These boys can really play their instruments, but technical ability is not a good enough reason to like a band. VW's music, with its immaculate construction, its high-collared violin solos, its boy's-choir croonery, is claustrophobically ordered—the sound of a band lulling itself into complacency. Whether they are truly bluebloods is beside the point: They embrace and exalt the accoutrements of a privileged Mo' Money/No Problems lifestyle. They transmogrify Jonathan Richman's New Englander fascination into a mutated bourgeois fantasy, fetishizing the parts of Massachusetts that would keep the actual "Massholes" out.

As a pop-culture entry point into the lives of rich and snooty white people, I prefer CWTV's addictive, ridiculous soap opera Gossip Girl, a trashy show whose very existence underscores issues of race and class (Blair Waldorf's Gwen-like "Harajuku Girls"; the absurd fact that Brooklyn loft dwellers are seen as impoverished). Vampire Weekend does the same, but sans the performative self-awareness. They are rightly credited for blending Talking Heads with twee and African-influenced polyrhythms, but they run their influences through a steam-cleaner—in sound, in texture, in language, in execution—until there's nothing left but space and simplicity and precious little conflict. Moreover, their calculatedly highbrow guitar techniques—pointedly undistorted; I bet these guys read sheet music—and carefully tousled nice-guy vocals drip so liberally with propriety that their style has, for me, become a resounding philosophical statement, a line in the sand. And because their whole steez is so '80s, I am forced to choose Black Flag and Minor Threat. Impeach Reagan!

And that's the deal: Trust-funded or not, VW's music, lyrically and sonically, emits the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society. And I can't get down with that, no matter how many times homeboys drop a Lil Jon reference.