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

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

Nearly six months had passed since the release of Funeral before I was willing to fully relinquish myself to the music of the Arcade Fire, and at the United Palace Theatre it was likewise only after a period of acclimation to the band and the crowd and the incredibly loud volume that I began to let go. Perhaps I was self-conscious. I was surrounded by thousands of people who, more than anything, wanted a glimpse of what I -- situated in the front row -- stood directly in the way of. Even if they weren't looking straight at me, many of them were obliged to look around my head in order to see the stage. I wondered what they thought. The songs from Neon Bible, the Arcade Fire's second and latest record, are less exuberant than those on Funeral -- more concerned with apprehension and inner turmoil than the gestures through which our worries can be externalized and, as they were on Funeral, released. The sense of everyone singing along, for instance, while not altogether absent, is no longer pervasive, and the feeling that Funeral conveyed, of having to confront something profoundly difficult, has been replaced with a retreat from something ominous and inescapable.

It had, of course, been necessary for the Arcade Fire to modify their outlook. Funeral was a beginning, an approach toward mortality that had relied on an urgent and one-off irreverence, only to draw back in awe -- enthralled, as the band's recent profile in The New Yorker ("Big Time") suggests, by the grandeur of a universe that was finally beyond its grasp; its songs forever reaching for, even on the verge of, a revelation that in the end simply wasn't there. This made for a nice variation on the young person's initial and predictably uneasy struggle with fate, but it wouldn't be sustainable if the band hoped to continue making music long term. Neon Bible would have to match the Arcade Fire's ambition with perspective and understanding if their sweeping movements and lush instrumentation was to constitute more than an empty (if agreeable) gesture. This may explain why so many of its songs address specifically the current and public turmoil that Funeral, by focusing on a turmoil that was instead universal and private, had so gracefully avoided naming. The results are clumsy and, for all the record's calculated references, lack those particularities that had distinguished the families and neighborhoods of the band's debut. There are lovely melodies and assertive rhythms, but no center of gravity to hold them together as Neon Bible is gradually overcome and buried beneath the weight of its increasingly loaded words: church, ghetto, MTV, bombs, downtown, holy war . . .

The stage production of recent performances only exacerbates the turgid subject matter, overpowering the viewer (who already had enough to look at during the Funeral tour, when the Arcade Fire was seven somberly dressed musicians) with more lights, horn players, neon reproductions of the new album cover, amplified megaphones and tiers of video screens that replicate and magnify every note and movement of the performers -- presumably a kind of comment on advertising and surveillance in the age of terror that succeeded only in making me dizzy (and sick of looking at the performers). Neon Bible was recorded last year in a church, and many of the subsequent performances have likewise been staged in churches -- the one I witnessed at the United Palace Theatre, which was originally a movie theater and is presently home to the congregation of a famous evangelical preacher, "Rev. Ike," didn't begin until the Arcade Fire had screened a brief sermon on the video monitors by an evangelical preacher (a woman, not Rev. Ike). So there is one more implication, I suppose, involving the relationship between religion and the secular media. The point is unclear. Has the media undermined our ability or willingness to pursue a meaningful spirituality by disseminating false icons, and is the hollowness of most rock concerts merely a reflection of our pervasive spiritual malaise? Is the church ideally a sanctuary from the electronic images with which we otherwise incessantly bombard ourselves? Or has televangelism subverted that sanctuary, as well as the media and perhaps the entire secularist enterprise by broadcasting messages that are originally intended for a particular congregation, to serve the political and economic interests of its leaders? The ambiguity of a song like "(Antichrist Television Blues)" seems, in this context, without consequence. If my suspicion is correct, and the setting of a church represents an attempt by the Arcade Fire to channel into their performance some celestial revelation, the band would've done better to simply jettison the video screens, stage effects, and lyrics about World War III, and instead concentrate more intently on the stylistic elements that had emerged on Funeral -- its soothing reiteration of ebullient rhythmic and melodic motifs, the singer's function as a fabulist whose stories unfold almost as a dialogue with the song of a distant and innumerably voiced reply, and of course a performance routine in which the natural playing movements of the musicians coalesce as a dance that brings all this into sharper focus, speaking to the audience -- in its best moments -- as if an intuition.

When such moments were in evidence at the United Palace Theatre, it was generally during the songs from Funeral, when little by little the crowd would begin to hum, sing, and all together emanate a tremendous ghostly noise that hovered somewhere above our heads, and commingled restlessly with the music from the speakers. If at first I regarded the singing of the crowd with skepticism, wary of a behavior that seemed mindlessly obeisant and conformist, when the noise continued to grow, at times even challenging the predominance of the musicians, I began to understand it as a form of empowerment. Rock concerts are exercises in visibility. They cultivate a yearning among musicians to see their work enlarged and circulated on a grand scale by manipulating the same yearning -- to see and be seen -- among listeners, who may find it difficult if not impossible to stand out from a crowd into which they are intended to recede. The individual who tries to rush the stage and claim a moment in the spotlight will, as several of my fellow United Palace theatergoers ascertained, be inevitably and ingloriously rebuffed by a team of so-called security guards, if not also forcefully removed from the venue altogether. An audience only effectively stakes an identity in unison. The singing of Arcade Fire listeners, then, which culminated during the last song of the set, "Rebellion (Lies)," when the musicians left the stage and for several minutes the entire theater continued humming the violin part until the band returned to play two more songs, was the most convincing act of defiance and self-discovery of the evening -- the crowd realizing that, together, it could not merely dodge the security guards but (more significantly) refuse to acknowledge the band's authority to stop the music, and thereby destabilize their claim to its possession.

Whether this qualifies as a proper purgative for the bitterness that springs inescapably from the audience of disproportionately celebrated performers is debatable. Encores are a standard element of rock concerts. If the Arcade Fire hadn't planned on playing two more songs, the lights would've turned on and everyone -- no matter how dearly they may have liked to stay and sing -- would've been forced to go home. As certain as there is a pure and elemental release that comes from wholeheartedly singing in a crowd, the moments of such release at the United Palace Theatre were occasional and of limited effect. More than half of the evening was devoted to material from Neon Bible, which is dominated by an unrelenting, brooding wariness; rather than ease or empathize with my concerns, in the end the concert merely drew my attention to them. When the band returned for its encore and I took the stage to sing "Wake Up," apprehensively and with the realization that I was being watched as well as photographed and videotaped by the rest of the audience, I could no longer tell if I was releasing something or simply working myself into a greater and more unsettled fervor.

***

The morning after the concert, I checked my e-mail and discovered -- at first with childlike delight -- that an image of the crowd on stage (myself visibly among them) was featured at the top of a popular blog. I indulged a moment of vanity in which I congratulated myself on a newfound sense of style and renown -- then took another look at the photograph and grew dismayed. I was lost in the crowd! Only the reader who already knows what I look like can identify me and see that I am actually turned in profile, as if to show off the line of my jaw. I also appear several times on YouTube, climbing onto the stage, and in a three-part video taken by another theatergoer on stage -- equally indistinct in each instance. (All told, I've found more than a dozen clips of the crowd singing "Wake Up" on YouTube -- and, in most of them, at least one and usually several audience members can be seen filming or photographing.) The more I thought about this, the more startled I became, first by how successfully I had disseminated myself across the web and then at how vacuous an achievement this was. I've often had the feeling that I'm being watched, but now, ever since the concert, I worry not only that my suspicion is true but that all I amount to in the eyes of my observers is an indiscernible blur flashing somewhere in the background of a grainy two-inch screen. Perhaps this is what the Arcade Fire are describing in "Black Mirror," the first song on their new record, in which the protagonist wakes up from a nightmare to sing of the impossibility of seeing oneself through the lens of a security camera -- "you can't watch your own image," he says, through the "black mirror" that "knows no reflection."

If so, among the conclusions one may draw from the Arcade Fire's run at the United Palace Theatre, which began on a Monday with "Black Mirror" and culminated Tuesday May 8, 2007 in the crowd taking the stage, is that the systematic surveillance to which each of us is presently subject has not been constructed by an Orwellian government agency, but by our own camera phones, wireless connections, and MySpace pages, in other words -- as Kafka implied in The Trial -- it is primarily self-imposed.

Other blog reviews of the Arcade Fire's United Palace Theatre concerts: (Mon., May7) Thoughts on Stuff, S/FJ, Brooklyn Heathen, Brooklyn Skeptic, Brooklyn Vegan, New York Magazine, Qbertplaya's Gigoblog, The Tripwire, Fluxblog, the daryl sng blog, Snakes Got A Blog (Tue., May 8) Fresh Bread, Shelves of Vinyl, Product Shop NYC, Vicarious Music (Both nights) Earvolution.


Photo: (above) of Win Butler at the United Palace Theatre, and on a screen - by Product Shop NYC.

Interesting Links: The Arcade Fire performs in Union Square, and in an elevator. Two reviews of early Arcade Fire concerts by a Canadian listener. How much would you pay to see the Arcade Fire? Did the Arcade Fire steal this guy's basketball? Is it okay for Radio City security to beat up the Arcade Fire's fans? Win Butler guest-blogs about music and Czech history. The Arcade Fire's violin player has a band called Bell Orchestre! David Bowie performs "Wake Up" with the Arcade Fire on TV. Thoughts on the United Palace gigs from opening band The National. More photos of the Arcade Fire at the United Palace Theatre on Flickr.

Notes

Frere-Jones, Sasha, "Big Time," The New Yorker, Feb. 19 & 26, 2007.

Moore, David, "Review: Funeral," Pitchforkmedia.com, September 13, 2004.

Petrusich, Amanda, "Interview: The Arcade Fire," Pitchforkmedia.com, May 14, 2007.

Schreiber, Ryan, "Interview: The Arcade Fire," Pitchforkmedia.com, February 14, 2005.