ARCADE FIRE IS OBSESSED WITH RECURSION, TOO
Occasionally I'll run into a cultural artifact that so perfectly combines my four themes that it's hard to know where to start with it. Arcade Fire's latest album, Everything Now, is one of those cultural artifacts.
No surprise: the album and Infinite Content tour alike open with the title track, an ultra-digestible disco-pop anthem of anti-consumerist consumer success. At the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC last night, gargantuan disco balls framed the center ring, staged like a boxing match, the band entering with a tongue-in-cheek announcement of their Grammy record and combined weight. A four-sided jumbotron hovered above it, infinitely scrolling recursive graphics superimposed over live footage of Win Butler &co oozing rock star glamour. My husband's hot take? "New Arcade Fire is ABBA with irony." "Everything Now" is Arcade Fire's first single to reach #1 on a Billboard chart.
Recursion is not a new theme for Arcade Fire. Reflektor, their third studio album, was an echo chamber of mirrors ("Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection"), but Everything Now is next-level. Leading up to the Album's release, the band created a fake corporation and a fake website, complete with a "Premature Premature [Self-]Evaluation"--a parody site of a parody site filled with embedded links to other meta-joke articles created by the band, pulling you into a click-circle of their "Infinite Content" that gets to the annular heart of the internet:
"We’ll probably spend at least a paragraph talking about the marketing campaign that has accompanied Everything Now—the logos, the corporate-speak, the Twitter account—saying that we get the joke, and maybe even noting that music sites and features like Premature Evaluation (and the new Premature Premature Evaluation) are all part of the same culture-marketing ecosystem."
That last link there is to a self-generated mock exposé of Everything Now's mock campaign, debunking self-perpetuated mock rumors such as, for example, Ben & Jerry's production of an Arcade Fire flavor. It's fake news blowing the whistle on fake news, like a billboard that blends into the background.
Aside from "Infinite Content," which is a bit brash and annoyingly repetitive (the acoustic, almost bluegrassy reprise is better), the album is as good musically as it is conceptually. "Electric Blue" and "We Don't Deserve Love" are winners, featuring Régine Chassagne's voice at its most ethereal. My favorite song on the album, Creature Comfort, is a synthy little sermon, spouting what might be the mantra for selfie culture: "Saying God, make me famous / If you can't just make it painless / Just make it painless."
At the concert last night, they closed with "Everything Now (continued)" of course--just like on the album, where the first track bleeds into the last, forming an infinite loop.