The surface of Vampire Weekend's "Holiday" is all sun, but darkness lurks underneath its ska-punk bounce. "It's about a member of my family who gave up meat when we invaded Iraq," lead singer Ezra Koenig explained to British music weekly NME in 2010. "They were horrified by what was happening, and they lost their taste for meat. It wasn't even an overt protest, it was a physical reaction." It's a strange origin for a single that many (including advertisers) interpreted as a non-denominational song written specifically for the end-of-year holidays, but then again, most everything about Vampire Weekend seems conjured in Victor Frankenstein's laboratory: college students in polo shirts fusing street music from globe-spanning locales with trends from across American pop history, their career was jolted to life by the internet, a then-emerging technological force the nascent Vampire Weekend leveraged in fresh, fascinating ways.
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