The Arcade Fire, The Rosebuds and the success of Merge Records

Before catching the Rosebuds at Bloomington’s Second Story Nightclub last night, I gathered with some friends at my girlfriend’s house (she has cable!) for drinks. The television was harmlessly on in the background, but eventually we began dissecting what we were seeing. It wasn’t too hard to analyze the program, because there was so much wrong with it. First, the elephant in the corner of the room, and a brief digression from my original point, the program was airing less than two weeks after hundreds of thousands of square miles of the American South was turned into a third-word nightmare and the New York Times published an article on corpses rotting in the streets of New Orleans. Fuck it! What’s Mark McGrath wearing?

In a surprising addition to that night’s ceremony–essentially a parade of the most inexplicably over-appreciated musicians (Rob Thomas, Joss Stone, Shakira, a wrinkly Duran Duran) performing in thousand dollar outfits for the edification of an audience mostly talking into their new Pink RAZR phones–Arcade Fire performed “Wake Up.” With David Bowie. And it was good. Really good. Bowie, who had earlier performed “Life on Mars,” is singular among the ever-expanding group of 60’s and 70’s rock royalty still performing. He’s relevant, and offers his impeccable credibility to up and coming musicians. He covered the Pixies’ “Cactus” fifteen years ago, and showed up a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show in New York two months ago. Last night, he added his regal baritone to the song’s magnificent performance, and made me realize that the breakdown at the end of the song could have sequenced well on Station to Station.

Then we went to the Rosebuds show, where something else hit me: Arcade Fire, who’d just performed a prime-time concert with a rock legend to millions of viewers on a broadcast network is represented by Merge Records, the same label as The Rosebuds, whom I’d just paid five dollars to see in a tiny Midwestern nightclub. The coincidence, after several gin and tonics, was startling, and caused me to think about the position of the “indie” label in today’s musical landscape. Merge, specifically, was started in 1989 as a vehicle to release records by founder Mac McCaughan’s band Superchunk among others. Sixteen years later, it is inarguably one of the best American music labels of any size, releasing great stuff from Arcade Fire, Spoon, Teenage Fanclub, M. Ward, The Clientele, …Trail of Dead, and this year’s Dinosaur Jr. re-releases. I chatted with the Rosebuds’ Ivan and Kelly briefly last night before and after the show, and they both agreed that they couldn’t be happier with their label, which is known throughout the industry as an unfailingly sincere advocate for its artists.

How, then, did a band like Arcade Fire end up playing on CBS while labelmates The Rosebuds, with a brilliant new album (Birds Make Good Neighbors, which I bought from Ivan himself), play for me and 30 other geeks in Bloomington, Indiana? How is there such a massive gap in consumer accessibility between two bands on the same tiny label? The clear reason exists independently of Merge, of course, and has more to do with the new state of music dissemination. As we all know, “major” labels aren’t quite what they used to be.

The 2004 documentary Tom Dowd and the Language of Music highlighted the remarkable 30 year run of Atlantic Records (John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Cream, subsidiary Stax Records, etc.), and many forget that the punk and (early 90s) alternative “eras” were populated almost completely with bands signed to majors. This last example underscores my point. For the past 25 years, as the majors have coalesced into a monstrous “Big Four,” punk (or the punk worth listening to, for that matter) has gone, and stayed, “underground,” alchemizing itself into countless hybridities and exerting a direct subterranean influence on mainstream trends in rock. The “do-it-yourself” ideology was partly influenced by punk, but more a product of the realization by many intrepid rock fans that the difference is very thin indeed between critic and creator, and a record label doesn’t need to have A&R executives, just a P.O. box. As was recalled in Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life, rock music regained its attainability, and most importantly, malleablility, able to twist and reform itself independently of commercial considerations while still maintaining a fervent fan base.

But it was destined to remain underground. As many times as Kurt Cobain referenced The Vaselines in interviews, one wouldn’t expect to see them on MTV anytime soon. Many “indie” artists were influencing bands lucky enough to make it big, and granted, many of them made it big themselves, but most were far from household names. Over the past few years, however, technology, as it often does, has served as a democratizing force for independent music. Marketing has become viral, and it’s now possible for bands to exert a high level of control over their commercial destinies. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, fans with opinions become critics with readers, with websites sponsored by small labels and tiny clothing manufacturers happy to be noticed. Finally, the controversial rise of peer-to-peer networks has offered the most rabid fans a dubiously fast way to sample almost anything they can type into a search bar.

It’s for these reasons that a collective of French Canadian musicians started by a husband and wife can, in the course of a year, move from a self-released EP to the next coming of R.E.M—the band that by hard work and talent alone established themselves in the popular canon. But what took R.E.M. 8 years took Arcade Fire 1. This is due wholly to the earnest and pious promotion and distribution of the band’s music by online critical journals like Pitchfork, as well as mp3 blogs.

Arcade Fire’s music is dark, unironic, irresistibly melodic and mature, but unlike thousands of similar bands before them now languishing in the racks of die-hard collectors and college radio stations, the chord they struck with the under-thirty music-buying public could be amplified to millions of listeners, including David Bowie, who no doubt made his feelings known to the producers of “Fashion Rocks.” There are undeniably those who will utter the selfish cliché of “sell-out,” but their voices will disappear, as they always do. “Selling out” is a vastly overused term offered by small-minded purists purporting to have knowledge of some independent musical principle sacrificed by artists striving to be heard and appreciated by as many as possible. The Arcade Fire hasn’t sold out, they’ve succeeded. And so has Merge.

Update (9/11): Said the Gramophone has Arcade Fire covering “Maps.”
Update (9/12): Brooklyn Vegan has a ton of info on Bowie and The Arcade Fire.

Filed under: Arcade Fire  bloomingtopia  indie rock  Merge Records  Second Story  selling culture  The Rosebuds