Neither Nor

The Album of the Year Grammy is a victory for The Arcade Fire and anyone associated with the band and Merge Records. It’s the culmination of all the hard work and effort put into turning this group into one of those oft-cited multi-year overnight successes. I want to stress this point, that these guys deserve all the kudos in the world & then some, to absurd ends, given what I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs saying. Because to paint this triumph as some awe-inspiring victory for indie rock or the indie ethos over the mainstream as a whole – some sort of final nail in the coffin or a chink in the armor of Big Whatever – is, to put it indelicately, some ridiculously short-sighted bullshit.

What happened is this: the music industry, with its excesses and extravagances and hard-to-fathom bottom lines, slowly eroded in the face of Napster and music sharing and all that jazz. That fucked over a lot of acts that needed to sell in the millions in order to make ends meet. It also fucked over low-profile groups, but the screw wasn’t so deep, if only because Indie Rock Joe didn’t have as far to fall as Major Label Joseph. The “indie” bands also had a flexible and creative network in place, as well as a educated and passionate and conditioned subculture (with all its attendant object-related fetishes; hola vinyl 2.0) to help soften the blow. As long as expectations for success were kept in check, and hard work was put in, a band could theoretically make a living wage recording and touring without being forced to sell out ginormous arenas or fill up Best Buy racks.

So the indie engine chugging away, coupled with corporations shitting themselves stupid trying to at once go with the flow and switch gears, did change the playing field, but it’s more about the big boys losing ground than the underdogs rising up. Instead of high-profile who-dat groups like Vampire Weekend and The White Stripes finding themselves on the back end of the Billboard 200, as they would have been not even ten years ago with similar sales numbers, they find themselves in the top ten. That’s not to denigrate the achievement of topping the sales charts, but it’s worth double-checking the height of the mountain being scaled before going nuts about being crowned king.

And of course it’s (hopefully) not the chart-toppers (and the folks behind the curtain) that are running around doing a reverse Chicken Little; it’s the subculture that’s been taught to take the Us Vs. Them paradigm at face value that’s out there with the hyperbole and the misinformation and the cockeyed optimism and naivete that makes a cynic-in-denial like me drop the charade and roll out the wet blanket. The Arcade Fire had their last TWO albums debut in the Billboard Top Ten (at #2 and #1) (thank you random Tweeter for that tidbit), and (release mechanism & underlying message notwithstanding) their grandiose po-faced music isn’t exactly something that’s alien to a Grammy voter with any Springsteen or U2 in their collection. It “happened” on a slightly different scale, and it “happened” for a record label that’s been a righteous standard bearer for everything good and true in the world of independent music, both aesthetically and professionally, but unless you believe perseverance coupled with hard work and good old fashioned luck is some newly-discovered formula, this victory isn’t a sea change by any stretch. It’s just low tide, and you’d better watch where you stand when the waters roll back in.  In other words (since I love belaboring points and using silly metaphors): this is less Bob Dylan, and more The Who.