Arcade Fire Concert—Susan Sutton
Posted in St. Gregory's Members Blog on Saturday, September 22, 2007
Last night Nancy and I went to the Arcade Fire concert down at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Arcade Fire is an “indie” band from Montreal, touring in support of their second album, Neon Bible. I say “indie,” because clearly, if they’re headlining at Shoreline, they’re pretty damn big. And they are numerous on stage as well… I counted ten musicians, since their music has an unusual amount of orchestration in it. I won’t really go on to describe the band anymore, since you either know it already or can check it out pretty easily.
Arcade Fire belongs on the list of bands that I think of as “crypto-Christian,” along with Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, and more obvious candidates such as U2 (which, yes, now falls into the old fart category, sorry to have to tell you) or lesser known bands such as Woven Hand or Sufyan Stevens. Some of these musicians are semi-openly Christian (like Sufyan Stevens, who is, I think, an Episcopalian) while their music is not particularly obviously religious. Others, like Gary Numan, might say they are strongly opposed to Christianity, but you can hear them furiously and authentically engaging with God in every piece of music (for example, some of the songs Numan wrote after his wife miscarried). While a few of the lesser known bands may have had a boost in their early performing careers by being linked to the “Christian” circuit, most of them have avoided it like the plague, seeing the association as imposing a permanent cap on how wide their popularity might become.
And yet, they sing about dealing with suffering, their conflicted desires (here I think of Morrissey’s swoony ballad “I Have Forgiven Jesus"), and a sense of wonder that runs through the world. Even when they don’t sing about God or church per se (and even if they don’t go to church, and even if they’d be insulted if you kept pushing the subject), they sing from what I’d call a Christian imagination, formed in a worldview permeated with meaning and spiritual possibility. I’m not saying that they’d identify their muse in this way themselves, of course, but I certainly find a lot to feed my own imagination there as well.
Susan,
Great post. As a musician/fan, I agree that it’s hard to draw the line between the secular and sacred when it comes to pop music. Music itself is a powerful vehicle for transcendent experiences that even something as mechanized as Kraftwerk takes on spiritual meaning for me.
I also appreciate your view that someone who rails against God belongs on a list of spiritual artists. I confront this all the time in my listening. I recall when my ears first opened up to punk. I was listening to “Marquee Moon” by Television and I had a powerful revelation: far from being crass, punk rock is desperately idealistic. Now, when I hear Television or the Clash, or the Replacements, I hear music that goes against the tide in order to recover our humanity. That certainly qualifies as spiritual music in my book.
The great and terrible thing about art is that it’s always open to new interpretation; I think X stopped playing “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” for years because they realized that some of their fans were absolutely *not* getting that it was supposed to be an anti-rape song…
Yes.
There’s misinterpretation by way of ignoring the words, e.g. “Born in the USA” and “Every Breath You Take.”
Then there’s misinterpretation by way of over-reading the words, e.g. “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
And there are lots of instances of artists using misinterpretation of their intentions as an excuse for the problems with their lyrics.
And then there are cases in which the words seem at total odds with the spirit of the music. The one I’m thinking of is the Selecter’s “Time Hard,” sung to the cheeriest little ska beat you could imagine (chorus: “Every day, things are getting worse"). Which mood do you pick? In a blatant case like that, do you have to pick both/and?
My MFA students are all over the map on this general question, not surprisingly.