Posh and proud ... Vampire Weekend. Photograph: Tim Soter
Vampire Weekend's debut album, due February 25th, conjures up a world with which I'm guessing most of you are pretty unfamiliar: holidays in Cape Cod; heiresses who shop at Louis Vuitton; the architectural features of Manhattan brownstones; people who can distinguish between Darjeeling and English Breakfast tea; men called Blake. Track six, Campus (and here's a sentence that I never thought I would find myself typing), makes falling in love during a poetry tutorial at an Ivy League university sound like the most fabulously romantic thing in the world. Ever.
Now I don't know too much about Vampire Weekend's personal circumstances, other than they met at Columbia University, but here is a band who, unquestionably, look and sound posh. They are impeccably polite, clearly well educated, dress as if they regard River Island as pretty edgy and seemingly move freely among an East Coast WASP elite.
How in God's name, then, have they managed to become one of the most widely touted bands of 2008? Since when did it become OK for the posh to rock? And could this finally mean that music is growing up?
Historically, rock's cool kids have been of solid working class stock: Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Mike Skinner. Intoxicated by the glamour of the street, the authenticity of the shop floor and the romance of poverty, rock's tastemakers - generally white, middle-class boys full of self-loathing and wildly patronising ideas about life outside Oxbridge - have idolised Britain's guitar-toting Everymen, while giving their own wealthy, well connected kind, the Lily Allens and Jack Penates of this world, all sorts of stick.
It's an inverse snobbery which makes little sense. In 1976, purging Britain of progressive rock was so urgently necessary that putting Pink Floyd, Genesis and their public school ilk up against the metaphorical wall and shooting them was the only way forward. But 32 years on from punk, it's clear that class is no bar to, nor indicator of, musical talent.
Working class bands are often credited (by journalists who have never been skint) with having "nothing to lose", of being wild and untamed, where the industry is cautious and careerist. But that's just rubbish. It neither explains the calculated genius of Oasis nor Jarvis Cocker's stubborn, penniless refusal to compromise early Pulp. It doesn't excuse the desperate way the Twang or Pigeon Detectives are happy to play up to a cartoon version of themselves to please the music press and it conveniently ignores real working class phenomena like Take That or the Spice Girls. There are many working class kids of negligible creativity and ambition who have managed to clamber aboard the music industry gravy train, and, for obvious reasons, they cling on for dear life.
At the same time, we have repeatedly seen that for every posh rocker whose music sounds exactly how you might expect it to: warm, safe, smug, content, conservative (James Blunt, Dido, Kula Shaker), there are just as many (Joe Strummer, Evan Dando, Rufus Wainwright, Daft Punk, Beastie Boys, the Strokes) who have produced music of genuine wit, soul, originality and vigour.
Moreover, surely a bit of cultural tourism is good for all of us? As a grumpy, left-wing northerner, I grew up on the Smiths and love the Arctic Monkeys. But I also like a lot of other music that evokes specific times, places and cultural experiences which are completely alien to me. If you like language, how can you fail to be drawn in by everything from Gil Scott Heron's evocation of the failing New York of the early 1970s to the Divine Comedy's knowing, camp evocation of upper-class Britain, circa 1920? And if Neil Hannon or Vampire Weekend humanise the rich for me, that is no bad thing. I'd rather my class politics were based on a sense of social justice, than the cheap, tuneless anarcho-punk sloganeering of spite, envy and prejudice.
Remember: the rich are people too. Tax them, shut their schools, nationalise their companies, but don't stop them making music. Or we'll all suffer. Toodle pip!
