are the arcade fire substantive artists?

Nor Easter
Arcade Fire are an embarrassment to art.  They copy, they imitate, and they do it with disgusting pretension.   They have NO new ideas.  Hope they all die in a fire soon.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
The Beatles started up copying some of the american rythm & blues, the same with the Stones. Madonna ripped off some of Blondie'S stuff and most of the disco era. Gaga is stealing her (?) ideas from just about everyone.....Motown sound came from a blend of blues and rock, Jazz came from Blues and on and on.......so, tell me what in this is true original music without any influence at all?

deathtokoalas
+Parhasard57 the same criticism applies to all that crap, though. there's been heaps of original music released in the last 50 years (some of it by the beatles, after they grew out of their mop top phase) but it contradicts the logic of capitalism to try and sell an unfamiliar product so it gets virtually zero promotion. case in point: madonna actually came out of a really creative music scene. the second most popular band in that circle of people was sonic youth, who you've probably heard of. have you heard of swans? jim thirlwell? lydia lunch? glenn branca? john zorn? it was all there at the same time, it all could have been marketed, but one was an easy product that appeals to base desires and the rest challenged people to reconsider their preconceptions of what music even is.

but, the great composers all die penniless and unknown. so it's not like this is anything new.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas I agree with most of what you wrote; and I know and/or heard some of the bands and artists you mentioned, heck you could have included many more but the point being about Art. I never thought someone would get up one morning and say: hum, today, i will write music that is Art. All those musicians do what they feel and wish to play, with basically one goal in mind: go further as a musician, or explore the limits of what they like. It is not easy for me to explain my train of thoughts since I speak French usually. And let's keep i mind how Art is not objective but rather subjective, in music as well as in painting.

So, all this to say that, although there are forms of music that are tasteless and formated that will please some, but there is also some music that MAY not achieve the status of true or pure art but may contain a vast sum of qualities. You see, many are praying Warhol as a genius but to me, it's «meh».

The bottom line being: nobody will never come up with a bunch of songs that will please each and everyone because as i said, it is a subjective medium, what is art to you may be shit to someone else. It's an endless debate.

oh, as far as «the great composers all died penniless», yeah some did but I believe Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, RAchmaninoff, Liszt and a few more did not do so bad.....Or Zappa for that matter.

Robert DeCreon
+Parhasard57 It's interesting you say that, because I think Beatles and Floyd were actually pretty original, altough of course they had their inspirations, they took it all from LSD and their incredible mind. Why do you think Beatles is considered the best artist ever? Because of their inventions to the music.

deathtokoalas
that's right. the arcade fire do not belong to the same category as the beatles or floyd. their early material is better compared to something like the beegees, and they seem to have recently entered an abba phase.

you're allowed to enjoy the product, but it's not art. and it's not fair to artists to think of it as art.

Trevor Johnston
+deathtokoalas I am sick of the beatles as "the best band"  Best band of their time but they were basically pop themselves with there melodies and simple playing.  Its music, its what you like, every body has their favorites.  I listen to Floyd but I find most of the beatles stuff simple, except there later experimental stuff.

deathtokoalas
+Trevor Johnston i pointed out a few posts back that i mean the material after and including revolver. early beatles up to that point is not creative and does not qualify as art. it qualifies as a successful product, but the reason it was a successful product is that it wasn't challenging.

but, no, it's not subjective, and i'm really fucking sick of fucking lazy capitalist idiots refusing to have the intellectual courage to acknowledge what is creative and what isn't. it's not interchangeable. it's not equivalent. it's not all fucking product designed to turn a dime to trickle it's way up the supply chain. it's not simply what butters your toast. there is a very clear, objective difference between producing for the sake of creativity and producing for the sake of profit.

again: if you want to listen to bland, cloned-over capitalist garbage then there's a million bands like arcade fire out there for you to explore. just don't call it art. please. it's not worthy.

Robert DeCreon
I'm not saying that Arcade Fire shall belong to a category like Beatles and Floyd belong to, but they are not like the Beeges or ABBA. Do you even know the meaning of the whole album? It's art, specially in this awful time that songs have no emotion or lyrical meaning.

deathtokoalas
i think the beegees/abba comparison is pretty good, actually. these bands were massively popular in their time and are mostly forgotten today. that will be the legacy of the arcade fire.

but if you want a more precise comparison, i'm going to draw attention to two bands: u2 and my chemical romance.

a few years ago, mcr swung out of being a bon jovi cover band and released this awful thing that was some kind of attempt to merge sgt peppers with the smashing pumpkins. reflector draws heavily from the black parade in the sense of stealing it's concept from sgt peppers.

musically, though, they've pulled a sort of ultra-paradoxical phase on u2's post-modern 90s phase. when u2 did the zooropa tour, it was a tongue-in-cheek parody on popular culture, a satire of over-the-top consumerism. the arcade fire have taken that sound and stripped it of it's irony. on one hand, it sort of makes bono look brilliant, in hindsight. but it all draws together the conclusion that this is designed solely to move units, rather than to say anything worthwhile.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas Dear Koalas.....I have to say I've rarely read such self-indulging comments. According to you, only you and a few others are capable of real Art! Wow, talk about being full of yourself . If I follow your saying, anything that is not like what you do is shit! You sound more like a jealous musician envying anybody's success. Here's the thing: Art is not restrain to sheer creation...it is also a matter of perceptions, communication and expressions. Visual arts are so diversified, it would be prententious to point only one form as being THE one. Same goes with music. The very first goal of music is to communicate either a message, or a state of mind, or an opportunity to explore some personnal ideas. To negate anything not complying with your own taste, is a proof of a limited mind....the same applies to those pissing on anything they don't get. All you,ve been writing here is a total lack of respect for anything YOU don't like......no wonder your band is not doing much.......talking TO people will bring you more than talking DOWN to someone. Good luck, anyway.

Robert DeCreon
+deathtokoalas Please don't take this as rude, but I'm glad your opinion it's just minority. You're saying like it's fact but it's acutally just a selfish declaration that you try to convince other it's a fact. Again I have to ask you: Do you know the meaning of this or the whole album? ABBA, Beeges, MCR, Bon Jovi or whatever other band you cited there (no ofense to someone who likes them) aren't capable of doing such thing. You're only showing at every comment you say that you're wrong and that you have no idea what art really is. You're thinking that art is the same that POPULAR, and POP things these days are only shit. So if Arcade Fire made sucess these days I would be surprised, because people have no capacity to recognize this as art from so much shit they have in their minds. Please don't think i'm a cunt after all these things I have said, I'm trying to be lovely at best way possible. If Arcade Fire weren't popular in a past time  then you could say they are equal as Beeges and ABBA.

You're seeing the music in a intelectual level. Don't do that, music isn't supposed to be seeing that way, yet feeling it with passion. AF doesn't need to a new Beatles to change people's life or something. I'm just happy that they have the courage to put something like that  in market against all others pop artists and still being considered in the top 10 albums of 2013.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas One last thing: your self-indulging mind seems to confuse taste with critics.....Your point of view is one about taste not what is Art. I cannot beleive you pose yourself as a music «critic» on your post.....to do so, you need to be impartial and able to recognise qualities in most musics made. Anything else is a matter of personnal taste and yours seems rather limited.

deathtokoalas
+Parhasard57 you've misunderstood me. i can cite a lot of art i don't really like. early kraftwerk would be an example. stockhausen, to a lesser extent. schoenberg, for sure. i find this stuff prodding and boring, but i realize it was created to push boundaries and not to move units. it consequently qualifies as art; my reaction to it is secondary. your reaction is pretty standard, though: conscientiously or not, you've taken the capitalist perspective of leaving the value of art up to markets and then accused me of trying to restrict the market. no. i'm rejecting the concept of art as a product altogether by separating out that which is meant to make money from that which is meant to be creative.

in broad terms, my perspective is closer to the historical norm whereas you're conforming to the existing neo-liberal anomaly of reducing everything to a price tag. i don't want to really think in those terms, though. i want to think in terms of a post-capitalist paradigm where the exchange of currency for art is abolished. in this proposed future post-lefist understanding of art, collectives like the arcade fire would for the most part cease to exist because they'll have lost their profit motive.

deathtokoalas
+Robert DeCreon if i was criticizing a robert johnson track, i could see your reaction making sense. i could even see it making sense in reaction to something like nirvana. but, this is hardly gut-wrenching music that is going to move anybody on an emotional level. i mean, that's ultimately the basis of my criticism: this is a cold, emotionless product. it exists purely on an intellectual level in the first place, so that's the right way to deconstruct it.
   
Robert DeCreon
+ deathtokoalas Your comments are just... idiot. You keep citing Robert Johnsonn, Kraftwerk, Schoenberg, and many others things that it seens like you're trying to show that you're a badass intellectual who studied music and knows what you're talking about yet you are just playing fool here. If you were only saying "I didn't like this album" or "I don't like Arcade Fire" it would be okay, but you keep saying nonsense things instead of just speaking, let's say, casually. Youtube it's not a fucking professional critics...

on the question of srv’s actual talent level

Panglos
You can close your eyes, and as soon as you hear this, you know who's playing. (You might think it could be Albert King, but not if you're sharp-eared.)

What that tells you is that this isn't the "best guitar player." It's a very one-dimensional guitar player, one who has basically one style, and one style only. A guitar player who's very overrated, by people who apparently don't know too much about guitars or guitar players.

Joris van Dijk
I don't think you know very much about guitars if you don't consider him as one of the best ever. He just liked one style most and mastered it like nobody could. If you watch his performances you'll see why people consider him as one of the best. I'm not saying that he is the best, but he sure is one of the best ever.

And further more I can also easily recognise Hendrix, B.B. King, Clapton, Guy, etc. with my eyes closed. And those weren't one-dimensional guitar players.

Panglos
Being limited and being recognizable aren't mutually exclusive. In your list, some of those artists are unidimensional (I love the guy, but exactly how many styles does B.B. have?), and some are multidimensional. Having worked with some of them, I have a pretty good handle on that.

deathtokoalas
your error is trying to rank guitarists in the first place. there is no total ordering on the set of all guitarists. how does one compare srv to al di meola? one was a self-taught prodigy working entirely on intuition, the other was a berklee academic. the guitar is a completely different instrument to these people.

rather, the question - in this case the definition of the set - needs to be restricted to something more specific. srv was a self-taught, "feel" guitarist that focused purely on raw emotion. the question you need to ask is not "how diverse was srv in comparison to other players"; that would be as silly as asking "how punk rock was al di meola?". the question you need to ask is "how real, powerful and fucking gut-wrenchingly emotional was srv in comparison to other players?".

i hesitate to place him at the top. i think dislodging hendrix from his acknowledged place of righteousness is very difficult. i'll throw the curve ball of a young billy corgan (90-95) in there that most people would probably think is pretty left field, but i'll argue the point. check out 'starla' or 'drown'. yet, the number of 'feel' players that can overpower srv is very small indeed. no more than can be counted on one hand.

....even if he'd tell you that you're speaking greek if you brought up the concept of modes.

Joris van Dijk
+Panglos You can't say that when somebody prefers one style above the others he's an unidmimensional guitarist. The thing is that he was a blues man and didn't feel like doing another style. His blues are unparalleled by anyone else. I'm sure Stevie could have mastered Rock or something like that, but why should he? He is one of the best blues men ever. Stevie is not unidimensional, but he had his own style he prefered. Those are two different things.

Panglos
+deathtokoalas It wasn't me who said "best guitar player;" I responded to the claim, and denied it. So "my error" is your error. I agree that it's ridiculous to rank artists as if art is competitive. The great thing about art is that, unlike sports, it's all positive and not a zero-sum game: you get A and B, not A or B.

But I have to differ about the point about SRV being self taught (as if that makes him unique) and a "feel" guitarist. The ability to emote is IMO the best attribute of a guitarist. I think we agree on that. But there gets to be a point at which it's too much, where the player represents the out-of-control sort. The type of trailer-dwelling person who loses his cool and beats his wife/girlfriend--sure he's unusually expressive, but we don't count that as being expressive in a way that we admire. And that's the kind of person SRV and his music remind me of.

There are lots of guitarists who have so much "feel" they can--and do--bring tears to my eyes. For the right reasons. I can do without SRV.

Joris van Dijk
+Panglos But even if you keep the "feel" (From which I think SRV has the best blues feeling, but that's an opinion matter) aspect out of sight and just take a pure look at his technics, you can't deny that SRV was technically one of the best, he always hit the right notes at the right time, he has extremely quick hands and the songs are greatly constructed. Even if you put the "feel" away you can say is one of the best.

Panglos
+Joris van Dijk Using the video here as an example (and it's one of many), it sounds really sloppy to me. Not tight at all, hardly "hitting the right notes at the right time."

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. I love Albert Collins' style, for example, even as I refer to his playing as "bad hair day guitar." Mistakes—and recovery from them—are sometimes my absolute favorite parts of blues solos (witness Johnny Winter at about 4:44 in Third Degree). It's like the charred bits in a plate of barbecue.

But somehow SRV just doesn't do it for me. It's more like meat that's not cooked exactly to my liking, and prepared much the same way every time.

I'm going to have to get off this topic. It's not my purpose to denigrate someone on a site/video dedicated to him. I only wanted to offer a differing opinion to a specific post. I'm happy for you that you get enjoyment from SRV that I don't get. Fortunately for me (and all of us), there are plenty of other places to get pleasure from blues players, and music in general!

Joris van Dijk
+Panglos Well after all music is all about opinions, so I respect yours, evenhough I don't agree with you. And just as you say there a plenty of other nice blues players and some of them we probably like both, was a nice discussion and enjoy the blues!

deathtokoalas
yeah. srv was not a technically gifted guitar player. that's why i brought in the di meola example. if you want to judge guitarists on that scale, you need to be looking into jazz and prog (and, to a much lesser extent, metal). srv sounds like an amateur in comparison to zappa, keneally, mclaughlin, holdsworth, etc. but it's a meaningless comparison to make because they're not playing the same instrument.

that being said, i don't understand how somebody could deny the raw emotional power of his playing and still manage to breathe on a regular basis.

Joris van Dijk
+deathtokoalas I don't entirely agree with you, SRV was also technically a good musician.

deathtokoalas
+Joris van Dijk stevie only really knew how to play pentatonic blues. he then got really good at it by practicing playing the same patterns over and over. so, he sounds fast, but there's no technical understanding of music underlying the sound. if you take him out of that context, he's entirely lost. he made the most of it, though - in the same way that a one-note solo can often be more powerful than a barrage of notes. really, i'd argue that it's his slower pieces where he really wails.

yeah, these things are freaky.

my grade 5/6 teacher (i went to a very small elementary school that had one split 5/6 class with the same teacher both years) had a thing for playing old time radio. we got to listen to the original war of the worlds and a bunch of other things. one of them was a story of fire ants advancing on a village in south america from a first person perspective, and the carnage that ensued when they ravaged it. that's something i won't forget....it was both educational and scary as fuck....

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bizarre-fire-ants-create-rafts-survive