Does Vampire Weekend’s ‘A-Punk’ make any sense at all?
2008 was a weird time. I was 12 years old, slowly crafting my own understanding of popular culture through the tight-fitted lens of skinny jeans and the ill-informed vibrancy of neon-lined V-neck T-shirts. I was too young to relate to the drug-addled sleaze of Camden’s indie scene, but too curious to outrightly embrace pop.
Oddly, through the introduction of a typically irreverent noughties comedy film, I found a song that slipped between those cracks, becoming a colourful anthem for my indie-obsessed adolescence.
“You’ll still get people who stick Step Brothers on and hear ‘A-Punk’ for the first time and think, ‘Who’s this?!’ That’ll probably always be our biggest song, but people are still discovering it,” Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig said of the song. To my credit, I discovered it in the year both pieces were released, but nonetheless, I won’t lie and say Will Ferrell and John C Reilly weren’t the vehicles through which I did.
It’s a true earworm of a song that has soundtracked a generation of off-beat millennials, whose humour, personality and mannerisms run parallel to the angular nature of the song. But the melody itself is largely what people sing when it begins to play. Almost like a pogo stick bouncing from the walls, the melody peaks and troughs at rapid speed, in somewhat of a modern-day twist on doo-wop music.
Within that, the lyrics are somewhat illegible and gives its listeners creative licence to inject whatever they feel. It was almost like a musical ladder that ascended and descended the scales, and the way in which you climbed it was your decision. But ultimately, there was a meaning behind the song’s lyrics that have since been lost in the endless cross-platform uses it has found itself in, and thus let us find some context to what otherwise sound like made-up sentences.
So what does ‘A-Punk’ really mean?
In keeping with the preppy nature of the soundscape, the song follows two diverging university friends who, after graduating, seek two very different senses of adventure. Johanna occupies the first verse, by driving slowly into New York City, with the snowy Hudson River providing the backdrop.
“Johanna drove slowly into the city / The Hudson River all filled with snow / She spied the ring on His Honour’s finger / Oh, whoa, oh!”
His Honour is the other friend in question who comes in the first verse after the chorus, is told to be moving southward, to sunnier climates and away from the bustling metropolis that caught Johanna’s eye.
“His Honour drove southward seeking exotica / Down to the pueblo huts of New Mexico / Cut his teeth on turquoise harmonicas / Oh, whoa, oh!”
On the surface, this is an innocent song of life’s transience. The parting ways of two friends whose separation from one another is mused over the parting of a memento, in this case, His Honour’s ring. A short and sweet tale that beautifully captures the conflict of excitement and sorrow, so often experienced in the ever-changing lifestyles of adolescence.
But Koenig manages to achieve something great in his lucid specificity. The tale is descriptively accurate, telling the geographically focused tales of two people that, outside of the universal feeling of loss, open up a whole host of theoretical viewpoints.
‘A-Punk’ is one of the finest examples of a song which lies in the eye of the beholder. The skeleton storyline of life’s transience is there, but the specificity of its background is up to you. Alternatively, you can regress to what you most likely did upon first listen, and just scat sing your way through the melody.
