A Sharpie Face On Tangerines

Vampire Weekend “How Long?”

“How Long?” is played as a light and jovial tune, right on down to including some goofy sound effects as punctuation on Ezra Koenig’s pleasantly winding melodies. It’s an amiable front for what could be Koenig’s crankiest, most bitter song thus far. It starts off with Koenig’s character grumbling about getting dumped by someone who cleverly tried to make it seem like a mutual breakup – “the only choice you gave to me is one I took reluctantly.” From there he’s questioning the value of pretty much anything, and though he’s doing it with a bit of levity, he’s not fully concealing his wounded pride. This is pretty bold for a guy who up until this point wrote every song in a way that suggested that he’d never had an unreasonable thought or feeling in his life. “How Long?” is pretty much nothing but unreasonable thoughts and feelings. It’s a song in which he conjures images of environmental catastrophe and it’s all just a hyperbolic backdrop for these two people to get stuck together alone all over again. Every mess seems entirely inevitable to him, and he’s just sitting there impatiently waiting for it just happen already.

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