Arcade Fire's The Suburbs at the Grammys

Aside from all the regular buzz of the Grammys (namely Lady Gaga being weird and everyone hating Justin Bieber), something pretty unique happened this year at the award ceremony. If you haven't heard yet, my #2 pick of 2010, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, took home the Best Album of the Year award last night at the Grammy's. And while the press wrote the pick off as an upset of the mainstream music world, the win is actually a poignant example of the direction of the music industry. The Grammy's have for so long been a celebration of the pop spectacle and fashion where the quality of the music is a mere side note. The award ceremony seems to stand in stark contrast to the Academy Awards ceremony, where quality, relevance, and artistry are sought after.

Musicians and bands have been known for not attending the award ceremony or criticizing it on the basis of it being a blatant "promotion for the music industry". It was as if everyone knew what the Grammy's were really all about and that was perfectly okay. And while this all may be completely true, this year at the Grammy's something unexpected happened and just about everyone was happy about it. Kanye West cheered safely from his tweet feed, proclaiming Arcade Fire's victory as being a win for "us", or the "true artist". Yet Kanye may be on to something, as picking The Arcade Fire, a band that gets almost no radio plays and exists on an independent label, over the likes of Eminem and Katy Perry, is saying something about the direction in which the award show wants to head.

But even more so, Arcade Fire's victory is a culmination of indie rock's invasion of the mainstream. The genre has been so perfectly assimilated that Arcade Fire doesn't even need to make the jump to a major label to hit #1 on Billboard America, play sold out shows at the Madison Square Garden, or win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year. Even if the Grammy was just a lip service toward actually caring about music, its a brave step in a new direction. Thanks to the internet and the music industry's digitalization, people care more about music and the quality of music today than they ever have before and its about time our award shows start recognizing that. Congratulations Arcade Fire!

Barbara Streisand can hardly believe it:

#2. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Arcade Fire isn't really into being subtle. Everything from their first two albums, the concepts, the amount of people they put on stage, the soaring vocals, the arrangements, just screamed big. Back in 2004, when their first album Funeral was released, it wasn't exactly the thing to do in the indie world. But after taking the world by storm, Arcade Fire now has a host of clones, admirers in the mainstream (John Legend anybody?), and a pervasive influence in culture that has even made their newest album shoot to #1 in Billboard America. But for all the attention that the album has gotten, I would say that although the conceptual material of The Suburbs is take-on-the-world big in typical Arcade Fire style, the way they go about it is surprisingly not. The Suburbs is 16 pop tracks with incredibly straightforward structures and arrangements compared to the two-part opuses of Funeral or the busy production of Neon Bible. Many of the songs also lack the emotional climaxes in each song that are so familiar to Arcade Fire fans and instead replaces them with an unsettling steadiness that no doubt contributes to the themes of the songs. As frontman Win Butler has stated, the album is "neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs - it's a letter from the suburbs", and fits into that unique scheme pretty consistently.

As Win and Regine sing about riding bikes down suburban streets, chasing the American dream up the corporate ladder, wasting time, being in punk rock bands, and working meaningless jobs, The Suburbs becomes an incredibly meaningful reflection on what it means to be a generation of people who live and die in the sprawling world of cul-de-sacs and shopping malls. Butler's stories seem to explore a variety of generations' experiences with suburban life from the Don Draper business man in "Modern Man" to a teenager's rebellion and subculture in "Suburban War", and even an old, cynical man's grumblings about technology in "We Used To Wait". The way Arcade Fire translates these stories musically is even more exciting though. By referencing different musical styles, they give each of these songs a setting and even reference particular decades. One of the best examples of this is "City With No Children", a song about living underground in fear of world war where they brilliantly reference classic Springsteen rock. In other parts of the album they do a punk rock song ("Month of May"), a disco-pop song ("Sprawl II"), and even a modern pop-rock song ("Modern Man"). I love the way they use the musical references for more than just nostalgia and instead pull meaning out of the style to compliment their lyrical insights.

Upon my first listening of the album, I thought it lacked variation and was a bit unorganized. But the structure and organization of the record really do play an integral part in the success of the album, which is laid out as two records with four songs on each side. Organized in this way, the flow of the album totally works as the pace picks up toward the end of each record (in "Half Light II" and "Sprawl II"). In some ways, The Suburbs feels like the conceptual antithesis of Funeral. Where Funeral was full of huge communal moments where it felt as if the whole word were singing alongside Butler, in The Suburbs we find those moments replaced with lonely falsettos and hollow reverbs. In terms of consistent songwriting and unparalleled overall success, The Suburbs also picks up where Funeral left off. Resonating with an entire generation trying to understand their suburban upbringing, it is the most complete and consistent conceptual album of the year.