Wake Up: You Are On Stage with the Arcade Fire (part two)

• This is the second post in a three-part series. Click here for the first post.

Media coverage of the Arcade Fire typically refers to the band as a collective from Montreal, relying on words like family and community to describe its members (since several of them are related, and supposedly they all lived together while making the new record) as well as its lyrical concerns -- as if the Arcade Fire was a direct result, and their music the expression, of an admirable social unity. The band has found various ways to emphasize this notion in concert. For instance, the musicians stand in what is more or less a single line across the stage, so that the guitar player commands no more attention than the violinist, and even Win Bulter, the lead singer (who on some songs hands the lead-singing over to his wife, Régine Chassagne), seems to fade out of focus; while the rest of the band trades instruments, giving the drummer a chance to step from behind his kit, and the bass player a turn on the accordion; and when everyone else is clapping and singing along, including the audience, the result is a kind of continuous call-and-response. Inevitably the line extends into the seats, as the band often enters or exits the stage by walking through the crowd or beginning their performance directly in the middle of the crowd, playing for them as intimately as possible -- almost like a serenade -- on acoustic instruments. "But then there was a palpable sense that we were supposed to come play in the crowd," Win Butler said in a recent interview. "Fuck that. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. It depends on the moment. But you start to feel like you owe them, like this is what you're supposed to do. Well, we won't do that anymore, then."

Of course, by inviting the audience to sing on stage in lieu of playing in the crowd, the band doesn't elude the expectations it has created for itself, but rather proves it is beholden to them. Every indie rock band must confront this predicament once they've achieved widespread acclaim: how to embrace their growing audience without losing the credibility -- as authentic creators of independent music -- that allowed them to cultivate that audience in the first place. It is a precarious balance grounded in the fundamental double standard of indie rock, that an inherently impersonal, public, and mass-produced media should retain elements of the private and the uniquely handmade. Indie rock listeners want to feel as if their favorite musicians are friends and peers as well as stars-in-the-making, but quickly resent any performer who actually achieves (or, even worse, aspires to) wider recognition -- not only because such achievements are seen as vain and self-important but because they are betrayals of a sacred trust. The music is an exclusive pact that should remain inaccessible to the uninitiated. In the age of the Internet, however, as this proposition becomes less and less tenable, the successful indie rock musician must maintain one of two available illusions, according to his or her situation: either he should appear less famous than he actually is (often by claiming to be the unwilling recipient of a degree of fame that he did not seek, like Kurt Cobain), or more famous than he actually is (by exuding an attitude that demands attention, saying I'm a star with such conviction it doesn't matter that his audience still knows him as a co-worker or former roommate). The ideal indie performer exists somewhere on the trajectory in between these two illusions, not yet globally famous but well known among a group of informed young people distributed across the cities and campuses of North America.

Indie rock is arguably less concerned with the creation of music than by the question of social mobility. How -- and whether -- one ascends from the middle class to the ranks of the celebrity performer. Both musicians and listeners are invested in the answers, but only the musicians reap the full benefit, and consequence, of fame; the listeners merely enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of watching from a comfortable distance a precipitous climb -- and its sometimes devastating falls, relishing the moment in which a performer receives either the triumph or failure we feel he accordingly deserves. Thus the resentment and hostility with which Win Butler regards his audience in the aforementioned quote is in some sense deserved. It is also compulsory: the typical indie rock listener will lose respect for a performer who regards the masses without reservation. Yet the listeners, who don't realize that they have -- in an expression of their apparent self-hatred -- obliged the performers to dislike them, become befuddled when they do. For instance, during the Arcade Fire's first performance at the United Palace Theatre, Win Butler supposedly directed a condescending remark at theatergoers who had purchased overpriced tickets on eBay. This, according to one blogger, "confused" the crowd -- "some even booing" -- when in fact it should have been expected by the very listeners who have demanded their performers to be two precisely opposite things at once.

The challenge of navigating these contradictions has, for the Arcade Fire, been amplified by the speed with which they were beset by fame -- a trajectory that literally took place overnight, leaving the band little opportunity to adjust to a new set of expectations and without the benefit of a more gradual ascent to notoriety (namely, the empathy of an audience that prefers its performers when they are -- like themselves -- still struggling for success and acceptance). Listeners who saw the band even three months after their breakthrough performance (early a.m. October 14, 2004, the Mercury Lounge) could no longer identify with the Arcade Fire as peers -- the band was at that point playing ever-larger, less intimate venues; and their record, Funeral, was still accumulating the so-called universal acclaim that would famously include the support and approval of David Bowie. Meanwhile the images, sounds, and feelings that had during their earliest performances constituted a mutuality of audience and performer waned as time accumulated into an impenetrable distance between the present and the moment when this mutuality had been forged. For the few listeners who had attended one of these performances, its memory took on the quality of an extremely rare possession -- the beauty of which they were willing to expound on and share fleeting glimpses of, but which they considered too precious and fragile to be touched or felt by anyone else. Of course, the listener who preserves a memory with such fastidiousness will soon find in it a disappointment as inevitable as the one I experienced by accepting the invitation to climb onstage. Thus even a band whose performances seem as heartfelt as those of the Arcade Fire -- who, in the words of the Pitchfork review that helped bring them widespread attention, restored "honest emotion" and "sincerity" to popular music -- would nevertheless reach a point when the same songs played in the same way so many nights in a row sounded false and enforced, actually insincere.

A great deal of popular music -- and almost all indie rock -- derives its impetus from the presumed sincerity of the emotions it conveys. There is, however, nothing inherently more sincere about the music on an Arcade Fire record compared to any other record that is manufactured for commercial profit. What set Funeral apart was not the presence but rather the specificity of its emotion -- that here, clearly, was a record about mourning to satisfy the feeling, common among certain young people in the autumn of 2004, that something should be mourned. Precisely what was to be mourned didn't matter, and wasn't really addressed by the lyrics or gestures of the record. Funeral doesn't concern itself with September 11 or the war in Iraq, as some have suggested, nor would it be any more than an apt coincidence a year later, when the Arcade Fire performed "Wake Up" with David Bowie on television, days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans -- a performance that was later packaged and sold on iTunes to raise money for the hurricane's victims. The only certainty about Funeral is that it deals with grief, and the expression of grief, from the viewpoint of youth, which is to say that it is confused and sounds frustrated by the limitations of inexperience. Its songs refer primarily to family and to the bedrooms, neighborhoods, and forgotten names of an unrecoverable childhood, while its prominent shape -- a long sustained crescendo (that takes place within almost every song, and over the course of the entire record) -- reflects an attempt to expel the uncertainty and disorder of these evocations without controlling the direction in which they go -- the necessity is to simply send out, indeed broadcast, what feels buried inside.

The vague sense of an intent behind Funeral's aimlessness is what I suspect ultimately attracted so many listeners to it. The pressure of life's travails (the endlessness of which the youngest listeners must have barely realized) and the feeling that sorrow could effectively be mocked and celebrated in a manner both haphazard and fun was, at least, what the band called attention to in the performances that accompanied it -- the musicians each dressed in mourning black, singing and swinging their instruments, marching with drums and tambourines and -- oddly -- two of them in motorcycle helmets, beating each other in the helmets with drum sticks. The prominence of movement and line and the show of exuberance in the face of death may have recalled a traditional New Orleans funeral parade, while the record's liner notes, which spoke of the recent death of several family members, gave onlookers -- such as the Pitchfork reviewer who announced that the Arcade Fire "have known real, blinding pain and they have overcome it" -- the impression of a significant and truly healing experience, yet I couldn't help consider the whole thing banal. The record sounded derivative, the performances too far removed from a tradition that could've given them ritualistic meaning, and the concerts that autumn (at least in New York) had all sold out before it seemed they had even gone on sale. What was supposed to be therapeutic and inclusive had assumed an annoying exclusivity.

"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." This is the assumption on which so many listeners and critics seemed to have based their esteem of Funeral. "Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow." The words belong to Oscar Wilde, who wrote them while in prison (on charges of indecency) -- and they sound with a ring of truth. I have never doubted sorrow's prominence among the lineage of artistic inspiration, nor did I suspect the Arcade Fire of contriving the display of grief that they had, nonetheless, taken pains to emphasize whenever they appeared in the press. I only wondered if the artistic rendering of an emotion required more than the literal experience of it. Oscar Wilde didn't arrive at the lines I cited by merely drawing on his own miserable circumstances, but through an excruciating and often contradictory spiritual deliberation. The Arcade Fire's response to misfortune may have been real, but compared to a work such as Wilde's De Profundis, it is limited by a one dimensional tendency toward exaggeration, and seems in the end unenlightening. It seemed even more so the following winter when my grandfather died and I found myself turning to Funeral for answers. I didn't find many. The only revelation I could come up with, in fact, was that since most people are made profoundly uncomfortable by death, the typical reaction when one takes place within the family of a neighbor is to lavish unexpected kindnesses and support on the bereaved. Never in my life had I seen such an unnecessary abundance of flowers, and so many well wishes from strangers! My conclusion was that the Arcade Fire had benefited from an equivalent impulse felt among the writers of blogs, web sites, and newspaper or magazine columns.

Still. I continued listening to Funeral. After a while, and whether this was the result of an association that hereafter developed between it and a period of personal contemplation and solace I don't know, but I began to like it. Its melodies are sweet and easy to remember, imbued with pleasing reiterations and rhythmic buoyancy that, by humming to oneself, perhaps offer a kind of consolation. To fully appreciate its effect, one must simply give way; surrender completely to what is above all a visceral and even bodily experience. Once I was able to let go of the belief that the record should offer me direct insight into the life beyond this one, or an answer to the question of what our human endings can mean in the face of infinite, I was able to enjoy its actually charming naivete and feel invigorated by the energy of its enthusiasm.

Click here for the rest of the essay.

photos: of the Arcade Fire at the Mercury Lounge, by Brooklyn Vegan.