The person being addressed throughout the whole song is God

An aside: the David Bowie song Sweet Thing was made around the same time as another Bowie bootleg, “Zion”

See a bit of a martyr complex or masochism emerging here, loving or fetishizing mental suffering, circular logic

He’s talking about God — and his ability to love all people and all things.

Enhances the reggae and Jerusalem allusions by search for a lost homeland. Per Ezra Koenig, referring back to the album title as a line from “One Blood” by Junior Reid:

““There’s a lot of vampire imagery in reggae and the vampire is connected to this idea of an evil force of modernity attacking Babylon. It’s a force that zaps energy and represents greed and selfishness. A lot of people think of bankers and lawyers as the modern vampires, which is a bit simplistic, though not necessarily wrong. I prefer to think about the greed and selfishness in all of us. There is something dramatic about the title, but also a little funny.”

For a song apparently about depression-induced soulsearching during a successful music career, also parallels to lyrics by Lauryn Hill (who is from a few towns over in New Jersey from Ezra Koenig)

References to Middle Eastern sociopolitical conflict pervade each Vampire Weekend record and are not addressed too much in earlier criticism of their albums. There are numerous asides about the Iraq war, probably the formative global event for people the same age as the band members, in the lyrics, perhaps most obviously in “Holiday” (“Half of me is the gasoline but the other half’s the surf”). If the band likes to write about itself growing older, it does so self-aware-ly against the context of the literal fall of Babylon. Saddam Hussein wanted to rebuild Babylon in his own image and tried to do so several times.

The central narrative of the Hebrew Bible is God’s mercy on Israel, his chosen people, despite their unfaithfulness to him. “Zion doesn’t love you” refers to this unfaithfulness (Zion = Jerusalem.) And if even God’s own people don’t love him, his enemies, represented by “Babylon,” definitely don’t.

This reminds me of Patti Smith’s “Kimberly.” Around this time Smith published a memoir, Just Kids, about nostalgia for a simpler, more authentic New York City. In addition to the shared lyrical themes, it is in the same key and has a similarly propulsive bassline.

Like The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter’s seminal work in historical theory from 1964. A decade earlier, he wrote about “the pseudoconservative revolt.” Hofstadter is a Columbia University legend, just like, I guess, Vampire Weekend. He advised most of the American history giants of the baby boomer generation.

In the essay, Hofstadter describes the intellectual and cultural roots of our instinctive American antipathy for—and consequent pull toward—spiritual cults including the Illuminati (really). Koenig is into these, as well as Five Percenter theology via Wu-Tang. Hofstadter’s resistance to Manichean good-vs.-evil frameworks in American cults is akin to “never choose sides, never choose between two” in “I Think Ur A Contra.” So, same idea as here.

To get into the race issue, maybe VW should do a song of the South on the Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, or the postcolonial theory of Edward Said. Both worked at Columbia. They could also do another midcentury American sociologist, C. Wright Mills on the “power elite,” but it was probably too obvious.

To interpret this line, I put my copy of Hofstadter’s essays into my blender.

Perhaps more generic, but perhaps a reference to WWI-era Germany given Koenig’s interest in interwar period European literature — David Bowie was also way into this Aryan “Fatherland” spiritual cult during his introspective coke washout from music while in Berlin in the late Seventies, hence his name “the Thin White Duke,” which may have resonance for Koenig as an Anglophilic New York Jew. The band is also into Led Zeppelin, and Fatherland iconography was a big Jimmy Page thing.

Latin equivalent of “Ya hey” (Koenig has said that he finds Latinate Catholic ritual intellectually attractive like Evelyn Waugh did). Catholics aren’t supposed to be fatalists, free will and all, but many Irish Catholics are, and you get the vibe here of a desire for escape from fatalistic thinking. Ut Deo means “To God” in Latin.

Seen in iTunes download, but official lyrics video suggests it’s just an improvised sound or riff on “ya hey” with no literal meaning.

Likely refers to the story of Moses and the burning bush, given the religious tone of this song. Given the overt references to the Hebrew Bible throughout the song, a reference to Isaiah 43:2-3 is most likely: “When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flames shall not consume you, for I am Yahweh your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”

Vampire Weekend is known for their random references to other songs (e.g., Lil' John, Peter Gabriel; or in this case, Outkast “Hey Ya”) so they might be referencing the popular metal song “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce.

Though this observation clearly has nothing to do with the song, tweens on Twitter think Ezra Koenig looks like young Steve Jobs, and this song was probably written around time of Jobs' death, so. OK! Let’s pretend that it does! Steve Jobs was also into this polyglot religious seeker thing.

the Sixties reggae song by Desmond Dekker and one of the first Rastafarian hits in the UK and US. Ezra Koenig has said in some interviews that his father got him into this music as a pretty young child, either via Tom Tom Club (who recorded two of the earliest white raps, “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love”) or Eighties British ska or the direct source. Sixties Jamaican ska soundclashes are a big interest of Whit Stillman, a New York filmmaker whose class-conscious dialogue-driven movies from the Nineties are often paralleled to Koenig’s lyric writing. There are also the usual V-Dubs racial politics at play here, best described by the music critic Nitsuh Abebe in response to an essay by Jessica Hopper.

“Spinning” meaning either a remarkable act of DJing/segueing or making a chain of mental associations (from the suffering of the oppressed to the suffering of the upper middle class — a nice VW theme!)

In “Ek Shaneesh” friend-of-Rostam Heems from Das Racist mentions “spinning Sufis,” comparing the experience of being stoned to religious meditation. Tom Tom Club compares it to the Rastafarian word “overstood,” like deeper registry than analytic understanding. Ultimately, though, this section has a very simple explanation: God is a DJ, and life is a dancefloor (or Coachella)