Everything Now by Arcade Fire? More like Nothing New by Dumpster Fire! 

 

Okay, now that we have that out of the way. My friend Lilywater told me it was a dumb joke, but she’s super post-humor and so I wouldn’t expect her to get it. 

 

Anyway, it’s everybody’s favorite “indie” band back with another “indie” album. Ugh. I put the words “indie” in quotes because the eighteen people who make up Arcade Fire are actually responsible for killing indie and the reason my group of friends call ourselves something we don’t tell anyone because we don’t want it to be commandeered by some dumb band with a vendetta against capitalism. 

 

That’s right: tune into Everything Now for Arcade Fire’s latest pseudo-philosophy, which would sound great if it was coming from a middle schooler who watched a John Green video on Marxism and made this as his final poetry project for the year before accepting that working for a local dairy farm is as good as it gets for those of us who want to live above the economy and this nation’s corrupt moral system. Spare me the theories, emo boy. 

 

And look, I’m as post-post-capitalist as they come, but I’m also post-truth and post-music, so I’d much rather watch a four-hour silent arthouse film of someone burning their possessions than hear the twenty-three people in Arcade Fire mumble about how much they hate iPhones to a beat mastered for iTunes. 

 

In the middle of them pretending to hate capitalism, these squares go so far as to perform the album on Apple Music with some fake-not-fake-fake-again dress code like a high school teen throwing her first party and flubbing the instructional mass text. I’m not coming, Cindy, and not just because I’m not invited. 

 

Let’s get down to it: Arcade Fire fans think they’re soooooooooo cool. And people who aren’t Arcade Fire fans don’t have to pretend. We know we’re cool, but are actually post-cool-pre-tight-unclear-on-the-meaning-of-lit-and-to-be-honest-swag-too. We stopped hating Nickelback because they were an easy target, and realized that by hating Arcade Fire we were proving to the world that we hate that which we most fear is in ourselves. 

 

Because to be honest, thirty of my friends and I rent out a warehouse in a bad part of town and play music really raucously in hopes that someone will find some sort of hopeful message in our music. I don’t know. I guess we just want to bring something into the world that isn’t negative or mean and just adds a little light to the day for kids who are disillusioned with this nation’s false promises. To quote a band we really hate, “I know a place where no cars go.” We want to be that place for kids who don’t want to live with everything n—er, I mean, all of the things presently. 

 

So, yeah. Zero out of ten stars. This band sucks. 

 

 

 

This article was written by Ben Taylor, who is not an indignant hipster, but who knows? Follow him for more on Twitter @therealbenshady.