Arcade Fire, the End of Indie, and the Coronation of Crit Rock
By You Can't Hear it on the Radio
March 30, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Crit Rock \krit rawk\ n 1: Music made for discerning tastes, often at the expense of broad popular appeal 2: Music that emphasizes innovation, originality, and unique creative characteristics over commercial viability
Arcade Fire is now the biggest rock band in the world. WTF is Arcade Fire?
More than anything that came out of the Grammy win and resulting agita among those meeting Win Butler and company for the first time is this riddle. How can it be both? How can Arcade Fire be unknown and huge at the same time? How did Arcade Fire, an indie darling for more than the last couple years and a successful but hardly commercially dominant enterprise, assume the title of the biggest rock band in the world from the likes of U2 (or if you think U2 is over, Coldplay)?
Firstly, remember that this is not about the Grammys. The Grammys meant nothing last year, and will mean nothing next year, so just because an indie band won Grammy's biggest trophy doesn't mean the Grammys suddenly matter. However, to the extent the Grammys are a symbol for mainstream acceptance, Arcade Fire winning a Grammy says something meaningful about Arcade Fire and indie music, even if it doesn't say something meaningful about the Grammys themselves, you dig? I mean, it's one thing for you and me to say that Arcade Fire is "good" in a critical sense, and another thing entirely for the Grammys to say it. The Grammys are a joke, but they are a self-serious joke with a big footprint. When they recognize a band like Arcade Fire and a record like The Suburbs with more than a token nomination (such as the level of recognition achieved by Radiohead's In Rainbows in 2009 or The White Stripes' Elephant in 2004), it gives a reason to evaluate the state of mainstream music and the state of independent music at the same time.
Arcade Fire's success is not based on selling records, but on making records that matter. 2004's Funeral was released on September 14th and a scant three months later was anointed by Pitchfork as the #1 album of the year. Pitchfork was ahead of the curve; six years later Funeral was on all the decade's best lists, including mainstream Rolling Stone. 2007's Neon Bible was in everyone's top five list for that year, including Blender (2), AV Club (1), Rolling Stone (4), Spin (2), and Village Voice (5). Ironically, it rated only 27th at Pitchfork, and probably kick-started the Pitchfork backlash era. Before winning a Grammy, The Suburbs was named as a top five album of the year by more than 15 organizations as diverse as MTV and Time Magazine. (Keep in mind that during this time Arcade Fire did not have a million selling album; all three albums combined would not top two million in sales to date. Strictly for comparison, Taylor Swift's Grammy winning album Fearless has more than 10 million in sales). Critics, both fringe and mainstream, have foretold and then cemented the rise of Arcade Fire. And as absurd as their win seemed to many populists, so too is the populist uproar absurd to anyone who does know Arcade Fire. What do you mean, who is Arcade Fire? They've made three of the absolute best rock albums of the last eight years. Wake the fuck up.
If you accept The Beatles were sui generis, then The Rolling Stones were the first biggest rock band in the world. (If you don't, let's just call The Beatles the first biggest rock band in the world and keep moving). Since the heyday of the Rolling Stones (up to about 1982) and until the emergence of U2 (their first run started in about 1987) all there were, it seems, were shifting contenders for this imaginary title - Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, etc. If you're old enough to remember those 18 months in 1984 and 1985 when Tina Turner was a huge frickin' deal, you get my point. Being mainstream popular was the whole game, and winning the game meant moving a shitload of units, playing the biggest venues for the highest concert ticket prices. And before the internet, the audience was on one end of this long pipeline, artists were on the other, and radio (and MTV for a while) controlled the flow. I'm not suggesting that these popular artists lacked artistic integrity, merely that they were operating within a system that rewarded meeting the consensus tastes of the collective audience with massive popularity. What would you have done?
This was less a convergence of critical and popular appeal than a case where popular appeal dictated and controlled the discussion about what was "good". Alternate media existed but in disconnected pockets around the country. A radio station here, probably affiliated with a college, a newspaper there, if you lived in a big city. Around but without influence in any broad sense.
These days the game is somewhat the same. Selling records and tickets is still pretty important, but one of the consequences of smaller record labels is less overhead weighing bands down, which in turn means the definition of success has changed. There's still money in being the biggest band in the world, and there are still bands like Coldplay and Kings of Leon (as well as the Katy Perry contingent) chasing that, but there are other models that work as well. Bands can have smaller audiences, play smaller venues, move fewer units, and still be successful. This makes more room for fringe acts to grow their music and grow an audience over a long period of time. In the 1980s these same acts never would have made it out of whatever medium-sized market they hail from, be it Montreal, or Omaha, or Akron.
The other thing that's changed, thanks to the internet and nearly infinite channels on satellite radio, is the flow of the pipeline. Like the Chicago River, the flow is now reversed. The bands are at one end, and the pipeline brings the audience to the bands.
As a result of this shifting dynamic bands have gotten bolder, more creative, and more niche. Let's be honest, there are a lot of gimmicks at play in crit rock these days; and that's kind of the point. Part of the appeal with music that is not broadly popular is that it wears its niche on its sleeve. Since there's no gatekeeper in music these days, musicians can narrow their field of vision without fear that a potential audience will somehow be prevented access their music because its too "peculiar" to get played on terrestrial radio. Forget the radio, the internet will make sure a band's audience can find it.
And so, since it is possible to be "big" in the sense of being creatively and culturally important without being "big" in the sense of selling a lot of records, the term indie rock no longer really applies. If indie was created as a way to describe bands in the era when mainstream popularity was a criteria for success, and the pipeline to new music was closely controlled - well, we are clearly now in different times where the obstacles of the previous era are easily breached. These factors also have a lot to do with U2's extended run. As things opened up it also meant there was no longer going to be a consensus. As the last holdover to a bygone era, U2 retained the title almost by default. Even during their fallow "Pop" period, the fleetingness of successors like Pearl Jam, REM, Coldplay, and the Dave Matthews Band was merely indicative of the beginning fracture happening within musical culture. In the late 1970s it took the death of Keith Moon to shift the balance of power from The Who back to The Rolling Stones. All it took to reinstate U2 in 2000 as the biggest rock band in the world was the lack of a consensus alternative.
Is Arcade Fire still an indie band if they've been embraced by the music establishment? Well, Arcade Fire hasn't been indie for a while, if they ever were. They promoted the release of The Suburbs with two sold out shows in Madison Square Garden, the first of which was broadcast live on YouTube. Their most famous song, "Wake Up" was used to promote the NFL and the movie Where the Wild Things Are. These are not signs of fringe, indie levels of popularity, nor is winning a Grammy. Rosie O'Donnell may not know who Arcade Fire is, but thankfully that is no longer a prerequisite for becoming a big band, or even the biggest.
What Arcade Fire is, since it is not indie, is a band that follows its own creative vision, in servitude to no one. They play for themselves, they play for the critics (inasmuch as it matters when critics say something is good or something sucks), they play for the sake of trying to make something worthwhile, and today that is enough of a mission statement to go all the way from Montreal obscurity to the epitome of mainstream acceptance in the span of 10 years. They play crit rock.
--Steve
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