It all started two days ago, the 21st. I've been working on a tiktok to commemorate December 1st, which is permanently cemented in my head as Horchata day from my tenure as a vampire weekend stan back in 2013. For those who don't know, the song starts with the lyrics "In December drinking horchata/I'd look psychotic in a balaclava." When December 1st rolled around, we'd terrorize Twitter and Tumblr with references to balaclavas and horchata, even going as far as to ask Ezra to share a balaclava selfie. Excuse me, I mean selfy.
As I scrolled through pale blog archives, scavenging for photos that referenced Vampire Weekend or balaclavas, another song popped into my head that I hadn't thought about in a very long time: Step.
Step is the third song on Vampire Weekend's third album, Modern Vampires of the City, an album I was wholeheartedly obsessed with during the winter of my freshman year of high school. Step is an almost lullaby-like earworm that serves as a reflection of Ezra's fear of aging and hesitancy in entering adulthood. I can no longer listen to music, so I began scrolling through the lyrics on Genius, humming along to the melody in my head. The song starts clunky and wordy with the line "back, back, way back, I used to front like Angkor Wat," but finds its footing with a beautifully simple, almost hymn-like chorus:
"The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones
I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone"
As I scrolled to the bottom of the genius page, I learned that the refrain of the song, "every time I see you in the world, you always step to my girl," was inspired by the song 93 'Til Infinity by Souls of Mischief. I wouldn't discover that song for myself for another year after my Vampire Weekend obsession, but it's been one of my favorites since I first heard it. Finding the connection between those two songs made me even more intrigued by Step. What other gold had I missed in my previous listens?
Mechanicsburg, Anchorage, and Dar es-Salaam
While home in New York was champagne and disco
Tapes from L.A. slash San Francisco
I then spent the next hour of my life meticulously reading all the lyrical annotations on Genius and on the Vampire Weekend subreddit. I'm now on day two of my Step craze, and I can't get the damn song out of my head. My thought process is fucked.
"God, I really need to finish making that video for work tomorrow," the type A bitch in my brain thinks.
"But actually Oakland and not Alameda, your girl was in Berkeley with her communist reader..." the other half of me replies.
Then, together: "I feel it in my bones. I feel it in my boooonessssss."
(which, quick aside, I think is the most beautiful lyric in the song. If I had written it, I'd be worried that it sounds too generic and cheap, but I think when contrasted with the dense lyrical thicket that came beforehand, it's clarity and simplicity is so gorgeously refreshing. Ezra is an amazing songwriter, I'll give him that.)
...Mine was entombed within boombox and walkman
I was a hoarder but girl that was back then...
As a general rule, I try my best to not think about Vampire Weekend. This is for a few reasons:
- I said I was a vampire weekend stan, but that's actually kind of a lie. Really, the only album of theirs I listened to in full was MVOTC. For some reason, I never gave the others a full listen. My music consumption habits were pretty shitty when I was younger, and I wish I could go back in time and shake myself for missing so much good music. Vampire Weekend fills me with regret for that reason.
- In 2019, Vampire Weekend did a free pop-up concert in Washington Square Park to promote their fourth album, Father of the Bride. I was sitting in a coffee shop 10 minutes away the entire time, torturing myself by studying instead of seeing them perform live. Once I finished, I rushed over to the park to find that they had finished playing 10 minutes earlier. While I'm no longer a Vampire Weekend fan (more on that later), I'm still really, really angry for not letting myself live for once in my goddamn life and see them perform. I put my studies in front of everything in life that could have brought me joy and completely ruined my college experience because of it.
- I have so many sacred memories of listening to Vampire Weekend while scrolling through Tumblr or reading Rookie. These memories are now completely tarnished because of what Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend's frontman, did to Tavi Gevinson. Thinking about that whole situation makes me feel...very weird.
For those who don't know, Ezra and Tavi dated when he 30 years old and she was 18, a glaringly problematic age gap. (Seriously, what does a 30 year old want to do with an 18 year old?) Tavi hasn't named Ezra as an ex, but she has written about him a couple of times, the first of which was published in 2016 on her online magazine,
Rookie.
I was sitting on the linoleum floor of my ballet studio's dressing room, fluorescent lighting overhead, scrolling through Twitter when I saw a few tweets linking to a freshly posted article on Rookie. As a suburban teenage girl on tumblr, I was a big fan of Rookie, so I was immediately intrigued when several people suggested that she had written about Ezra. As I started reading, my heart began to sink deeper and deeper into my chest.
...The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones...
In the piece she writes, which is a fragment of a conversation she has with Taylor Swift, she describes going on a date with a Man, which was set up by Man's friend. Another friend of Man refers to him as a "sex addict" in the same paragraph. Tavi goes on to describe the (very awkward) date she has with Man, mentioning a few details, like Man's obsession with luxury watches, that pin the bullseye right on Ezra.
Ezra comes off as kind of/very creepy and gross in the article, enough to put me off listening to Vampire Weekend until Father of the Bride came out. I, like many Vampire Weekend fans, was disappointed he'd go after a girl who was so much younger than him in a situation where the power dynamics were so fraught.
...I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone
Every time I see you in the world, you always step to my girl....
There's a degree of parasocial betrayal here. Back in middle school when I first encountered Vampire Weekend, they stood out in stark contrast to the One Directions and Austin Mahones that the music industry was trying to throw at my attention. Vampire Weekend didn't sing about insecure girls or objectify them; instead, they referenced Oxford Commas and Angkor Wat in their decidedly genderless lyrics. They were socially conscious and respected their fans, who were by and large teenage girls, and joked with us on Twitter. They understood the patriarchy, called themselves feminists, and campaigned for Bernie. To me and to my tumblr girl brethren, Vampire Weekend was one of the few bands that we thought actually respected us and believed we were smart, intelligent, and capable. Seeing the way he callously persued Tavi, and the way in which other people in her retelling described him, had us all messed up.
.... Ancestors told me that their girl was better
She's richer than Croesus, she's tougher than leather
I just ignored all the tales of a past life
Stale conversation deserves but a bread knife....
In early 2021, five years after her first date with Ezra, Tavi published an essay in The Cut called
"Britney Was Never in Control." In her piece, she uses Britney's treatment by the media and her portrayal in her documentary to analyze her own experience with abuse, sexual assault, and coming of age in a male-dominated industry. Her writing largely reflects on a relationship with an unnamed man, but again, it doesn't take much to figure out she's referring to Ezra. In the (very powerful) piece, she writes "looking like he was taking advantage of me was worse than raping me when I was too drunk to consent or coercing me into sex that I said, over and over, that I didn’t want to have. Me saying “I feel like I need to be helicoptered back to my childhood bedroom” did not set off his alarm bells, but the specter of negative PR apparently did." What was initially seen as a gray area relationship crystallized as flat-out abuse and assault.
...And punks who would laugh when they saw us together
Well they didn't know how to dress for the weather
I can still see them there, huddled on Astor
Snow falling slow to the sound of the master......
For me and for many girls who grew up on the internet, Tavi was a stand-in for us, and I feel a degree of closeness to her (albeit she is much more articulate and ambitious than I've ever been). She helped me realize my own voice and autonomy as a teenage girl, and the idea that someone who is linked so closely to her work in my memory sent her into "days-long spells of depression and anger," makes my insides twitch. I can't look at Ezra the same or listen to Vampire Weekend like I once did.
...The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones...
But the lyrics of Step revolve around my head still, like a taunting cloak of comfort. The melody makes me want to start scream-sobbing with grief over the fact that I'm no longer 15 and that I will forever be wary of men, even the "good" ones, because the good ones have also capitulated to the patriarchy and to capitalism.
...I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone...
It's been a decade since my Step obsession. I'm now in my mid-twenties, as hard as that is for me to wrap my head around, Ezra's lyrics sound a lot like my internal monologue these days. It's hard to re-discover something you once loved and have it resonate on a level deeper than you could've fathomed, but yet be completely unable to embrace it. I've changed, and I've lost too much since I last listened to Step, both in terms of my health and respect for certain indie rock musicians. Part of me wants to reclaim Vampire Weekend's music for myself again, but I don't want to support that band, and there's no one there for me in the past anymore. People will say, you know, that if you like something now, that's all that matters—you don't need to be 15 again to enjoy a song; you can enjoy it now.
...Wisdom's a gift, but you'd trade it for youth
Age is an honor, it's still not the truth
We saw the stars when they hid from the world
You cursed the sun when it stepped to your girl....
But I'm not the person I was when I was 15. I'm much more cynical, and the world is so, so different. There's no longer a Rookie for me to scroll through while listening to my favorite bands. My brain is no longer the fanatical sponge it used to be. I don't live with color anymore, just longing.
...Maybe she's gone, and I can't resurrect her
The truth is she doesn't need me to protect her
We know the true death, the true way of all flesh
Everyone's dying, but girl you're not old yet...
In the chorus to Step, Ezra writes "I'm stronger now/I'm ready for the house/Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone/I can't do it alone," a lyric that, to me, represents a transformational moment of being ready to take the next plunge into adulthood, but he knows he needs help to get there. This is a lesson that life has repeatedly tried to hand me, that we all need people in our corner to help us grow and evolve into the next stage in life, which I had little grasp on when I was 15. I, like Tavi describes in her essay, thought I had all the power to do whatever I wanted to because teenage girls were capable of everything.
...The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones...
Maybe I thought I had more power than I did in some ways, but independence became a hindrance as I isolated myself and college, spoke to no one ever, and punished myself by starving and studying for long hours. If there was ever a time I was ready to step into the next phase in my life, that time is long over, for I only yearn to go back or stay the same at the very least. (This probably should be its own separate post, but I've been ruminating a lot on how I've changed since high school and how I haven't, what it means to change, and if I actually want to change.)
..I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone...
So that's kind of where I'm left at right now. I spent Thanksgiving eating alone in my room due to my disability, with a song I hate that I love stuck in my head. Knowing all the baggage that comes with it, it feels that my brain is bullying me with it, but I can't really expect anything else from
the big dumb electrical ocean in my skull. The only thing that gives me comfort, actually, is the thought of drawing on my memories from the past and stepping into the next stage of my life,
not unlike Porter Robinson and Madeon's Shelter: “Even if those memories make me sad, I’ve got to go forward, believing in the future. Even when I realize my loneliness and am about to lose all hope, those memories make me stronger.” Whenever that happens, if that ever happens, I have to trust that I will be ready for the so-called house (such a modest mouse), even though I may have to do it alone.
...Every time I see you in the world, you always step to my girl.
