Vampire Weekend – Diplomat's Son Lyrics

Either a Whit Stillman-esque coming out story or a parable about Clash frontman Joe Strummer, or both of these things. Music critic Simon Reynolds called it “everywhere/everywhen pop” in his 2011 book Retromania.

Reminiscent of The Getty Address by Dirty Projectors, a “glitch opera” written from the perspective of Eagles frontman Don Henley which somehow incorporates the fall of the Aztec empire, strip malls, and some other shit into one fractured narrative

Rostam had this to say about it in a Reddit AMA:

Ezra sent me a short story called Diplomat’s Son when we were in college. The last paragraph read:
“I wondered, watching him bleeding on the rugby field beneath my mud-covered boot, if he was looking at me through the proscenium of a Turkish taxicab’s rumbling windshield or, perhaps, the small port window of the rickety boat which had taken him down the Ganges.”

Years later I started working on a song on my own, this was between our first and our second albums, I knew I wanted two distinct parts with two really distinct grooves but both Jamaican in feel.

I started to take the idea of the “Diplomat’s Son” and put it in a different context. I started to look at it as more of a love story than a story about competitive students. I had a vocal melody and lyrics for the chorus: “He was a diplomat’s son, It was ‘81”.

Then Ezra and I got in the studio and started working on fleshing out the song: writing a verse, and prechorus together. More sections after that. Figuring out some vocals for the bridge as well.

We added CT on drums, Baio on Bass… and the rest is history.