Biblical

Neon Bible

So I walked several blocks across town in bitterly cold weather on my lunch break today, purely so I could finally buy the new Arcade Fire record, Neon Bible. I've been listening to it since shortly after it leaked (was that in January?), and I wholeheartedly adore it -- the first album was a slow-burner for me, but this one immediately smacked me in the face with how great it was. Which is why I'm frankly flabbergasted to have heard from so many people that they consider it to be a disappointment. Nobody's given me a convincing argument as to why yet, of course.

All the negative comments I've seen just remind me of two of my least favorite things about 90% of music fans. These two toxic ideas are pretty much eternal, but the Internet age of music has dramatically increased their exposure:

(1) Music fans don't like musicians as people or artists, they like musicians as stories. The rise of popular-music culture has obviously accelerated the mythologization of artists, and the only musicians who succeed these days are the ones who arrive with a ready-made myth*. This myth or story should preferably be one that can be summed up in a single sentence, since most magazine record reviews have been boiled down to about three sentences -- one to summarize the myth, one to make a snarky joke about it, and one to say something that in some way relates to the record at hand. Once that myth is "on file," as it were, deviating from the script is very, very dangerous. It doesn't even take much of a change to make people feel bitter about your going off "the reservation;" sometimes it only takes the existence of a new set of songs to evaluate that's enough to set people off. Which brings me to my second point:

(2) Everybody is desperate to look like they've got authority.  LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" makes this argument pretty well -- the "I liked them better when" meme has been an immortal fact forever. But in the Internet age, it works like this: A band puts out an album, the myth gets written, people enjoy the record. But when a second record comes around a few years later, everybody feels the need to re-assert the fact that indeed, they listened to that first album, and time has elapsed since that record was released, meaning they have Lived With Those Songs and that They Know What Makes This Band Great. The simple fact of elapsed time has made them an authority, and everybody loves to make pronouncements that feel like they've got weight behind them** -- and nothing makes people feel bigger than dismissing something that's not worthy of them. The creation of this false authority almost demands that they dismiss anything that invites them to revisit their definition of what any given musical act is. This has always been the case -- see U2, dramatically switching styles, for an obvious example -- but that was after six albums. In these hyper-accelerated times, it only takes one album to get everybody started on their deeply rigid conceptions of what an artist is supposed to be or do. Everybody bemoans the fact that record labels don't take the time to develop artists these days, but guess what? Half of you douchebags would never like the second album anyway, purely because it isn't the first one.

Tie the two together, and you arrive at a deeply uncomfortable place for long-term artists to be. Consider R.E.M.: A band that continues to release music that is, even at its roughest, still pretty damn good. Around The Sun might not be the best R.E.M. album -- it might not even be in the top 5 -- but it contains songs that most bands would kill to write. So why are R.E.M. irrelevant? Because they've gone off the script ("Four Georgia boys make jangly pop with mysterious lyrics!") -- point 1 -- and because everybody needs a punching bag  -- point 2.

It's true that some artists, in the completely noble quest to develop and extend their art (I say this is completely noble even though many people seem to feel it isn't), occasionally lose track of or shed some of the qualities that made them initially recognizable and enjoyable -- see The Killers'  more-or-less horrific second album. But hey, guess what -- most of the time, they did it because they wanted to get better! (Some musicians are just contrarian shitheads, but you can generally spot them and disregard them as necessary.) And to bring it back to the specific case, I've still yet to see anyone convincingly articulate what's gone missing from the new Arcade Fire album. All I'm hearing are better songs, better singing, better playing, and my favorite album of the year so far.

* For the record, the Arcade Fire's myth is "Army of pale, underfed misfits play weird instruments and sing wistful songs about children and death!" It's depressing how many band's essential stories contains the words "pale, underfed misfits" these days -- seriously, do we still live in Victorian England and I missed it? Just because you play the guitar means you can't do sit-ups? Also, if you're ever in doubt about what a band's essential myth is, just search Pitchfork for the first review they print of any given band, as that's generally what most hateful indiefolk accept as canon.

** A perfect example: This post.