February 17, 2011

On Arcade Fire and “Never Heard of It”

“Never heard of it”: This has been the natural and traditional response of all sorts of ordinary American humans to all sorts of phenomena. It’s not really about knowledge or information. It’s an argument, for the most part, and a faintly aggressive one — a way of insisting that what you pay attention to really does define the world. What you’ve heard of is real, and everything else is marginal. The center holds, and you are that center. You are normal and aware, and not just some tiny atomized entity that can only hope to know one tiny corner of the universe.

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posted by in anger, found, this is why we can't have nice things, twitter | * | 17 comments 

comments

  1. Amanda Mae Meyncke on February 17th, 2011 at 3:28 pm

    “But of course there’s also the fact that, for a whole lot of listeners, Arcade Fire is the kind of band that’s too ubiquitous — the band backed by a huge, boring critical consensus, the middlebrow-crossover NPR darlings, the bland and tiresome more-of-the-same act that already plays Madison Square Garden and shows up on Saturday Night Live. Given that Who Is Arcade Fire appears on Tumblr, you assume that whoever put it together comes from something like that world, the online post-collegiate indie sphere where Arcade Fire might be one of the least interesting bands you could know about.”

  2. Sheila Ryan on February 17th, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    I confess I made (light) sport of a friend for her confessional post-Grammy FB post, the gist of which was “never heard of them I must really be out of it want to hear more.” Said, “Hey, at least you’re not among the haters being pilloried on Tumblr.”

    But I’m not sure why I even bothered, as I rate Arcade Fire among the crowded ranks of my take-em-or-leave-em artists.

    It kind of troubles me that I felt moved to say anything at all.

    On the other hand, I told my friend I liked it that she said the Grammy show featured too many aliens and not enough Muppets and that Mick Jagger looks like a chicken.

  3. Lex A on February 17th, 2011 at 4:09 pm

    Funny enough when I saw them perform on the Grammy’s I thought it was because they were so mainstream. I can’t believe people hadn’t heard of them already.

  4. Amanda Mae Meyncke on February 17th, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    Lex! Let’s go get sodas at the Redhook Ikea.

  5. Joel Bernstein on February 17th, 2011 at 5:15 pm

    I’d respond, but I’ve never heard of any of you

  6. Andrew Simone on February 17th, 2011 at 10:37 pm

    YES.

  7. Luke Neff on February 18th, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    Know who Arcade Fire is.

  8. Dave Vogt on February 18th, 2011 at 3:34 pm

    I was gonna say “What are the Grammy’s? Never heard of ‘em,” but Joel already topped that.

  9. Sheila Ryan on February 18th, 2011 at 3:35 pm

    What’s a gramophone?

  10. Carole Corlew on February 18th, 2011 at 4:00 pm

    What’s a phone?

  11. Sheila Ryan on February 18th, 2011 at 4:05 pm

    Are those Jeopardy answer-questions? Are they beyond the ken of Watson?

  12. Luke Neff on February 18th, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    I showed a few minutes of Watson dominating us humans to my students yesterday. We had a nice chat about his/its abilities. At one point during the discussion, I had the thought that most of what happens on Clusterflock would not compute with Watson until his/its algorithms advanced significantly.

  13. Sheila Ryan on February 18th, 2011 at 4:15 pm

    Luke, I’ve been thinking of challenging Watson to locate items in the clusterflock archives.

  14. Luke Neff on February 18th, 2011 at 4:20 pm

    Maybe IBM will loan Watson out for the weekend to play on Clusterflock. If so, I think it’s likely that he/it (he? it?) would spend most of the time dropping “also, fish poop” into the comments of every post.

  15. Joel Bernstein on February 18th, 2011 at 4:21 pm

    Hey, that’s my job

  16. Sheila Ryan on February 18th, 2011 at 4:25 pm

    Joel, you need to work on delivering “Also, fish poop” in a Watsonesque monotone.

  17. Sheila Ryan on February 18th, 2011 at 4:28 pm

    Tomorrow night I’m joining a group of Chicago friends for a birthday dinner. One of the friends was on Jeopardy some years back.

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