Self-Destructive Impulse: Listening to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes"

I was scouring blogs the other day, looking for MP3s on the Best of 2007 lists posted last month, when I had a chance to reacquaint myself with the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. (Pitchfork's fourth-best song of the year), a pleasant and buoyant number about selling illegal visas and taking hostages that features a chorus of what sound like children singing of their intent to murder the song's listeners and steal their money. The chorus, which is repeated three times during the song, unravels with devastating rhythmic precision as the children sing "all I wanna do is," then three gunshots and the ching of a cash register culminate in the refrain of "take your money." It is dark and unsettling and, for some reason, deeply satisfying to hear, over and over.

Of course the more one listens and craves the tuneful, synchronized chime of gunshots and cash registers, the more menacing the song becomes. M.I.A. has the reputation of posing a challenge to the U.S. government and its so-called War on Terror -- her (distant) affiliation with the Tamil Tigers (a proscribed Sri Lankan terrorist organization), lyrical references to "piracy," and trouble last year obtaining a U.S. work visa have contributed to her depiction in the press as a minstrel of what, in "Paper Planes," she calls "Third World democracy." But what kind of challenge -- if any -- does she pose to Western hegemony? M.I.A., at least, has referred to the chorus of "Paper Planes" as "a joke" about her "stupid visa problem" -- and the absurdity, as she says, of "them thinking that I might [want] to fly a plane into the Trade Center" -- adding of the song, that it's "up to you how you want to interpret" it. I interpreted it as a joke, although a sharp and double-edged one; its humor undercutting its apparent celebration of violence and apathy in the same motion as it condemns the real, economically-derived violence and apathy diffusing across so-called developing nations. Yet a message this nuanced is effectively bulldozed by the momentum of the song's banging, hypnotic chorus. Like any successful pop single, "Paper Planes" is overwhelmed by -- and ultimately reduced to -- its most outstanding effect, namely: a juxtaposition of mechanized rhythm and the brief, repeated flash of an appealing melody and lyric. Everything else is auxiliary.

This doesn't make "Paper Planes" any less violent. The recipients of its most violent gestures, however, are not the Eurocentric structures of global capitalism, but the listeners who have paid (or deliberately, and possibly illegally, avoided paying) for the privilege of hearing it. It is "you," after all, who are taken hostage and executed, almost ritualistically -- three times over the course of "Paper Planes" -- by the imperative of its danceable, electronic beat: a comment, perhaps, on the tension between forces of consumption and production, though primarily within the context of contemporary pop music; between its listeners and the creators of their favorite mass-produced songs.


Readers can find an mp3 of "Paper Planes" here -- and watch the video on YouTube.

Rev. Charlie Jackson: Oxford American Music Issue

I have an article in the current issue of the Oxford American about the Reverend Charlie Jackson, a gospel singer from Louisiana. This is the Oxford American's Ninth Annual Music Issue, which is (as always) dedicated to the music and musicians of the American South (a definition the editors interpret as broadly as possible). There aren't many places to find intelligent writing about popular music, but the OA is a reliable one -- and it's supplemented with a thoughtfully-compiled CD.

Instant gratification is available to less patient readers in the form of two video clips of Jackson performing on an Irish television show, I'm guessing in the 1990s. One of the clips features Jackson singing a version of "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" -- a song I discuss in some detail in my article (and below) -- with an ill-suited backup band that has no idea how to keep time, and a vocal quartet that sounds nice, if a little out of place. (Be forewarned: the song begins two minutes into the clip, after Jackson has endured a painful interview with his extremely condescending host.) There is also a clip of Jackson playing "Morning Train," solo, and an mp3 of one of his 'live' cassette recordings.

All of these performances are good, but none can match the work on God's Got It, a recent compilation of 45s recorded by Jackson in the 1970s -- available on CaseQuarter, a record label started a few years ago by Kevin Nutt. Nutt lives in Alabama, where he produces a radio program for New Jersey's WFMU called "Sinner's Crossroads" (click here for an MP3/podcast -- "Sinner's Crossroads" is well worth hearing).

***

"My mother is a fish."
--As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

As I was writing about "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus," an idea occurred to me that never found a place in the article . . . about the song's plausible connection to the standard "Catfish Blues," and its familiar refrain (I wish I was a catfish, swimmin' in the deep blue sea . . . have all you women fishin' after me), which has appeared in various forms over the years, under various titles: first as "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues," recorded in 1928 by Jim Jackson and, later that year, as "Kansas City Blues" by William Harris; as "Catfish Blues" by Robert Petway in 1941; "Deep Blue Sea Blues" by Tommy McClennan, also in 1941; finally as "Rolling Stone" by Muddy Waters in 1950, before becoming "Catfish Blues" again when Jimi Hendrix recorded it in 1967 (and so on . . . ).

The Rev. Jackson's "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" does not include the familiar refrain about women, and is performed in a different style -- but it retains the singer who wishes he was a fish, and who imagines himself being caught, reeled in, and submitting to a fate of ecstasy and oblivion. Of course Jackson's vision is of a spiritual, rather than earthly, oblivion in which ecstasy must be preceded by pain and remorse -- to the exclusion of fleshly indulgence. I can't help wondering, then, if the Reverend's song was a pious (even self-righteous) retort to the rambling, rolling stone ethos of the comparatively lackadaisical secular guitar-picker . . .

The Blues Going On and On (Part One): Horace Silver in the Netherlands

What solace is there for me in these strange reverberations, in these unholy echoes, what relief? If in moments of despair I am drawn to the blues because integral to the music (I have supposed) is a response to every cry, an answer to every pronounced existential appeal, at what point will I tire of its evermore mechanical replies -- of these inspired visions that are in fact only shadows of a sun that has long since set?

What to make of my recent, chance discovery -- of Horace Silver, performing on television in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago?

Anyone with a basic grasp of television history, which is to say, virtually anyone who has watched television, even indifferently, should be able to situate this clip in the late-1950s or early-1960s merely by looking at it. Something in its high contrast black and white is synonymous with our perception of the era, and lends Silver's performance the aura of an authentic artifact. How much it must tell us about our past, we suppose, which is to say the phase of collective memory preserved visually in high contrast black and white. Yet the clip wasn't produced as a document of history or even as a document of Silver's performance, but as a performance of its own in which the music would relinquish its precedence to the audience, and to the audience's reception of the music -- as well as to images of individual musicians, and the manner in which they perform. This is not happenstance, given that the backs of Silver and his band have been turned deliberately away from the people who are listening to them, so that the band -- and the process of watching it -- will be captured in a single camera shot. Meanwhile the camera tends to focus on either one musician at a time -- instead of the group as a whole -- or on clusters of individual audience members, at the sake of depicting either the band or the audience as an integrated collective.

The audience, in fact, or the presumed audience, I should say -- a finite group of spectators who in 1959 were assembled in a studio-theater in the Netherlands and saw five musicians playing their instruments -- is ultimately succeeded by a different, more abstract kind of audience -- one not assembled at the time of filming -- who would experience the performance only later, in the relative isolation of its respective homes. Yet the Europeans for whom this clip was intended, who lived within broadcast range of the television station that commissioned it and saw the clip only once, presumably within a few weeks or months of its production, represent a far more integrated body than the world wide web users who (in my case) would not be born for another twenty years but who can watch the clip now as often as they like on their so-called personal computers.

What, though, does this tell us about Silver and his music? Most of what I've said is self-evident. Modern technology has permanently disrupted the relationship between those who devise and those who receive forms of expression once considered immediate. Merely lamenting this disruption will do nothing to reverse its course, nor would such a reversal necessarily be advantageous were it even possible. For the moment, it seems we instead have an opportunity to reconsider those forms -- such as jazz -- that rely on immediacy as their determining factor. The viewer who watches the clip of "Senor Blues" may be justified in regarding it as immediate, in some sense, as an arguably more vivid display of jazz improvisation than an audio recording -- but only within the context of this immediacy as an artifact of yet another technology. The clip didn't simply happen . . . and I wonder how much of its success I can honestly attribute to circumstance, the element so often prized as vital to jazz expression, providing its circumstances were highly controlled and externally manipulated by a group of producers, advertisers, and executives. (Surely there are few scenarios less conducive to the often-professed objective of improvisational freedom than the prescribed, indeed programmed, formatting of television.) So when I assume that Horace Silver's music offers each musician a chance to express himself fully while contributing to the advancement of the work as a whole, I should bear in mind that the camera is enforcing (and possibly even leading me to) my assumption by zooming in on the musicians' faces, one at a time, as they play both solo and as an ensemble. And then if I admire the sweat glistening on the musicians' faces as evidence of their dedication and of the intensity of their efforts, I may likewise consider whether their sweat is only the product of unusually bright lights necessitated by the filming. Or is a hot lamp still a hot lamp?

At the end of the clip, Silver retrieves a handkerchief from the lid of the piano and begins mopping his brow while he bows in recognition to the camera. The studio audience obliges him with applause and he smiles at the camera knowingly, as if the handkerchief, which emerges from the piano in a single almost organic movement, was an inspired, dramatic flourish added specifically for my benefit.

This is the first of what will likely be a three-post series. The second post will consider the relevance of T.S. Adorno's infamous excoriation of jazz within the context of Horace Silver's eternal life on YouTube. The third post will examine Cecil Taylor as a possible counterpoint to Adorno's critique. I haven't written the second or third posts yet, so they probably won't appear for a while.

Imperfect Pages

I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

... How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

The Book of Disquiet
by Bernardo Soares,
assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon

Max Roach is Dead

Right now I'm not particularly interested in how "great" Roach was, whether it was him or Kenny Clarke who invented bebop drumming, or when the overwhelming body count of jazz icons will be enough to bury the music for good . . .

Right now I want to watch Mr. Roach play with his brushes again.


Then maybe watch him again, with the hi-hat . . .

and once more with the whole kit.

"My technique really developed to its present level by watching old masters like Sidney Catlett, Jo Jones, Keg Johnson and O'Neal Spencer. I had a chance to check out O'Neal Spencer when he was with John Kirby's band. To me, he was a master. Today, brushes aren't used as much as they were once, but brush technique is beautiful, and some of the guys still remember these things. Lester Young's brother, Lee Young, was a fantastic brush man, too. It's almost as much of a lost technique as tap dancing now, where black people are concerned. The development of our music probably had a lot to do with it, and the attitude that musicians brought with it; sticks were more definitive, I guess. With a lot of people concentrating on volume, brushes are just out of it, unless you could wire the wire brushes in some kind of way so that they matched the sound of some of the electronics we have today."
-- Max Roach interview with Art Taylor, "Notes and Tones," 1970-71

Watch the old master, "Papa" Jo Jones, here.


Also worth seeing are two clips of Roach with Abbey Lincoln.
Finally, a few more words and some mp3s.

Max Roach, 1924-2007.

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.

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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.


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