Revisiting Vampire Weekend's "Father of the Bride" in Wake of Israel's Gaza Offensive

Exploring binding ties and dividing lines in Ezra Koenig's double album opus.

Thanks for visiting The Wax Museum, the vinyl and vibes curation newsletter, where we dig up grooves from the past, present, and future.

Today we’re revisiting Vampire Weekend’s most recent album, 2019’s Father of the Bride, a sprawling, eclectic work that resonates more profoundly with each passing year.

The dense double album, which has been compared to the Beatles' White Album for its wide range of ideas and styles, is worth a deeper exploration, especially as its lyrics, increasingly relevant, echo the current state of the world.

The album's cover, featuring a distant view of Earth, aptly reflects its themes. Frontman and songwriter Ezra Koenig says Father Of The Bride is “about the ties that bind, the relationships between communities, between humans and God, between people and the land they live on.”

The bright music contrasts the heavy lyrics of heartbreak, religious quagmires, and geopolitics. As Zack Ruskin said in his Variety review, Father of the Bride “could soundtrack an afternoon picnic or be used as fodder for a doctorate thesis on songwriting. It’s a beautifully realized cipher in an age of unsatisfying answers.”

One of the threads I want to pull on and discuss further is the album’s theme of finding a place to call home and being part of something bigger than yourself. This theme culminates on Koenig’s gorgeous, piano-driven closer “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin,” featuring fellow diaspora Jew Danielle Haim of HAIM.

The titular cities are significant to the Jewish people: Jerusalem as the root of Judaism, New York as the hub for diaspora Jews, and Berlin as a remembrance of the horrors of the Holocaust. The song begins:

I know I loved you then
I think I love you still
But this prophecy of ours
Has come back dressed to kill

With acknowledgment to the title, these opening lines appear to refer to the crisis of conscience many Jews have for the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. Ezra makes it clear in the following verse:

A hundred years or more
It feels like such a dream
An endless conversation
Since 1917

In 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s wrote a letter to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Walter Rothschild, supporting a "home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This became known as the Balfour Declaration, and come postwar 1919, Britain was entrusted with the administration of Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both Jewish and Arab inhabitants. It was soon evident the two communities would be untenable together and it’s been that way for over a century.

Now the battery is too hot
It's burning up in its tray
Young marriages are melting
And dying where they lay

If “the battery was too hot” then, it’s a raging inferno now. Israel’s closure of Gaza and its two million citizens since 2007 resulted in deadly blowback in the form of Hamas’ October 7 terrorist strike. In response, Israel has killed more Palestinians in a month (11,000+) than the entire Russia-Ukraine war death count in two years (9800+). Children account for nearly half of the casualties.

Ezra ends the album with the verse/plea of:

Let them win the battle
But don't let them restart
That genocidal feeling
That beats in every heart

This is a two-partner, acknowledging historical Jewish suffering and expressing concern for the Palestinians' future. Here in the States, genocide is being cheered on by our government, often literally, with less than 25 out of 535 members of Congress publicly in favor of a ceasefire.

Why is this? Well, we can go to mid-album track “Sympathy” for an answer, a guitar-laden headbanger Ezra calls “the most metal Vampire Weekend’s ever gotten.”

Judeo-Christianity, I'd never heard the words
Enemies for centuries, until there was a third

The titular sympathy is the newfound solidarity between Judaism and Christianity that stems from their common enemy of the third Abrahamic religion Islam. This shared fear unites Jewish and Christian communities, with the Jewish experience often co-opted as a tool to further imperialistic agendas in the Middle East.

The following verse references “Diego Garcia,” which, if you are a political sicko like myself, you know is not a person but rather an atoll in the Indian Ocean currently used as a US-UK joint military base. The island was used as a CIA torture black site during the War on Terror and recently housed nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to threaten Iran.

Between 1968 and 1973, the 1700 inhabitants (known as the Chagossians) of Diego Garcia were forcibly uprooted from their homes for the military base to be established. The US ordered the island to be “sanitized,” which included killing all the resident’s pets; more than 1000 were gassed to death.

The Chagossians were promised a right to return to their land in the agreement; needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet, with petitions and lawsuits still ongoing 50+ years later. No apology has ever been given by the US government.

The Palestinians could be facing a similar fate. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land and forced to flee; they were not allowed to return. Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba, or catastrophe. As Israel orders the Gaza citizens to flee, there’s fear we are witnessing a second Nakba. Palestinians already comprise the largest stateless community in the world, with over 7 million homeless or in refugee camps.

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“I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die” is the chorus on FOTB’s lead single “Harmony Hall,” which was previously used as a line in “Finger Back” off Vampire Weekend’s 2013 Modern Vampires of the City. “Finger Back” is about an Orthodox Jewish girl falling in love with a Palestinian falafel shop employee.

One line in “Harmony Hall” raised eyebrows upon release:

Beneath these velvet gloves I hide
The shameful, crooked hands of a moneylender
'Cause I still remember

Moneylender touches on the historical Jewish stereotype and the community's journey from marginalized outcasts to powerful players on the world stage. As Ezra explains to Song Exploder, the “stateless eventually established a state,” and the people “outside the palace” have become the people “inside the palace.”

“When I think about that phrase, the moneylender, it just makes me think about the past and shame, and how sometimes people in power, […] because of trauma or shame sometimes make decisions that are based in fear.

In some ways that’s one of the drivers of these kind of vicious cycles that we have as people, is that people are attracted to power often because they lacked power at some point in their life. […] when you've been traumatized and made to feel fearful, it's no surprise that even with power, you're still seeing yourself in a shameful, fearful way. It's a tough combo. Power plus fear.”

Father of the Bride is a story about how the same forces that bind us can divide us, illustrating how divisions arise as organically and gradually as connections. The only way out and through is to understand each other better in this vast, complicated world we share. A beautiful, often painful reminder that despite our differences, we all yearn for the same thing: a place to call home on Big Blue.

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