Arcade Fire’s New Orleans Years
Arcade Fire’s Pink Elephant has come and gone with little more than a half-hearted Saturday Night Live appearance to show for it. Pink Elephant sank with mediocre reviews exemplified by Neil Z. Yeung’s at AllMusic. He wrote that it “feels like an album Arcade Fire ‘had to’ make, one that addresses a very public period of the band’s history without getting too deep (or deep enough at all) into the matter, like they just want everyone to forget about it and move on to the inevitable next album cycle.”
It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Arcade Fire was a national story and Win Butler and Regine Chassagne made it a New Orleans story by moving here. As NOLA.com’s Keith Spera put it, “After Arcade Fire concluded a tour at the 2014 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Butler and Chassagne essentially never left.” How did they go from one of the more promising bands to an also-ran on this album cycle?
Really, the story starts in 2011 when Arcade Fire played Jazz Fest for the first time, an occasion capped by Cyndi Lauper joining them onstage to play “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” That booking, that guest spot, and their Grammy Album of the Year win for The Suburbs seemed to signal that Arcade Fire could be the rare breakthrough band that could hang on to its indie aesthetics and reach a larger audience.
Their Jazz Fest experience and South Louisiana’s Creole culture enticed them to record 2013’s Reflektor at Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana, where they embraced dance music more directly than ever before. Butler and Chassagne solidified their place in the New Orleans story in January of 2016 when they teamed with Preservation Hall to present a second line for the recently deceased David Bowie.
As a music event, it was so-so. Butler’s voice could barely be heard over the blare of a brass band as he sang “Heroes” through a megaphone, and if Chassagne’s keytar was plugged into an amp, no one knew but her. Still, the French Quarter was packed with Bowie fans, many dressed in honor of their favorite Bowie incarnations, and Butler and Chassagne found themselves at the center of a cultural conversation about second lines, funereal parades, and who should throw them or be celebrated by them.
That event made national news, but while Arcade Fire’s name had currency, it wasn’t what it once was. The indie rock marketplace has been notorious for falling in love with bands before dumping them at the first sign of growth—just ask New Orleans’ Generationals—and by 2016 Arcade Fire were 12 years past their debut, Funeral, and five since they won the Grammy. Instead of being the band with the best of the indie and mainstream music worlds, they’d damaged their cred without broadening their reach.
That year, they closed the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience with an excellent set that I’d argue came a close second to a warm-up gig the night before at Second Line Stages. It included songs they were working on for Everything Now, as well as album cuts they rarely performed. That show demonstrated that Arcade Fire had more good songs than their concerts had room for, and they were a genuinely exciting musical force when engaged with songs that had not been thoroughly road-tested for maximum audience appeal. That said, the optimistic, heartfelt surge of the Voodoo show justified the band’s reputation as Arcade Fire and its audience came together in an exhilarating, communal moment.
New Orleans as a whole never entirely embraced them, though. The city has long been ambivalent about rock stars in its midst, particularly ones that don’t play the clubs or jump onstage with a friend, even if that’s not how their music or careers operate. Butler became better known for being a New Orleans Pelicans fan than for his music, and when Arcade Fire played the UNO Lakefront Arena on the Everything Now tour, the venue was half-full.
The show itself felt triumphant and genuine. Arcade Fire’s best songs dramatize growing up with the nagging feeling that you’ve been cheated, that the music and events that shaped your life happened somewhere else and you missed it. Their shows created a sense of community and significance as the best moments said you’re not alone in feeling that loss, and the solidarity in those moments created its own positive energy.
The attendance, though, said that the band had problems. The UNO Lakefront Arena was half-full, at least partly due to the elaborate marketing plan for Everything Now that vilified the online world that once championed Arcade Fire. The band deserved credit for a creative, cheeky way of drawing attention to the album, but jokes have never been Butler or Chassagne’s strength, so the roll-out didn’t land well.
It didn’t help that Arcade Fire came to be perceived as Butler and Chassagne, even though the rest of the band added needed, unruly dimensions to their otherwise deliberate presentation. To be fair, that perception may have come from the media and others dealing with Butler and Chassagne, but Everything Now was recorded in their home studio in New Orleans, which gave fans reason to wonder about the power balance in the band.
In many ways, the story to that point was predictable. Eventually, bands just don’t have the cultural currency they once had, and they rarely recognize that or accept it with grace. But in 2022 things got worse. According to a Pitchfork story by Marc Hogan, “Three women made allegations of sexual interactions with Butler that they came to feel were inappropriate given the gaps in age, power dynamics, and context in which they occurred. All three women were devoted Arcade Fire fans between the ages of 18 and 23 at the start of their interactions with Butler, which took place during overlapping periods from 2016 to 2020, when he was between 36 and 39. A fourth person, who is gender-fluid and uses they/them pronouns, claims that Butler sexually assaulted them twice in 2015, when they were 21 and he was 34.”
Butler responded to the allegations in a statement, writing, “I have had consensual relationships outside of my marriage…. The majority of these relationships were short lived, and my wife is aware–our marriage has, in the past, been more unconventional than some. I have connected with people in person, at shows, and through social media, and I have shared messages of which I am not proud. Most importantly, every single one of these interactions has been mutual and always between consenting adults. It is deeply revisionist, and frankly just wrong, for anyone to suggest otherwise.”
He continued, “While these relationships were all consensual, I am very sorry to anyone who I have hurt with my behavior. Life is filled with tremendous pain and error, and I never want to be part of causing someone else’s pain.”
These are the events Yeung referred to in the AllMusic review of Pink Elephant, and they’re deal-breakers on many levels. There are the obvious issues about how consensual a relationship can be considering the dynamics at play, but they also gave fans a reason to call Arcade Fire’s history into question. As The Suburbs made clear, part of Butler’s appeal was his ability to speak to young people who felt cheated by their well-meant upbringings in safe, culturally banal urban sprawl. Fans connected to him as one of them and felt like they and their experiences were not only seen but brought to exuberant life by the band onstage. Butler’s actions, however, showed him to be no different from the misogynistic rock stars of previous eras.
The Arcade Fire that people cared about shared the stage with David Byrne and St. Vincent when they played SNL50: The Homecoming Concert at Radio City Music Hall three months before their SNL appearance.
Once again, they played David Bowie’s “Heroes,” and played the song with absolute commitment. Butler’s grin bordered on unnatural while Byrne and St. Vincent performed, and he sang his verse with manic excitement. He held his acoustic guitar over his head one minute, then fell to his knees the next, moving without connection to the rhythm or the lyric. Butler and Arcade Fire have made grand gestures their home space, but his performance looked like a self-conscious demonstration of enthusiasm and not a physical extension of the music.
Maybe he was just really, really excited to play that song in that venue with those people and that audience, particularly after the band’s last few years. Maybe he was internally thanking his lucky stars that producer Lorne Michaels gave him the spotlight despite the allegations, and maybe he thought about how lucky he is that America is still slow to hold men accountable for their actions. And maybe he knew that Pink Elephant was coming, and that moments like that one might soon be in short supply.
Photo by Josh Brasted: Win Butler leads a second line for David Bowie on January 16, 2016
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