Hardcore for Nerds

“ Arcade Fire were actually nominated for two other awards, neither part of the Grammy telecast, and they lost both (Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance By a Duo or Group With Vocals) to the Black Keys.

—

Pitchfork: Arcade Fire Win The Album of the Year Grammy

Oh sweet, I loved their song on Punk-O-Rama 8!

Even if they’ve never done anything better than their Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough EP in 2006.

arcade fire Black Keys epitaph punk blues

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» Who Is Arcade Fire??!!?

Today in cognitive dissonance: the reaction to the Grammies

(in a way it’s good because it’s an awful, awful album, but ignorance is still ignorance even if it’s also bliss by external measures)

arcade fire

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» Rachel Maddux's Knocking the Suburbs

rawkblog:

Pretty much everything I wanted to say about The Suburbs but never got around to doing.

yeah, fuck this album (seriously, how many times does it need to be said? WORST PIECE OF ART 2000-2010)

the suburbs arcade fire

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» Pazz and Jop Voter Comments: From Kanye West to the Suburbs - Village Voice

“In their shared commitment to demolishing binary oppositions (East/West, Black/White, Us/Them), Vampire Weekend, Das Racist, and Titus Andronicus constitute what I like to think of as the “second wave of college rock,” one that’s absorbed the post-structuralist theory so prevalent on the ’80s campuses that birthed R.E.M. et al.”

(Jonah Wolf - New York, NY)

“One of the scariest developments of the past year has been the rise to the mainstream of a loose collective of overwhelmingly white reactionaries, defined by a self-contradicting hatred of East Coast elites, a complete inability to understand nuance, and an irrational fear of losing their dominance over a deeply flawed and somewhat scary cultural narrative. I’m talking, of course, about Vampire Weekend haters. Last year, I had fun cutting and pasting the identical criticisms of Avatar with those of Titanic in 1997. This year, I did the same with Vampire Weekend and the criticisms of the Beastie Boys circa 1986.”

(Ethan Stanislawski - Bloomington, IN)

I’m not sure if Titus Andronicus are committed to demolishing the “Us/Them” binary opposition so much as reinforcing it and then somehow overcoming it by being on the right side, but I like the idea of “second-wave college rock” anyway. Obviously it’s ironic as fuck, if by “irony” you mean “critical thinking”, and aimed at grad students with too much time on their hands to prevent their esoteric and in-depth studies from leaking into their music blogging. Of course none of us in my class last year knew exactly what structuralism meant, so some further journeying back into the pop-cultural past is still necessary, and the lecturer leapt onto a table for my inadvertently suggesting that punk rock hadn’t received any academic treatment as a countercultural movement (it still hasn’t gotten that much, especially if you take it very far beyond the fucking Sex Pistols…) so you’ve got to beware of the hipster-as-sociological-entity discourse.

Outside the ivory tower of liberal academia and indie, and apparently within it as well, there are the hordes of Arcade Fire fans. If the Vampire Weekend haters are analogous to the extreme right (also true in that I have little respect for either), then maybe those opposed to big-tent indies Arcade Fire are the radical far-left commentariat. Those that maybe don’t think that in ‘Rococo’ they “imagined downtown hipsters as a homogenous clone army with a sardonic spirit worthy of Don Draper”, except perhaps at his most out-of-touch and plainly pedestrian. Or that fail to see the value or even the real truth in the binary opposition “If this is the blueprint for a rock resurgence that moves past punk’s creaky anti-commercialism, I’m all for it” (the only parts of punk that are creakily anti-commercial are those that haven’t themselves moved, other parts are still quite creative - even Titus Andronicus caught the ear of the modern rockists this year).

Ultimately The Suburbs is a triumph of musical blandness that achieves through the very factor that makes it bland, and that sucks out any meaning beyond the banal (though sometimes the banal can be very interesting for those over-familiar with it, which appears to be Middle America in this case) - its horror of irony:

“Arcade Fire succeed through earnest creative toil, while Vampire Weekend find a much more ambivalent fate, one well known to those who tend to overintellectualize. Both succeed in their own ways, however, with coping strategies for us 21st-century moderns: pushing back against the encroaching horde, or luxuriating in its detritus.”

But the Arcade Fire are the horde, even it’s one trapped within an even larger apathetic society, and The Suburbs is as luxuriant an exploration of the material and middle-class detritus of post-war Americana as Contra’s often far more restrained meditation in its destruction.

das racist vampire weekend arcade fire the suburbs Titus Andronicus

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A Lazarus Soul, ‘A Penthouse View’ - new single on Soundcloud, via 4fortyfour

Really excited to hear about a new, post-boom album from these guys. 2007’s Graveyard of Burnt Out Cars is an Irish favourite of mine; apparently I once described their sound as being “n a kind of post-punk, Joy Division dimension with lyrics of social realism and, more importantly, very strong songwriting.” The new album Through A Window in the Sunshine Room is supposed to be “a departure in tone and style”, but from the track above Brian Brannigan’s voice is as identifiable as ever. It’s only really in the latter half that the song hits a groove, and in terms of backing vocals earns the name ‘soul’. There’s also another track on YouTube with a harsher, deconstructed (almost witch-house-y!) sound, so the whole I’m sure will be interesting. It can be ordered through their Myspace or Bandcamp, but I’m hoping there’s a shop in Dublin that’ll be selling it as well.

Anyway, ‘A Penthouse View’ is obviously about the Irish property collapse, and perhaps not in the most subtle way possible. But still, from previous experience they’ve been in the habit of writing smart, nuanced, emotionally-connected and geographically-centred songs about the darker side of life in Ireland. I give out about the moaning of Arcade Fire on The Suburbs, and maybe that’s true for certain parts of North America, but it doesn’t follow that the rest of the world ought to buy into it: and this is the concrete alternative.

a lazarus soul irish dublin the suburbs arcade fire

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distorte:

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

— The Sunday Times - ‘Lady Gaga and the death of sex’

“For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture.”

Let’s play Jenga with (redundant and/or contradictory) signifiers!

Another instalment in the Arcade Fire-inspired War on Irony; it’s not just rococo this time, it’s ersatz rococo.

The above quote is based on a nostalgia for past popular culture (which was, as the term suggests, also a performance and not just the direct communication of “personality” and “passion”) as well as a fear of current technology (all teenagers are now faceless automatons, apparently).

As others have pointed out, it’s perhaps not fair to criticise something that you haven’t read in full, on account of the rest of it being behind Rupert Murdoch’s game-changing paywall; but “Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…” is not an inspiring jump cut, especially when continuing requires an (economic) leap of faith. “Camille Paglia, America’s foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon” (what, the Sunday Times’ readership aren’t literate or Protestant enough for ‘iconoclasm’?); “read the rest of this explosive profile, including Paglia’s debunking of comparisons to Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John and Andy Warhol…”; the death of journalism, more likely.

pop irony arcade fire

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» The Arcade Fire and indie record labels: The New Yorker

by Sasha Frere-Jones (h/t to Britticisms)

The Suburbs is “driven by the perfervid*, jerry-rigged noise that has become Arcade Fire’s trademark” and “avoids obvious finger wagging”. Indie isn’t defined by aesthetics any more: “Arcade Fire has enough in common with long-established acts like Bruce Springsteen and U2 that there isn’t much of a case to be made that the band is defining itself through novelty or innovation.” Basically, not much of anything has changed, although

“The difference between major and indie labels now has less to do with aesthetics than with the way bands conceive of their careers. For Arcade Fire, independence and control may be ultimately more profitable.”

Such as the €73 tickets for a show with fellow indie artists (on XL, and covered in this article) Vampire Weekend? A plague on both their houses, I say, or, ethics before aesthetics.

*fervid, only more so.

arcade fire

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desnoise:

““You know I’d sooner go down in a ball of flames/ Than I would lay here and be bored to death/ All’s well that ends.” Surely Los Campesinos! don’t believe that, but they know what it’s like to feel it, and it’s fun when they can make you feel it, too. It’s a way to get the emotional release of mythologized self-destruction without the atavistic dumbness.”

—

Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Los Campesinos!: All’s Well That Ends EP

Marc Hogan working out our collective Arcade Fire issues again?

(via hardcorefornerds)

Aw, thank you for noticing/quoting this bit! I was pretty sure the last sentence wouldn’t make it past the editors, but it must’ve been a busy week. And I’m glad it did, because it gets at something I really have been thinking about outside of the LC! EP, although I’m not sure it has to do with Arcade Fire (but I’d like to hear more about why you think it might!). I mean, basically a lot of what becomes myth about music in our pop culture of the last century or longer has to do with people burning out rather than fading away, right? Choosing to destroy themselves— jazz virtuosos, rock gods, rappers, heroin, booze, guns, etc., with the mythologization of Kurt Cobain’s suicide right up there. But as people noted in discussing a PRR post a little while back, rebellion isn’t inherently a positive thing, and neither is self-destruction— obviously, I think? Our culture sometimes seems to treat such self-destruction as a mark of authenticity, a sign that you know someone was really living for their art, but this seems backward to me right now in a way I’m not sure I can quite articulate without you guys/gals helping me a bit. Like, this urge to watch an idol “go down in a ball of flames” seems to speak to something barbaric in ourselves— it fits in with some of the tension at the heart of Kelefa Sanneh’s awesome New Yorker article on boxing, too, sort of (“Boxing hurts people, disables people, and kills people; none of this can be rationalized or hidden, and there is no humane way to refute anyone who thinks these facts should outweigh all the others”). Two things: (1) Why shouldn’t an artist choose to be humane at this juncture in history, when we’ve got so much inhumane demagoguery in the political sphere already? And what’s more: (2) Isn’t any authenticity conveyed by rock’n’roll self-destruction ultimately, well, fake authenticity? I’m just talking this out. I don’t know the answers. I just know how that EP made me feel.

Supplementary Edit #1: So in the review I’m saying that it’s fun to experience this sense of being caught up in self-destruction that symbolizes something bigger than yourself. It’s cathartic. But I don’t believe LC! really have that sort of brute pre-modern urge to destroy themselves, and I don’t think that lack is a bad thing.

Supplementary Edit #2: Speaking of mythologized self-destruction and fake authenticity, I just walked away from my computer for a second and remembered what Mr. Messick used to say in 9th grade Old & New Testament class when I was living in Nashville, by way of justifying faith in Jesus Christ: “Would you die for a lie?” This was before American evangelicals had much awareness of suicide bombers, obviously.

Supplementary Edit #3, way less heavy than the one above it edition: How might breaking away from “mythologized self-destruction” relate to Nitsuh’s provocative, insightful “You Are All Still Boomers” post yesterday?

It was more a case of reading the paragraph and Arcade Fire coming to mind, then coming back to it and realising maybe it didn’t have so much to do with it as I thought (hence the questioning part) but I still wanted to reblog it on general principles - especially to do with artistic expression of emotions. As for the specific connections, “atavistic dumbness” reminded me of the emotional naivety/unironic expression/gormless sincerity, etc., that have been identified with the new Arcade Fire. I see you connect it elsewhere with “commercialised rebellion” - well, that’s how I see the €73.05 Ticketmaster tickets for Arcade Fire/Vampire Weekend/Devendra Benhart in Dublin’s O2.

(Okay, that’s a pretty decent lineup, or at least it would be for someone who likes both Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire, but it is also one that has been arranged with the specific purpose of milking the gig-goer, and it kind of sickens me that people will pay that amount in an economic society wrecked by a property boom to listen to a band sing about how terrible suburban life is - notwithstanding the flat cut of the ticket price that goes to the entirely worthier cause of Haiti. Now you can see why I have Arcade Fire issues, but a lot of them stem from the dumbing-down of indie, hipsterdom, and generally the kind of progressive music that the band at once represent the ‘successful’ pinnacle of, to most people, but also of late the most awful traducement of its values, esp. irony)

As for authenticity, I’ll direct you to something I wrote in response to Barthel on the topic, and something I’ve been trying to tease out with not much success ever since. If rockism is the thesis, and poptimism the antithesis, then I think the synthesis should be ‘authenticism’, confronting the problems of authenticity but recognising that we probably do want some kind of alternative/progressive/underground values in our art. When it comes to punk, I don’t want it be something defined by tribalism or by being reactionary, but expressing some kind of positive, outward-looking values. I don’t want to abandon the authenticity of punk, my ‘underground’, as a goal, only as a limit - that’s why I don’t think I can agree with Nitsuh’s proposal about throwing away the map. Really, a map doesn’t tell you where to go, it tells you where you are (in relation to other things): a compass tells you what direction to go - although I guess we’re all using GPS now, which does both!

Understanding that goal is, of course, very difficult, and I try and take on board all the suspicions here of authenticity*, while perhaps also feeling that in rejecting punk in the way that it has, indie has brought a lot of the problems on itself (that’s not to say that hardcore or emo haven’t engendered many other problems of their own). Added to that is a form of historicism that always seems to find more authenticity from others in the past, which is often the worst place to look, because it need to come from the self in the present. Perhaps that can be termed “atavistic dumbness” as well.

*that link about ‘Fake Authenticity’ should probably go here, which is a revised version that corrects the fact that the opening line is a misattributed quote to George Orwell; in fact, it should be Miles Orvell. Apparently Arthur Koestler had a similar problem when he first came to England, with his strong German/Hungarian accent (continental hairnets were also involved).

authenticism indie punk arcade fire NO PAST

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La Dispute - ‘Why It Scares Me’ from Searching for a Pulse/The Worth of the World, split 7” with Touche Amore, 2010.

The opening of this reminds me a lot of the start of AFI’s Art of Drowning album (i.e., the intro track ‘Initiation’). Which scared me a little when I first heard and bought it, insofar as I didn’t want to become a ‘goth’, when really it was - and still is - a rather good punk rock album which uses dark themes, right up to demons and the occult, to express psychological ideas of a certain intensity.

This song, by an American screamo/the Wave/post-hardcore band, is more obviously ‘emo’ (to an English-speaker, at least) than the exotically unintelligible Euro-screamo of their near-namesake, the Italian group La Quiete, but in its extreme heart-on-sleeve quality is also revealed a self-awareness and intellectual engagement with its central theme, of life as a process of thought and feeling; seen through a lyrical device of theatricality, which sets it apart from, say, Arcade Fire and their wholly theatrical expression of ideas which betray no self-awareness or serious engagement past the age of adolescence:

“At times I’ve shouted out unprovoked at the world and you

Just to see if the people around me react

Sometimes I think they’re all acting,

Sometimes I’m scared I’m acting too

Like my movements are stage directions“

But the line that first jumped out at me was the following, expressing the conscious fear of immaturity and the failure to escape the mental frame of, so to speak, The Suburbs, and giving an indication as to why this is worth listening to instead:

“Have I been taking my emotional cues from the script I wrote at sixteen?”

Incidentally, there was another rather good screamo band, who just broke up this year, by the name of Age Sixteen: reflecting perhaps a conscious tension between the adolescent qualities and inspirations of emo, and its artistic and visceral strivings for transcendence. Yet for all those concerns, the middle section is pure and crystalline truth, while further questions which have relevance for me are “I want to believe that the way I am is just the way it goes” and the closing refrain, “And if my heart just stops keep me alive for a minute/I want to know if a curtain drops”; both of which I reckon that I know to a reasonable degree of certainty the intellectual answers to, but that doesn’t stop my feeling them, and almost everything else in the song, as emotionally meaningful - like the core of art in between engagement and detachment.

emo la dispute post-hardcore psychology screamo age sixteen arcade fire irony

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Mark Richardson, Pitchfork: Resonant Frequency #73

“On Neon Bible, Arcade Fire pushed. Hard. And it was the sort of thing that was bound to be disliked by those who can’t stomach music without at least a little humor or self-awareness that yes, this is a pop song. For my part, there is something about this kind of bald emoting in music that, when it’s just done so, I find appealing. Sometimes even in a way the band didn’t intend. In late 2008, a Fatboy Slim remix/edit of Arcade Fire’s grandiose “No Cars Go” was posted around a bit online. […]

In Cook’s hands, “No Cars Go” becomes camp, and damned if it isn’t equally effective. In the song’s final section, where Win Butler is screaming, “Women and children! Let’s go! Old folks! Let’s Go!” as a chorus builds behind him and you can almost see a beam of light streaming down from the heavens, it’s half funny and half deeply moving and all pretty great.”

I liked Neon Bible, and I still do. But however enjoyable it is (I’m a sucker for the Springsteen aesthetic), it’s also a completely meaningless album for me. Of course, there’s a message there, however ham-fisted its delivery, and I always thought that over time its lyrics might reveal a bit more - but they didn’t, and now I realise that’s because it’s an essentially meaningless piece of rock music. I have no real problem with that; it’s only with The Suburbs that the music has become less exciting, and the meaninglessness of the lyrics has become far more offensive.

“Sometimes I feel Arcade Fire as deep and resonant art that speaks to universal truths, and sometimes I appreciate their music more as a costume, something to put on and enjoy as it communicates this specific thing in a direct and maybe even manipulative way. Both have their use, their time and place, and each has something interesting to say about life. Being able to listen to and enjoy this music on both of these levels feels like a real luxury.”

I never felt the first way about Arcade Fire, but the second - which seems to echo what Nitsuh Abebe said about the theatrical seriousness of the band over their evolution - I’m more willing to accept. Neon Bible, and its “emotional bombast”, is a cloak of music signifying feeling, without really feeling anything meaningful itself. Where The Suburbs went wrong was in trying to put a trite layer of meaning back in front, removing the cloak, and going naked as if this genuine honesty and anti-hipsterness could substitute for either real emotional or intellectual content. Given its popularity, it seems the most gigantic, postmodern case of the Emperor’s New Clothes yet.

Then, in relation to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, he talks about fanfares:

“It is indeed hard to think of fanfares without thinking of the military, and there is accordingly something fascistic about them: you’ve got drums, trumpets, an implied call to arms, maybe an invocation of pride: fanfares are music at its most manipulative. They bang you over the head, and in Cage’s term, push, so it can feel natural to instinctively push back. But sometimes, if I can give myself over to them, they can be as powerful as music can get, and it’s almost scary. And it’s that this surrender to that force, without the feeling of enjoying the music on a few layers simultaneously, that for me moves the music into a more primal realm. I’m not going to call this experience deeper, or more meaningful, or more profound; but it is more intense. This is when listening to music becomes a physical experience, and you feel like you are hearing with your whole body.”

As an example of this, he discusses free jazz artist Albert Ayler:

“ It’s hard for me to think of music with more overt emotional content, where nothing is left to the imagination. And I can picture people reacting strongly to the naked sound, positively or negatively. Because music, most of the time, has a lot more to it than just pure feeling. The reasons for listening to music are endlessly variable, and this kind of stuff, you can only put it on when the time is right. Thinking back to Arcade Fire, my ability to see their pomp as a kind of absurd theater allows me to enjoy their music more often than I otherwise might, but I don’t have the deep spiritual connection that I have with Aeroplane or my favorite moments of Albert Ayler. I save them for certain occasions.”

In this context, it’s clear why a lot of post-hardcore bands from the early 90s onwards incorporated free jazz into their music: wordless, visceral expressions of feeling which are nevertheless too grounded in the now of action to become bombastic, or to float free as signifiers of some implied emotion that is nevertheless not present; and thus retain both their immediacy and their depth. The only ‘problem’ is that this sort of abrasiveness doesn’t fit well with the sugar-rush short-cut of pop music, and while poptimism is correct that pop can express a lot of things, it struggles to replicate the intensity of free jazz or something like the post-hardcore of Fugazi.

arcade fire indie pop resonant frequency

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