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.

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.

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

Last month I found myself in the front row of a sold-out theater, basking in a spectacle known to indie rock listeners as the Arcade Fire. It was the end of the evening, and the Arcade Fire had just retaken the stage to deliver their requisite encore. I was admiring the band's violin section -- two attractive young women with wide belts (one of them, I think, may have been playing the viola) -- as I leaned my elbows on the stage and wondered if this was one of those pinnacle moments for a young violinist (or violist): two sold-out nights before thousands of adoring fans at the United Palace Theatre, one of the largest and most elegant venues in Manhattan; national television appearances; celebrity galas; prestigious award nominations. I looked at the crowd: eager and intoxicated twenty-four-year-olds, shaking their heads, singing nahh na-na, nahh na-na as the lights blinked and images of the band flashed from video screens. I thought of the dexterity required to bow a violin or viola string in tune and assured myself that an attractive and talented young violin/violist could aspire to loftier heights than these -- when all of a sudden I experienced a disorienting reversal.

Win Butler, lead singer of the Arcade Fire, was pulling audience members onto the stage and beckoning the rest of us to follow. I directed an uncertain glance at my friend, Matt, who'd been beaming ever since I told him that our tickets (secured by chance on Ticketmaster) were in the front row, as if to ask him, do you really want to climb up there? He did. So as we made our way onto the stage I wondered why now I regarded with ambivalence an invitation that, a few years ago, I might have considered an exhilarating delight -- aware not only of having been content where I was, leaning comfortably against the stage as it vibrated with the force of electronically amplified instruments, but also of a powerful and elusive threshold that this invitation had asked me to cross. For in order to claim a new position, among the ten musicians on stage, I would have to of course forgo my place as an audience member -- my position of detached observation and scrutiny -- for another in which, conversely, I would be observed and scrutinized.

I began to worry about my backside, and how it would look as I climbed onto the stage. I moved as fast as I could, upstage, hiding myself among the band and the crowd, embarrassed by the sound of my voice (for I had given in to the impulse to sing, which I was now doing as loudly as possible). I stopped in front of the violinist -- actually, no, I think she was the violist -- and considered her position again from up close. Her viola had been affixed with a wire connecting it to a set of pedals on the floor, presumably for amplification, which had come loose during the stampede. I could still hear her well, better actually than during much of the performance, which had been marred by excessive volume and an indistinct mix, but realized that almost no one else in the theater could. Then a stagehand arrived and attempted to reconnect the wire, which failed, as his hands were repeatedly stepped on by thronging audience members. He seemed annoyed and when the violist realized that her viola was no longer connected, she stopped playing and disappeared. Someone nearby had meanwhile seized a tambourine and begun banging it gleefully. Now it was primarily the audience members who had stormed the stage, singing "Wake Up" for the audience members who had remained in their seats, most of who were singing as well. I could no longer hear anything but bass, the drums, and our three thousand voices screaming, you better look out below!

Which was precisely my concern . . . that as I struggled to sing and recall the words to "Wake Up," effecting a posture of dignified yet wholehearted merriment, countless discerning eyes would be following me -- from the seats below, and above -- from all directions. There was nowhere to hide; wherever I went I would be followed by the searing glare of the stage lamps. I felt hot and confused. Once I had gotten situated, however, and started settling into my singing, I actually began to enjoy myself. I had sung from a stage before, and as the memory of my days as a performer returned -- the matchless and invigorating sensation of standing in front of a crowd with no clear sense of what exactly was going to happen, anything could happen, I can make anything happen -- I felt a tinge of regret at having summarily abandoned my career in music. Perhaps, I thought, this is my moment to shine. I wondered what kind of outrageous act would bring me the most attention, readying my body for a sudden discharge of impulsive energy, before I realized that whatever I did, no matter how outrageous, I would immediately recede and disappear into the crowded stage.

When we had completed our rendition of "Wake Up," a stagehand appeared and, with a commanding and spiteful glare, snatched the tambourine away from my neighbor. Our moment was over. It was time to go home. Still exuberant from the concert, though, I felt suddenly let down -- almost thwarted by such an abrupt (and somehow deceptive) ending, and wondered how many others were leaving the stage with a void inside. Later I would realize that dissatisfaction had been the only logical conclusion to a performance in which our desire to be seen and heard was at once gratified and frustrated (a typical paradox in the age of digital imagery, when visibility is encouraged by the same mechanism that overwhelms and denies us the chance to actually be perceived). Who or what, after all, could emerge distinctly from a landscape of echo and static? Even the Arcade Fire ultimately drown in their own "Ocean of Noise" -- the title of a song on their new record, as well as a problem the band encountered when they tried to perform that song, specifically the soft and gradual fade-out at the end of it that was all but silenced by cheering from the audience. If it had worked, the fade-out would have been a rare moment of graceful subtlety during an evening of obvious and sweeping gestures. When it didn't, the audience saw through -- briefly, even if they didn't realize it -- an effect that had been tagged onto the end of the song as superficially as the invitation to climb on stage had been tagged onto the encore.


Click here to continue the essay.


photos: top, Arcade Fire violist, Marika Anthony-Shaw, by Houari B. on Flickr; below, the United Palace Theatre and a tambourine, by Matt McLaughlin.

Bitter Tonic: On the Closing of NYC Night Clubs, and the Discussions of Indie-Blog Readers

Last weekend Tonic, a well-known Manhattan night club, self-described as "a home for avant-garde, creative, and experimental music," closed its doors for the last time, priced out of the Lower East Side by a large and expensive condominium tower. The proprietors say they still hope to re-open in another location. Meanwhile, supporters of the club staged what they're calling a Tonic Eviction Musical Protest last Saturday, which resulted in the arrest of two musicians, as well as a press conference this afternoon outside City Hall:

"Let it be a wake-up call to say that small music and cultural spaces can no longer pay these outrageous rents and that important music and culture is being forced out of NYC! We need YOU to come to our press conference at City Hall, so that city government sees how many people need and support all kinds of non-mainstream music. ... City Councilman Alan J. Gerson of District 1 is supporting this press conference and will stand in support of our group; and will challenge other members of the City Council to come to the table on the issue of public interventions to save artistic creation in NYC."

When CBGB's closed last October, I considered the fuss Patti Smith made about "the empty new prosperity of our city" a rather pretentious display of "bourgeois sentimentality." But my feelings about Tonic are mixed. I have no illusions about the space itself -- I always found Tonic cold and inhospitable -- but neither am I optimistic that a new place will soon emerge where the free and open exchange of musical ideas would take precedence over the needs of finance. The kind of music that once played at CBGB's, or Sin-é (another recently closed and bemoaned rock club), will find a new home -- as long as that music is popular and potentially lucrative (which it still is). The music at Tonic, however, was of marginal interest from the start, and it offered limited financial incentive to either the club owners or the musicians, most of whom make a better living performing in Europe or Japan than they can anywhere in the United States.

The organization of a mass rally outside City Hall is therefore a well-intentioned, if somewhat misled, effort -- to show the officials "how many people" support a music that is, by definition, not widely supported. The task that these organizers ultimately face is in fact quite different -- and more formidable: to convince not only the officials, but the public at large that certain music must be valued and supported, regardless of its unpopularity or commercial promise, simply because it places more emphasis on the act and process of creation than on the creation itself; that the products of an artistic pursuit may be less valuable than the undertaking -- not only for the artists, but for the community as a whole.

To give an idea of how formidable it will be to convince even a sympathetic audience of this, I'm posting a series of comments about Tonic, retrieved from the message board of a popular indie rock blog called Brooklyn Vegan. The comments indicate a formidable, if latent, hostility among indie rock listeners, not only toward music of limited commercial appeal but -- what is more distressing -- the people and institutions that would support it. (These comments are conspicuously different from those posted on Brooklyn Vegan last October, when CBGB's gave its final performance, most of which were about celebrity sightings... )


From Brooklyn Vegan
(see all the comments, originally from two posts, here and here):

What can really be done though? That's capitalism, right? And also the reason that parts of Brooklyn and Queens are flourishing.

***

The Tonic protesters want "to ask for public and political intervention to protect new music/indie/avant/jazz in New York City"

They seriously hope to accomplish that? Why should an indie club have more of a right to exist than some other business? Furthermore, why should people devote their political efforts to this cause, rather than something that would benefit a greater proportion of the population?

***

music venues are businesses. they may represent something culturally significant or worthy, but make no mistake, they exist to make money. real estate owners and investors are also businesses. they also want to make money. this is what makes the world go round.

what do you suggest be done about this?

force the owner of the property to not get (or try to get) more money for his investment if someone is willing to pay it? or force the owners of tonic or other venues to run their business smarter so they can make more money so they can pay more rent or to negotiate better lease agreements...such that they could stay where they are forever?

Tonic or any another venue (CBGB's...) that looses its' lease can surely open up somewhere else if they've planned appropriately. surely they knew the day of reckoning would come and they would have to consider such a move. i think that is the issue that one should attack - their lack of planning or just plain bad business sense. the owners of these establishments have let us down, not rising real estate prices.

one business or neighborhood changes or goes away, another replaces it...THAT IS WHAT NEW YORK IS ABOUT...and this is nothing new.

***

"yeah, blame the owners of these places for not making enough money booking shows that have artistic merit."

Exactly. Why should taxpayers support a business that can't make money on it's own? In the cases when taxpayers do provide subsidies, it normally goes toward the greater good of the public. I loved Tonic, but it's patrons do not constitute the greater public by far. Keep the government out!

***

so anon 9:15pm, instead of criticizing, why don't you offer a suggestion? Let me guess: raise taxes so that the government can subsidize Tonic and other venues that cater to YOU.

***

Whats the point? If you cant pay the rent go find a cheaper space.

cant expect landlords to lose money in the name of experimental music and what is the mayor supposed to do about it anyway?

Get a job.

***

dont any of these people have jobs?

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my favorite part about your porous arguments:

-all people that live in condos are bland and boring

-people who have or make money should be willing to lose it to investing in something that is historically a money sieve.

You sound like a bunch of naive, xenophobic hipsters. start something yourselves, sponsor something yourselves. stop complaining start doing.

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And Elsewhere...
Similar perspectives can be found on Curbed, a blog dedicated to New York City real estate:

What is it with you socialists. You want evryone else to foot the bill for your "art". Okay, I think taxpayers should provide a fund so that teenage girls can buy Britney Spears albums. How is that different?

As it regards Tonic, if they either cannot pay the rent and/or the landlord refused to reup the lease, then that is life in the big city. Take up your shit and find another place like the rest of us do.

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These comments are not intended to represent the majority opinion of either blog's readership, or of most indie rock listeners -- only of a tendency that exists, prominently in this case, among the audience (perhaps I should say, consumers) of the so-called independent media.

Also, the comments on Curbed feature one very intelligent exchange, between the authors of comment #3 and comment #17, which is followed promptly by the amusing retort of comment #18.

More Thoughts on Closing Tonic:

Neither More Nor Less (many lovely photos, in three parts: I, II, III)
Tiny Mix Tapes
William Avery Hudson
The New York Times
Village Voice
TimeOut New York
New York Magazine
Gothamist

Take it to the Bridge is the organization that put together Saturday's Tonic Eviction Musical Protest. They have a petition and an update on Tuesday's City Hall press conference.