Weekend’s sound, “Classical.” Over jaunty guitar, organ, and drums, the song’s speaker grieves the perseverance of cruelty and violence: “Untrue, unkind, and unnatural / how the cruel with time becomes classical. / I know that walls fall, shacks shake, bridges burn, and bodies break. It’s clear / something’s gonna change. / And when it does, which classical remains?”

So what does remain?  In Only God’s fourth song, “Connect,” the speaker is obsessed by connection, asking over and over across the chorus, “Now is it strange I can’t connect? / It isn’t strange, but I could check [...] / I know once it’s lost, it’s never found.” Bookended by an elaborate piano solo and frantic crescendo of piano, drums, and strings, Vampire Weekend marks connection as the thing that might bring solace—a solace by which Edwards suggests heaven is entirely characterized. Vampire Weekend reaches for love and connection constantly in Only God. In the bridge of “Mary Boone,” the album’s most tender song, the speaker rattles off a list of religious symbols before returning their attention to the addressee, their desire for love from them: “Book of hours, / Russian icons and / sand mandalas and / Natarajas and hex sign barns, /  Ando churches and / whirling dervishes, long exposures, and / these two tunnels go west and east. / Let me bring you my masterpiece. / You’re the author of everything. / Use this voice and let it sing. / Mary Boone, Mary Boone, / I’m on the dark side of your room. / Mary Boone, Mary Boone, / well, I hope you feel like loving someone soon.” The effect of this catalog, despite the gentle piano, is one of searching, frustration, and failure—looking for God across a range of faith traditions comes up empty, and all one can do is hope for love.

But “Prep-School Gangsters” disrupts this narrative. In its chorus, the speaker swaggeringly takes for granted connection through lineage and likeness—another preoccupation of the album—by declaring, “Somewhere in your family, / there was someone just like me.” Over relaxed, playful guitar and drumline, you can all but hear the smirk. But this connection is clearly a Pyrrhic victory: the song’s very first words all but negate the value of such intimacy, insisting instead that “It’s just something people say. / They don’t really feel that way.” Then, before the instrumental playout, over and over, we’re reminded, “It’s just something people say. / It’s just something people say. / It’s just something people say. / It’s just something people say. / It’s just something people say.” Heritage, identification, our ties to each other, crumble as mere discourse. So again we’re left with the question: which classical remains?

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Sometime during the early days of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I began to lose my faith in God, a faith that struck, like lightning, only a few years before that. I wept secretly in my bedroom several days a week as I heard the daily death toll in New Jersey and in New York City, just across the river from where I lived. So much suffering and for what. Then, when I moved to Austin to begin a PhD program, my mental health deteriorated and brought with it new diagnoses and a retinue of psychiatric medications. I felt intensely isolated, far from the support network I spent seven years building when I first moved to New York at eighteen. Traumas accumulated, as they do for everyone. I felt—and often still feel—that I lost something fundamental along the way. God became a bitter joke.

But still I desperately cling—out of stubbornness or optimism, pick your poison—to the little bit of faith I have left. This messy commingling of faith and faithlessness, of brightness and doom, is the genius of Only God’s thematic work, a genius most strongly exemplified by the album’s opening song, and my personal favorite, “Ice Cream Piano.” From the very first lyric, sung carefully over slow, almost hesitant, guitar, despair is the starting place: “‘Fuck the world.’ / You said it quiet. / No one could hear you, / no one but me.” But as the song transitions into its second verse, the instrumentation suddenly gives way to noisy guitar and galloping drums, and the lyrics grow impish: “The word was weaponized / as soon as it had passed your lips. / I am a gentleman. / I refuse to show my gentleness. / ‘Fuck around and find out!’ / The angry child recites this every day. / The universe will pry out / the truth, which is you’ve got nothing to say.” The rage against the world, at the universe, at God, bound up in the word fuck, grows into a joke, defanged.

The third verse extends this sense of play to politics, alluding to Eastern European ethnic heritages and conflict with specificity, the identity markers cascading, almost to render them all absurd: “‘You talk of Serbians,’ / whisper Kosovar Albanians. / The boy’s Romanian, / third-generation Transylvanian.” Then the verse’s sudden, meta final turn, riffing on Transylvania’s association with vampire fiction. The speaker says, “I see the vampires walking. / Don’t be gripped by fear: you aren’t next. / We’re all the sons and daughters / of vampires who drained the old world’s necks.” It is a subtle tonal shift but one that casts a shadow over the entire album—self-recrimination. Like Edwards, the speaker of “Ice Cream Piano” does not mock the angry child or the Kosovar Albanians as others but instead as an extension of the self. Indeed, even in the first verse, the speaker identifies themself and the addressee as agents of violence: “Armistice, / we never tried it. / You’re a soldier. / I’m police.” The result of this dialectic between anger and laughter is contradiction, the very contradiction that gives the song its title: “In dreams I scream piano.”

At the very other end of the album, the meditative, very long “Hope” closes the album by gesturing at the only way out of contradiction that we might find: acceptance. Its simple verse-chorus structure consists of a catalog of examples of decay, destruction, and rot, always returning to the simple refrain, “I hope you let it go.” In many ways, Only God is most in conversation not with Vampire Weekend’s previous album, the breezy Father of the Bride, but with its brooding older sibling, Modern Vampires of the City. As the speaker repeatedly hopes that I can let everything go, I continually return to Modern Vampires’s penultimate song, “Hudson.” It is perhaps the song that most directly predicts the band’s preoccupation with apocalypse in Only God. What do we do when we know the end is coming? The speaker answers: “Some men tend to linger on and some make haste from Babylon. / Some will roam their ruined home, rejoicing to the end.” If Modern Vampires lingers on and Father roams our ruined home, desperate for solace, Only God seems restless, desperate to escape. Its busy instrumentation and production bathed in noise drip with the desire to move.

Edwards’s “Sinners” famously begins with the King James Version of Deuteronomy 32.35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” He deploys it to emphasize the inevitability of God’s judgment, but a sliding foot is also not that far from a dancing one. I dance alone in my bedroom to the freakout final seconds of “Ice Cream Piano” as though I were preparing for a marathon, for death, for Hell itself. The final entreaty of Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners” insists I run, but I cannot help imagine Edwards directing his command at himself as much as his parishioners: “[L]et every one that is out of Christ now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom.”

Caught between the God I once loved and the God I struggle to believe in, my care for this world and my fear of it, my friends who I adore and miss all at once, the tension grows unbearable. But I hear the refrain over and over. I want love but I have not had it the way I want it. I hope I let it go. Nothing ends at the right time and rarely do we get what we deserve—or maybe we get too much. I hope I let it go. In the face of suffering, I cannot linger. I hope I let it go. My foot will slide sooner or later and when it does I can dance and then I can run. Let it go, then go. Make haste from Babylon—make haste and let there be no delay!