Arcade Fire Comes In & Soothes

Not even with their music this time, either. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, brothers Win and Will Butler said a number of wise things which not only resonated with me in a big way but also apply in a sort of general way to the literary scene of the day and the ways in which major publishing houses, like major record labels, are floundering, and why I tend to find a lot of the current crop of literature written contemporaneously quite dull, unimaginative, self-involved, and artificial (and yes, there are more than a few exceptions to that last bit). A couple of the gemlike standouts below, but check out the whole interview at The Fork and not to mention their latest long player, which is a phenom of a record, a sonic event.

Pitchfork: A recent New Yorker piece used your success as an argument against major labels, what's your take on that?

Will Butler: Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals. They were just flailing about and throwing money around. They weren't thinking about putting out good music or embracing new things.

Win: When we were getting courted in the early days of Funeral, we would get taken to these dinners, and it was just like, "We'll take the dinner, but who's paying for this?" I guess Led Zeppelin is. But, at the end of the day, we were just like, "Would we be paying for other peoples' dinners?" It's such a weird thing.

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

And more, commenting on a kind of myopia amongst young people making art these days:

Will: We are ambitious, and I think that the general mode of almost all art these days is pretty small-focused. In literature and in film, the culture is all about these Miranda July-esque small moments observed in a lovely manner. Nothing against Miranda July, but I think that's the prevailing aesthetic.

I remember reading a book where the author was making fun of people who liked [Melville's] Bartleby, the Scrivener instead of Moby Dick-- like favoring a well-crafted short story instead of his flawed, epic thing. But I think we're definitely much more of a Moby Dick kind of band, and a lot of bands just aren't. And there are some beautiful small songs out there, and it would be nice if we could theoretically do a small album. Maybe we will. But the music we really reacted to growing up was stuff that was a little bigger and more major label.

Pitchfork: Like what?

Will: The original stuff that got me excited about music was Björk and Radiohead and the weirder spectrum of the bands that were popular and on MTV. Radiohead weren't small in their focus. It definitely seemed like they were talking about the world at large. I think the first indie music I heard was Neutral Milk Hotel and the Music Tapes, who were both Elephant 6 bands on Merge.

Still more, hinting at autonomy and the absolute silliness of art school, academia, and some of the absurd rules and theories occasionally found therein:

Pitchfork: On "Ready to Start", you sing about an emperor who "wears no clothes" that the kids "bow down to... anyway." Do you ever worry about reaching that kind of level of hero worship yourself?

Win: America's a big country. There're still way more people who've never heard of us. For me, the feeling of "Ready to Start" came from going to art school and meeting a lot of people who had really defined political ideas and rules about art. But I just wanted to make something in the world and worry about the rest of it later and not get too caught up in rules.