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. 

SELFIES AND THE INNOVATION OF SELF-MYTHMAKING

Paris selfie - croissant in tow.

The mere mention of Paris conjures up images of lovers: walking along the Seine, kissing, maybe sharing a croissant. But on this trip, it has been the mass-demonstration of another kind of love that's struck me. It shouldn't have. Selfies are, by now, so ubiquitous that they are no longer even embarrassing (as in the decadent Rome of Cavelli's opera Eliogabalo, "where everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent"). In Japan this Spring, I saw more signs regulating selfie sticks than bicycles. Here in Paris, they're more easily procured than miniature replicas of the Eiffel Tower. 

The bewitching appeal of self-love is hardly new. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, wise Tiresias rhetorically asks Narcissus:

Caravaggio, Narcissus, ~1597-9.

"Why try to catch an always fleeting image
Poor credulous youngster? What you seek is nowhere
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance."

Looking at Narcissus's conundrum as a design problem, he faces two main issues:

1. Lack of control - Narcissus's image is "nowhere," eluding capture
2. Impermanence - Narcissus's image is "always fleeting," eluding documentation

I think the selfie is so successful as an innovation because it seems to solve for both of these long-standing problems with Narcissism. It provides the subject with the impression of control over his or her self-image as actor-director, coupled with the ability to "immortalize" it on the internet.

CONTROL

When I look at photographs from childhood trips, taken by friendly strangers (or in this case, probably my mom), there are usually other tourists in the background. I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the main things selfie sticks and digital enhancement allow for is their removal. As Jonathan Franzen writes in Freedom, "nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special."

Selfies give us the impression of control on two levels: first, directly from our perspective, and second, recursively from the perspective of others, dreaming of the illusions we will create in others' dreams. 

As the ultimate manifestation of images "known to be false but felt to be true," selfies glamorously highlight some details while obscuring others to reinforce our own specialness. 

The fantasy of someone else fantasizing about you is an even more cunning trick of mind. While, as Virginia Postrel points out, "Glamour is not something you possess, but something you perceive," the recursive perception of another's perception offers the illusion of possession--an illusion that can be seemingly quantified and insatiably fed by "likes," and archived for posterity on Facebook or especially Instagram, everyone's personal museum, digital formaldehyde. 

IMMORTALITY

Selfies thus offer intimations of immortality on our own terms; they are a modern form of mummification. It's really no wonder that people are, increasingly, willing to risk dying for the perfect shot, and actively want to plan for their "digital afterlife." 

Evan Carroll, the founder of Loggacy, a digital afterlife platform, explains that "the emergence of online digital legacy tools, that provide us with the opportunity to record our lives online and leave an everlasting legacy, provide a meaningful solution to the...conundrum concerning 'immortality.'" 

That's a lot of provisions. The thing is, we're not preserving a record of our lives--selfies are carefully-staged simulacra, not faithful representations. Archiving them offers the promise not of self-history, but metamorphic self-mythology.

I'm reminded of a book I vaguely remember from childhood, where the main character is a little boy in search of perfection. He eventually finds it, if I remember correctly--and it's this boring room filled with people doing nothing. Perfection, he realizes, is way overrated; flowers are glamorous, but it's way more fun to be a boy.