Beyond the black mirrors

Yes, I went to see Arcade Fire. With Feist, LCohen, Aziz, Huma, Zevon, Drake and others on my mind.

Yes, I went to see Arcade Fire. It’s complicated. As is life. Life beyond the black mirrors.

This will not be a hot take. It will be a long take. This is what’s been rattling around my brain for the past three months, illustrated by what I went to see last week.

Arcade Fire has been the defining musical act of my personal and professional adult life, for myriad reasons. I love the new album. I’d bought tickets months ago. As the date approached, I didn’t necessarily want to be there. And I didn’t know how to feel about the fact that I didn’t necessarily want to be there.

Who was going to be there? Some angry fans were demanding refunds from Ticketmaster, people who trusted the band that once sang, “Put Your Money on Me.” And now I had Nardwuar’s voice in my head singing “Half-Empty Halls.”

This summer’s news about how Win Butler “lived [his] misbehaviour” was shocking. Awful. Gross. I feel terrible for people who felt manipulated, harassed, used and exploited. There are accusations and denials, but there remain things Win admitted to and got caught doing, things for which there is a trail of digital evidence provided to a reporter and Condé Nast lawyers. Keep it down now, voices carry. These days, so do dick pics.

I also felt terrible for people in the band, and the collateral damage to others whose professional careers and reputations are inextricably linked to the name Arcade Fire. I’ve had lots of long conversations with many people about this in the past three months. With many people who feel betrayed.

And also with women in their 40s and 50s—women old enough to wish a dick pic still meant a Grateful Dead bootleg—who shrugged and told me: “Honey, that’s just men.” What do you expect?

Julie Fader @JulieFader

I am quite possibly naïve, but I truly wonder who has ever, ever been excited about an unsolicited dick pic.

I saw the band play at Osheaga in Montreal this summer, shortly before the allegations broke. It remains a fantastic memory for many reasons. That could have been my final memory of the band. Why soil it?

Michael Barclay @mmmbarclay

So this happened #HeartsOnFire #ArcadeFire #WolfParade

I was there close to the band’s very beginning. If this was going to be some kind of end, I wanted to bear witness.

We know that it’s time to go / heard the news on the radio /

one last round before we go /

through the pale atmospheric glow / and the oxygen’s getting low /

sing a song that we used to know /

one last round before we go

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Thursday, December 1. The previous show was in Edmonton, four days earlier. The crew’s trucks got stuck in a Prairie snowstorm, and didn’t arrive in Toronto until a few hours before doors. The band was getting ready to play a stripped-down set on rented gear. Door times were pushed. Then came news that a key collaborator of recent years had suffered a brain aneurysm and died. As if this tour wasn’t stressful enough already.

Upon arriving, there are no noticeably weird vibes. No protests outside. No desperate scalpers. The crowd is all-ages and mixed gender—this isn’t a sausage party of Louis CK fans. Arcade Fire is a massively successful pop band; their current audience likely doesn’t consume a lot of music news. This isn’t Twitter. This is life offline.