Some refractions from Arcade Fire's Reflektor

Released with an appropriate amount of fanfare, including a 30 minute special directed by Roman Coppola, Reflektor has been garnering a mixture of apathetic shrugs from the indie kids and hyperbolic acclaim from the many folks (myself included) who still want BIG albums that tackle BIG themes. This is an album for those of us who still care about capital-A albums, but it's also more than that: it's an album that repeatedly calls into question its own legitimacy.

I celebrated Tuesday's release by reading an album review from Rolling Stone for the first time in what's probably been about ten years. It was weirdly satisfying to see David Fricke make overt comparisons to all the baby-boomer greats (U2, The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, The Cure, Neil Young, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, and so on). The write-up ends by placing Reflektor in the same league as game changing records by Radiohead (Kid A), the Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street), and U2 (Achtung Baby). Along with Pitchfork, The Quietus made similar comparisons. Perhaps it was in the band's press release. Most of this critical pandering is useless and boring, but it's also somewhat accurate, as it has been for their previous albums. Of course Arcade Fire aren't likely to let go of the Talking Heads, whose influence is obvious on songs like the jittering "Normal People" and the meditative "Afterlife." The U2 comparison isn't that far-off either. On a mid-tempo track like "Porno" Butler's sultry croon is pure Bono, and when you've got lyrics like "there's so little that we know" or "it's the only world we know" shouted into what sounds like empty space, U2's early 90s wanderings certainly come to mind.

Despite its 80 minute running time, Reflektor feels exceptionally well-crafted and well-paced: as it presses on, Arcade Fire manage to earn your trust, despite juggling a variety of things that don't at first glance fit together. You've got the influence of Haitian culture driving the rhythm and the lyrical content of a good portion of the album, a lot of meandering lyrics about the afterlife, the usual adolescent discomfort, a lot of self-referential "reflections" on the nature of art, and some pretentious Greek mythology thrown in just for kicks. And all this comes with several finishing touches from former LCD Soundsystem dude James Murphy, who, by the sounds of it, didn't actually do that much for the songs, but adds even more cultural capital to the whole endeavour.

The themes are BIG but remain rooted in vague specifics. In an interview with Maclean's, Win Butler explains how much of them came from a recent trip to Haiti:

There’s a crazy energy in Port-au-Prince when the sun goes down, because there is no electricity in a lot of the city. A lot of parts of the city are pretty dangerous, and people are rushing around trying to get home. There’s also this nightlife thing that happens, and it’s a combination of really dangerous and fun. Whenever you go to Haiti there are all these packs of missionaries wearing the same T-shirts that say “Jesus loves Haiti” or whatever. You ask them, “What are you guys doing?” And they say, “Oh, we’re going to paint houses.” Well, why don’t you just pay Haitians to paint the houses? I’m sure they’d love to do that. There’s a strange idea of going there to teach people about Jesus, while I’m sure Haitians know more about Jesus than these people do; they’re the most religious people. After the earthquake, people were singing songs of praise in the street. It’s a strange idea that we can teach these people something. The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm and so there’s this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.

I want to think that this has everything to do with why the motif of reflection came to dominate the conceptual structure of the album. Removed from this context, the theme of reflection can be easily glossed over as a way of celebrating art as such. In Lindsay Zoladz's Pitchfork review, for example, Arcade Fire's reflexivity is more or less equivalent to musicians (and critics) giving themselves a pat on the back:

With its clipped snippets of airwave chatter (the BBC's Jonathan Ross makes a cameo), warped VHS hum, and retro-luminosity that nods to a time when synthesizers connoted un-jaded wonder and revelation, Reflektor is designed to be an homage to the many ways music is transmitted, discovered, and incorporated into people's lives.

Ian Cohen tweaks the sentiment a little bit in his earlier review of the band's first single, suggesting that the album's big theme is "the possibility that art isn't a shared, living experience but rather a mirror for our own projections and preconceptions." Well, no shit. I like to think that Arcade Fire have a more nuanced understanding of the work they're producing. Most post-colonial theory begins with the assumption that the Occident has constructed other cultures in way that suits its own purposes (be they economic, symbolic, or political). In Haiti's history, we see reflections of our own violent history, but we also see more. Arcade Fire aren't so naive that they haven't considered the implications of what it means to appropriate other cultural forms, especially when the culture in question bares obvious traces of Western European imperialism of the worst kind. Butler is no post-colonial studies expert, but by drawing out certain elements from his experience in Haiti (most strikingly on "Here Comes the Night Time" ) while employing a self-conscious conceit like the mirror, Butler's lyrics suggest something that usually gets left out of the discussion when privileged white folks use things from other cultures: the appropriated image of another culture isn't simply problematic because of its content but because of its very form. Or, to put it in Arcade Fire's terms, it's not simply the reflection that's at issue but the reflector. In other words, it's important to be conscious not just of what's being represented but how representation itself is a form of cultural production that has a history.  The danger in this kind of thinking is that it can put all the artistic agency in colonial hands, and that's obviously not what's going on here. While this insight isn't made explicit on Reflektor, it's there in the background, and along with it is an assortment of other loose threads that don't necessarily reveal their origin, Occidental or otherwise. Heaven or "Afterlife" is another recurring topic that seems to fit well with a critical view of representation and its use as an colonial weapon for maintaining oppressive power structures.

As has no doubt been said ad nauseum, with Reflektor, Arcade Fire have devised their own hall of mirrors, but what makes this album truly worthwhile is that they've also given us some of the hints we need in order to find a hammer.

canons, texts and contexts

My first full week in Edmonton ends with uneasy anticipation of the next: the beginning of classes. There have been plenty of distractions. As usual, my apartment continues to evolve with occasional additions from the alley, and last night I watched the brilliant but uneven Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as a recent widower (and former marine) whose burnout London housing estate is becoming overrun with violence and drug-trafficking. A familiar story (very similar to that of Gran Torino) but told in the most uncomfortable, effective way. The direction achieves the level of estrangement necessary to make Harry Brown feel important and timely without resorting to race, poverty or any of the other usual outlets for easy moralizing (unsurprisingly, the only thing American film critics could appreciate about this film was Michael Caine's performance).

I've appreciated having some time to settle in to my new place, but it's hard to contain my excitement for the coming week. Here's what I'm up against:

Milton and Print Culture

John Milton – canonized poet of the high literary tradition invented in the centuries after the seventeenth – came out fighting in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. In works like Areopagitica, Milton self-consciously located his own writing and publication within the fervid print culture of civil war London. In other words, while Milton’s literary friends and allies certainly included the likes of Virgil and Dante, his nearer neighbours in print (especially in the 1640s) included petitioning apprentices and a host of writers of cheap pamphlets.

Derrida Engaged

Derrida’s later career is often described as an emphatic turn away from idealism and abstraction and towards issues of more immediate worldly concern. However, Derrida himself questions this characterization, and one point of this seminar will be to investigate ways in which this “engaged” Derrida has always been at work—even in those less overtly politicized moments of his deconstructive program. Texts up for discussion will include Margins of Philosophy (1982), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (1994),  Of Hospitality (2000), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005), and The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008).

Empire and Travel in Literary History

This course studies the relation between English (British, European) expansion and travel and the meeting of cultures. It will discuss the relations among English (British, Europeans) and local peoples, Africans and Native Americans and will examine questions of race, gender and class as well as culture more generally. This is a focused survey of works of travel that have mainly to do with questions of politics, religion, identity and/or expansion in the context of literary representation and will show that, from the Middle Ages to the present, travel (including the motifs of pilgrimage, journey, expansion colonization) has long been a concern in English or European literature and culture.

the wizard of AZ

I'm back from a trip to Arizona, from what feels now like a very distant place. There were a lot of very interesting parts to my trip. Not only was I able to spend some much needed quality time with my grandparents, we hiked in the Grand Canyon; we hiked to the Devil's Bridge; we ate at an authentic Southern grill, a Nepalese restaurant, and did our grocery shopping at place called Superstition Market. I suppose that's another thing I love about the southern states. So many landmarks and regions have wonderfully suggestive, eerily spiritual names.

The cacti were perhaps my favourite feature of what is very different climate.The weather was characteristically hot and dry, so it's taken me some time to adjust to the cold, wet discomfort of Winnipeg. It also happened that the political climate was quite heated (Winnipeg's on the other hand...?), especially regarding the state's decision to bypass the federal government's jurisdiction and clamp down on illegal immigrants.

If this is news to you, the story is certainly worth checking out because it brings up all kinds of disparities and disagreements between right and left, rich and poor. It also links quite nicely to my last couple of posts on colonialism. Each morning of my vacation began with the newspaper; each day began with a related story on the front page, featuring protesters and particular celebrities speaking out against the bill.

And there I was, right in the heart of this debate: comfortably situated in a gated community called Sunland Village where the only Mexican people you'll see are probably groundskeepers or delivery men. As an outsider, it became quite clear that I was in an environment of power, among a large population of people who support a bill that "requires local and state law enforcement to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country without proper documentation, and makes it a state crime to be in the United States illegally." It made me wonder about how our decisions and opinions are tied to our cultural position, how as a white middle-class male I am always speaking from a position of power. Something we'd all do well to consider, I think.

theology in a fair country

A poster advertising a public lecture by John Ralston Saul caught my eye the other day. Turns out he's speaking as part of a conference on "doing theology in a changed relationship with Aboriginal People in Canada" that is being put on by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Winnipeg in association with the CCTE (Churches Council on Theological Education in Canada). I don't much care for Saul's work, but I wrote a brief review of his latest book, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, last year and I'm very interested in whether it is possible to speak of post-colonial theology, so if I can I hope to attend his lecture. Below is the better part of my review, which should at least provide some explanation for his presence at this conference.

“We are a people of Aboriginal inspiration organized around a concept of peace, fairness and good government. That is what lies at the heart of our story; at the heart of Canadian mythology, whether Francophone or Anglophone.” So concludes the prologue to A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, the thirteenth book by political philosopher and novelist John Ralston Saul. Undoubtedly one of Canada’s most esteemed public intellectuals, Saul’s has produced timely essay on the complexities of our national identity and a reality-check for a country notoriously at odds with itself.

As Saul demonstrates, our future as Canadians depends on a thorough engagement with this nation’s past. We are a uniquely diverse and egalitarian nation, not because of our bi-national ancestry, but rather, because we are a Metis nation, Saul argues. When Europeans began to settle this land, their survival was dependent on Aboriginal people, whose way of life contrasted European ideas of conquest because it grew out of a sophisticated process of adaptation to the environment. In other words, European settlers were enveloped by a new narrative when they set foot on this land. While the most adhered to enlightenment paradigms like progress, rationality, and human mastery over nature, aboriginal culture privileged complexity over singularity and negotiation over violence, lived in continuity with nature and socially practiced what he calls the inclusive circle. This means that the qualities often used to describe or define “Canada” are, in fact, profoundly aboriginal. Our country’s resistance to acknowledge the overwhelming influence of aboriginal culture and philosophy, argues Saul, is precisely what holds Canada back from true national awareness and international confidence.

Saul’s writing, though mildly academic, is clear and makes for an easy read, but can quickly become quite repetitious. For those who’ve bumped up against post-colonialism in their studies, A Fair Country fails to offer much that’s new in the way of critique, but it does deal with Canada’s muddled economic policies and the often misguided elites who shape current acts of legislation. Alongside Saul’s national reality-check, we must recognize that colonial violence remains deeply rooted in our imported economic system and methods of governance.