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BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Guided by (Many, Many) Voices
NYTimes.com
A Very Crowded House
Ten minutes before Broken Social Scene was due to go onstage, Kevin Drew, co-founder and lead singer of the Toronto band, had his hands up on the wall. He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie. A woman in silver boots briefly massaged his shoulders. Nearby stood her boyfriend, Brendan Canning, who founded Broken Social Scene with Drew, his strawberry blond hair dangling toward the floor as he tried to touch his toes. Sliding closer to Canning, the band's soft-faced drummer, Justin Peroff, gave him an assist, as Leslie Feist, an occasional singer with BSS, brushed past. "Feist-y!" Drew squealed and hugged her. Her own chanteusey album, "Let It Die," had just gone gold in Canada and Europe.
Everyone was jammed together in the windowless, cluttered basement of an Ontario college auditorium, as band members stretched out or kneaded one another's backs or just sat drinking beers in chairs. A co-owner of the band's three-year-old label, Arts & Crafts, Jeffrey Remedios, was keeping up morale, checking in with the various musicians who make up the band and murmuring how great their individual work was. It was the first local show of Broken Social Scene's three-month world tour.
To call BSS a "band" is to simplify matters drastically. It's more like a network, or, as Emily Haines, a sometime BSS'er and lead singer of the Toronto band Metric, put it, "somewhere between a tribe and a cult." Most of the members of BSS are also members of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. The very name connotes what all the artists on the label have in common: they are lo-fi, heartfelt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly interlinked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making session. The musicians play on one another's CD's (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musicians on a given track depending on who shows up or what's needed for a particular song), a level of cooperation and organization unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slogan above the bar code on BSS's most recent CD: "break all codes." Perhaps it helps — or maybe it hurts — that a few of them have also slept together, though the BSS'ers tend to be secretive about whom, when and why.
Musically, you could say that Toronto has become a nicer but less aesthetically coherent version of Seattle in the early days of grunge. Broken Social Scene is Toronto's Nirvana, without — so far — the troubled-rock-star antics or the anomie and with a social agenda that puts collective music making above individual success. The second album, "You Forgot It in People," is dedicated to "friends, families and loves."
"We made a lot of decisions to help ourselves be grounded," Drew explained to me. "The whole band is based on people who are closely connected, metaphysically. People with their hearts on their sleeves." If it all sounds hopelessly earnest — another emo band bent on saving one little corner of the world — it isn't, or not quite. BSS has forged what one critic called "endlessly replayable, perfect pop" out of musical sources that couldn't be more disparate. Sometimes Broken Social Scene sounds like Lawrence Welk crossed with the Replacements, with a little Brian Eno in the mix; sometimes it sounds a bit like Pavement; sometimes it sounds more like U2, but with Jane Birkin on lead vocals. In being united every way except sonically, BSS is a lot like the Toronto music scene itself, which has given birth to the florid anti-folk of the Hidden Cameras, the mock angry rock of Peaches, the alt-country of Royal City (now defunct). Musically, none of these bands resemble one another. What they do have in common is a warm emotional timbre and a stress on communality.
BSS is nothing if not the warmest, most community-oriented of them all, to a degree that makes you wonder if the band isn't pushing the family-on-Ecstasy-vibe just a little too far. Onstage, BSS welcomes all comers. When the band played in Japan, a kid in the audience showed up with drumsticks, and BSS let him play. In New York, at the beginning of the 2006 tour, BSS invited a film producer and a graduate student of French intellectual history to join them. That meant there were 25 people backstage, including two drummers and six horn players, many of whom had been in the same band class in junior high school. During the group's three shows in New York last month, there were so many "band members" backstage that there was barely enough room to move. On one of the nights I caught up with them, Haines from Metric, clad in a lubricious black T-shirt dress, her blond hair perfectly mussed, held hands backstage with two other girls, satellite members of the collective, as they talked emphatically about a Charlton Heston movie from the 1970's. Charles Spearin, a Buddhist BSS'er, stood placidly to one side — he was thinking about his idea for an indie-rock activist project tentatively called Broken Social Worker. Even the band's 43-year-old quasi-Socialist producer, Dave Newfeld, was on hand, gearing up to play with the band and eagerly sharing his extensive theories about the secret malfeasance of American corporations.
The practice of having a kind of cabinet made up of different Toronto bands all in one performance is part of the BSS credo, and it is also the credo of Toronto's independent music. Onstage at BSS shows, Drew tends to introduce the members of the collective by announcing the other Toronto bands they are part of, which produces the strange effect of watching an all-star concert that has come together for a fund-raiser — all sublimated artistic ego.
"It's about what we think is right," Drew says. "I've never made music without friends — they are my security blanket. Playing with friends is who we are."
II. Why Labels Do Matter
Toronto's alternative-rock scene is a place where the sweetly familial and weirdly collective rub up against the traditional markers of stardom. BSS is the largest and the most media-ready of the Toronto bands, but it is far from the only band committed to a Toronto-bred arty idealism, known to some as Torontopia. Jonny Dovercourt, a 32-year-old local rock musician and impresario, and his friend Steven Kado, a musician with an interest in hipsterish pursuits like urban planning, coined the term in 2002 to help give utopian ballast to the city's sprawling but idealistic music community. Dovercourt is so committed to Toronto that he adopted one of its street names, Dovercourt, as his last name; his real name is Jonathan Bunce.
I met Dovercourt for a pint at a sports bar, the Rhino. Sitting beneath the large rhino head mounted above the bar, Dovercourt explained that starting in the late 80's, there was a huge roster of local bands, but there was no single Toronto sound. "These were bands struggling in obscurity and were unique from each other," he said. From surfer to punk, they helped lay the groundwork for the Canadian wave that today has a worldwide audience.
Dovercourt has a penchant for arriving at rock clubs and bars with books by the famed urban critic Jane Jacobs, who has made Toronto her home for nearly 40 years. He is a public-space enthusiast intent on defending it from corporate forces and on keeping it open to the improvisational and the unexpected. In his effort to advance Toronto's fortunes, Dovercourt started a weekly music series called Wavelength, held at bars like Ted's Wrecking Yard and Sneaky Dee's. The indie-popular Constantines, which plays a kind of blue-eyed-soul-punk, had its breakout show at Wavelength, which is often described as the center of the Toronto scene and its incubator. In the past six years, hundreds of bands have played in the series, including BSS, Dovercourt's Republic of Safety, Ninja High School, the FemBots and the influential CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), an improv music co-op featuring the filmmaker Michael Snow. On a typical night, two or three bands, almost always local and encompassing various genres, attract audiences of up to 200. This month, Wavelength had its 300th show.
Just as the L.A. punk scene circulated around the SST label and the early grunge scene sprang from and adhered to the Sub Pop label and K Records in Olympia, Wash., the Toronto scene has coalesced around a few key labels. The 25-year-old Kado, who has joined or started more than 10 different bands, started his own extremely independent music label, Blocks Recording Club, in 2003. Blocks now puts out records by local bands at a phenomenal pace — 30 CD's in two and a half years. The most acclaimed is Final Fantasy, which sold 7,000 copies of its last album, a string-heavy CD with full band arrangements, which Kado describes as "orchestral loner music." Unlike A&C, Blocks is a cooperative — CD's are packaged by hand — that divvies up profits between members and musicians. But compared with the even more D.I.Y. Toronto label Consumption Records — which dubs its new releases on recycled tapes — even Kado falls short. Kado may be aware that he doesn't achieve the recorded-on-a-boom-box-and-available-for-barter standard of Consumption — he has a distributor, after all — but he still won't call his label a label. To him, the term "recording club" means what it says. "We do what that community wants done," he explained.
Doing what the community wants done weighed on Drew's mind too, when he was first getting BSS and Arts & Crafts off the ground. But his model was another collectivist music label, Montreal's Constellation Records. Founded in 1997, Constellation is anti-corporate in both its music — it releases the work of Godspeed You!, Black Emperor and Do Make Say Think (two of whose members are in BSS) — and in its merchandising, refusing to sell to corporate chains like HMV. Constellation is also given to issuing polemics about the compromised nature of the music industry: "We have attempted to evolve one possible model for the recovery of an independent music ethic, hoping to summon some real sense of indie rock in spite of its reduction to a branded slogan through corporate co-optation."
For all their commitment to the same general principles, the members of BSS see themselves as being more about emotions than politics. For one thing, Arts & Crafts doesn't reject the major-label business model entirely. For another, says Drew, BSS isn't explicitly political. "Our politics are about human beings — we want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty," he says. "But our records are at HMV and Virgin."
Like many indie labels today, Arts & Crafts both borrows from and rejects the culture of major labels. Jeffrey Remedios and Daniel Cutler, co-owners of the label with Drew, are both former EMI employees who were attracted to the collective feel of the Toronto music scene starting at the end of the 1990's. Remedios met Drew through Brendan Canning, and they became roommates. At the time, Drew was playing in the band K.C. Accidental. Soon, Canning and Drew started Broken Social Scene with the drummer Charles Spearin. They recorded a CD with Paper Bag Records.
"They'd have brand-new material for each show, and the shows became really something," said Remedios, a polished, affable man of 30, with a helmet of black hair and fashionably fraying clothes. "It was the first time I ever felt that level of art coming from the neighborhood." That was around 2000. "It was then that me and Kevin and Daniel had this idea for Arts & Crafts." Remedios continued. "I named it Arts & Crafts as I was trying to show that we mixed art and commerce, and that commerce was going to hold up its end of the promise. I had witnessed the machine," he said, referring to his years at EMI. "I wanted to rebel well."
For Michael Barclay, an author of "Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance," the collective bent of Arts & Crafts and the Toronto music scene has less to do with North American D.I.Y. culture than with a distinctly Canadian temperament and music history. "It's textbook Canadian identity politics — the expression of individual will through community," Barclay says. Above all, Barclay delights in the Toronto music scene's willingness not to take itself too seriously. BSS, he says, is willing to be imperfect: "It's like a workshop, it's a band in progress."
III. All in the Family
Of course, Broken Social Scene didn't invent the music collective: creative collectives in general have a long history. And the last decade has seen an unusual spike in their numbers. In Italy, there is the Situationist- and Archigram-influenced Italian architecture collective Stalker (named after the Tarkovsky film), which stages events in abandoned urban spaces. In England, there's Picture Farm, a British film collective of writers, directors, producers and actors, which makes both documentaries and features. In New York, there is the performance-art fashion label threeasfour (formerly asfour), known for its early Cirque du Soleil-style fashion shows and later for its equally spectacular intrafamily brawls. New York's art galleries have also been twisting the meaning of the term "group show," with exhibitions like Scott Hug's 2003 show at John Connelly Presents, which featured 70 artists collaborating on a "teenage rebel" bedroom.
In Toronto, the collective-music scene has been motivated almost equally by the desire to engage in a cool cultural maneuver as by the practical pressures of limited funds. "The collective spirit happened as much out of necessity as ethics," Dovercourt says. "Most people in the music scene don't like to compete with each other. There never has been much money, so people just cram into the recording studio and cooperate in order to survive."
Walking around Toronto with Drew, it was easy to see what Dovercourt meant. People in Toronto tend to say hello to Drew. They also tend to let him in free at clubs. Strangers offer him unsolicited hugs. So do audience members at shows he plays. Sometimes he gets down into the crowd at a show and hugs as many people as he can manage.
One cold evening as we made our way down Queen Street, Drew seemed to delight in his role as the unofficial mayor of Toronto. He said hello to the hostess and several of the patrons at a local Italian restaurant. He clutched arms with the bartender of his favorite local bar, the Communist's Daughter. A young woman, whom Drew had met once in passing, stopped him and asked him to call her cousin, a victim of a random shooting, who had just come out of a coma. He called the cousin. In between encounters, he rang up a few musician friends to tell them how great their show was and to offer other words of alt-mayoral succor.
When we finally reached one of the city's older rock clubs, the Horseshoe, Drew made his way through the crowd, wrapping his arms around a local music critic, sundry music fans and the heavily pierced co-founder of the recently defunct Toronto indie label, Three Gut, who had a button affixed to her lapel that read, "My Other Girlfriend Is a Faggot."
Until recently, Drew lived within walking distance of the Horseshoe, in a splendidly filthy room that he calls "a nest of destruction," where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong. Drew isn't the only one of his collective to live with a lack of pretensions. Leslie Feist, who sings with BSS but whose solo career has recently taken off, has a home in Paris, a fan base of squealing teenage girls and the look of an art-house film heroine, but she has seemingly adopted few rock-star (or even upscale) habits. When I caught up with her, she was eating fried fish cakes she'd purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation.
It's not just the new crop of Toronto rock musicians who are perched between low-rent communal living and glossy stardom. To some extent it is the city as well. It was gentrification — in the form of two boutique hotels — that, paradoxically, gave the bands new places to play. In 2004 and 2005, two once-grand railroad-era hotels that had become flophouses were completely renovated; a small number of the neighborhood's truly marginal inhabitants, not the imitatively marginal hipsters, still hover around their doors. The Drake Hotel sponsors an artist in residence, hotelwide art installations and even a games night (Monopoly! Scrabble! Exquisite Corpse!). At the Gladstone, just two blocks away, Kado set up a portable recording studio in a hotel room and gave anyone — even bands newly minted on the spot — an hour to create an album free of charge.
IV. When the Collective Spirit Is Not Enough
Thanks to Arts & Crafts (and the labels that put out the work of other band members), Broken Social Scene can stay committed to the notion of being a sprawling, all-inclusive band, even when the reality is often less harmonious. Just getting 11 or more band members into a recording studio is virtually impossible. For now, musicians go in one or two at a time to record individual parts. Touring with such a large crew presents another set of problems. It is expensive and can lead to situations like guest lists that contain 200 names (recently, BSS decided to start charging guests and giving the proceeds to charity). There is also the matter of distributing royalties and fees as fairly as possible. A core group of seven BSS'ers are paid equally when touring. Additional musicians who show up irregularly, BSS satellite players, are paid less for their work. And while each songwriter on a BSS album is paid for his or her contribution to a song, the musicians are compensated according to how many songs they sang or played on. "We wouldn't survive in a major label," Drew explained to me. "We took our art-nerd vows, we took this concept. . .," he said and paused. Then he held up his arm. I could see that the tattoo on his wrist read, "Save Us," which he quickly covered with his hand, as if embarrassed.
In keeping with its "art-nerd vows," the band claims to have said no, on ethical grounds, to potential ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard. Remedios said that the band objected to the products that its music would be selling rather than to the commercialism itself.
"We weren't comfortable with endorsing a gas-guzzling postmilitary vehicle," Remedios says. "We asked ourselves whether we would do a commercial with Best Buy, and we said no. We asked ourselves whether would we sell our music at Best Buy, and we said yes."
Drew put it slightly differently: "When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you. But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial."
Drew may continue to stick to the collective line — compromise only for the greater good — but Remedios seems willing to consider other options. According to Remedios, the band actually came close to selling its music for a mobile-phone ring tone, but there were, he says, "timing issues."
Increasingly, BSS's commercial success rubs uncomfortably against its collective ideals. According to Arts & Crafts, BSS sold 130,000 copies of its second album, "You Forgot It in People," right off the bat, and around 115,000 copies of the new CD, "Broken Social Scene." Not large numbers for a major rock group but large numbers for a group of musicians who for years had no profits to split at all. BSS's indie cachet can at times seem a little precarious. Nowadays the band plays big concert halls and clubs throughout North America and Europe. BSS just completed a tour on a bus outfitted with beds and flat-screen televisions; it also took along a masseuse. And though the band has refused to allow its music to be used as ad jingles, it has aggressively sought out television and film licensing deals. Songs have appeared on the far-from-collectivist television shows "The O.C.," "Queer as Folk" and "The L Word." It's these commercial concessions, along with the Toronto scene's internecine battles over artistic purity, that have led some Toronto critics and musicians to suggest that BSS is neither truly collective nor independent.
"A&C rotates around BSS, and the Blocks Recording Club catalog is more diverse — A&C has distribution in Canada from EMI that gives it promotional muscle, while Blocks is run as a cooperative and reflects the wider diversity of the local music scene," Dovercourt explains. Carl Wilson, a music critic for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, calls Blocks "one of the most committed D.I.Y. labels in North America." Kado tells me that what makes Blocks so different from, say, A&C, is that although A&C is an independent, there's little difference structurally between it and a major label. "A&C is just a label more in touch with the structure of contemporary capitalism than most," Kado says. "They outsource promotion. They are a slick small organization that is a response to the record industry being doomed. I wish they would own up to be being a small business, with a corporate structure. Words like 'collective' are thrown around so easily. Do you work with your friends and are co-owners with them or do you mediate between them and a corporate distribution company for your friends?" Kado was also quick to point out that since the bands are on tour most of the time, they are "not part of the social community. I never see them on the scene."
BSS'ers admit they rarely show up for Wavelength anymore. And even some of those inside BSS have their doubts about how collective an enterprise BSS really is. As the band's guitar player, Andrew Whiteman, told me over his favorite drink, "North American sangria, or orange juice and bad red wine," the new BSS record was Drew's CD. The CD captured Drew's "intimacy, his ambience, his nervous breakdown," he said, in a half-joking tone. At 38, Whiteman is the oldest member of the band, slight, with long hair and a pretty-boy face that has been complicated by a crosshatching of scars from a car accident. He is also the most intellectual and arguably the most talented member of the band — his inspirations include Ethiopian music, the poet William Blake and the San Francisco cult poet Jack Spicer (he likes to repeat Spicer's dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me"). In his sparsely furnished apartment, the attic room of a house owned by a friend, he played some new songs by his band, Apostle of Hustle, on his home-recording equipment: the music was mysterious and densely layered, the lyrics were allusive and playful and as usual, his guitar work was lush, combining numerous world-music influences. But it was also difficult fare.
For Whiteman and some other members of BSS, the music collective is a contradictory enterprise. On the one hand, BSS is true to the communitarian effort, generously sharing the spotlight with satellite bands and musician friends — as good as the last Apostle of Hustle CD "Folkloric Feel" was, without Whiteman's BSS and Arts & Crafts affiliation, it would most likely have sold fewer than the 8,500 it has sold so far. On the other hand, there are some members of the band who emerge as its stars (Drew and Feist) and others who do not (Canning and Whiteman).
It's hard to be in a band with ambiguous hierarchies, in which a singer isn't automatically assigned more value than the drummer. And on occasion I detected a certain steeliness underneath the comforting wool knit of the community. As Dave Newfeld, the producer, put it, it's "like a twisted Christian camping group."
V. With Friends Like These. . .
One night in Toronto, I saw the A&C label and by default BSS in action, in a show featuring Jason Collett, a 38-year-old folk rocker who records solo but is also in BSS; Apostle of Hustle; and Feist. It was in a gilded 19th-century theater called the Danforth Music Hall. The evening started with Apostle of Hustle. Whiteman, in the incestuous tradition of BSS, played a song by the band Metric — Metric is one of BSS's "friends and loves." Then Collett played. His solo music is pleasing, something like Ryan Adams if he worked a day job and also took Ativan. Finally, Feist played, and the crowd roared in appreciation. Leslie Feist, with her ink black hair and tight white pants and her penchant for singing in French, was very appealing — like Dido made over by François Truffaut.
Somehow though, as if by some invisible force field, these three separate acts fused and wound up becoming Broken Social Scene. Kevin Drew emerged, along with Collett and Whiteman, and with Feist they performed a fast rendition of a new BSS song, "Major Label Debut." Drew and Feist do-si-doed onstage, the very picture of Indie Rock Family Values. Teenage audience members jumped up in front of the stage. The grown-ups, mostly in their 20's and early 30's, stood and clapped. I overheard audience members explaining to one another what connected the various people onstage: that one of the musicians in BSS might or might not be going out with Feist and that the 13-year-old boy playing guitar was Collett's son. (For some reason no one seemed to notice that Drew's wife, who isn't even a musician — she's a social worker — was playing the horn with Feist.) The relationships among the musicians onstage clearly pleased the audience — it was like watching a sitcom, with the added ingredient of rock glamour. Perhaps they were pleased also by the A&C ethos on display: the band members hit tambourines and cowbells and linked arms, and the lyrics they sang sneered at the perils of stardom and untrammeled individualism, at being "all hooked up" and having the "masseuse on the guest list."
It was then that I recalled a conversation I'd had with Drew in one of his brief funks. He said he wasn't sure the band would stay together. We went to the Communist's Daughter, a bar whose main contribution to the brotherhood of man is its remarkably low-priced drinks. Drew wondered aloud if his band and his scene would last. He seemed to be quoting one of his new album's longest, messiest and most stirring songs, "It's All Going to Break," a song that starts with lyrics about pederasty and ends with horns and all sorts of suborchestral maneuvers that are more triumphant than miserable. Of course, the answer to whether a band or a subculture will explode is, usually, yes. Then again, there's strength in numbers.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Guided by (Many, Many) Voices
NYTimes.com
A Very Crowded House
Ten minutes before Broken Social Scene was due to go onstage, Kevin Drew, co-founder and lead singer of the Toronto band, had his hands up on the wall. He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie. A woman in silver boots briefly massaged his shoulders. Nearby stood her boyfriend, Brendan Canning, who founded Broken Social Scene with Drew, his strawberry blond hair dangling toward the floor as he tried to touch his toes. Sliding closer to Canning, the band's soft-faced drummer, Justin Peroff, gave him an assist, as Leslie Feist, an occasional singer with BSS, brushed past. "Feist-y!" Drew squealed and hugged her. Her own chanteusey album, "Let It Die," had just gone gold in Canada and Europe.
Everyone was jammed together in the windowless, cluttered basement of an Ontario college auditorium, as band members stretched out or kneaded one another's backs or just sat drinking beers in chairs. A co-owner of the band's three-year-old label, Arts & Crafts, Jeffrey Remedios, was keeping up morale, checking in with the various musicians who make up the band and murmuring how great their individual work was. It was the first local show of Broken Social Scene's three-month world tour.
To call BSS a "band" is to simplify matters drastically. It's more like a network, or, as Emily Haines, a sometime BSS'er and lead singer of the Toronto band Metric, put it, "somewhere between a tribe and a cult." Most of the members of BSS are also members of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. The very name connotes what all the artists on the label have in common: they are lo-fi, heartfelt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly interlinked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making session. The musicians play on one another's CD's (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musicians on a given track depending on who shows up or what's needed for a particular song), a level of cooperation and organization unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slogan above the bar code on BSS's most recent CD: "break all codes." Perhaps it helps — or maybe it hurts — that a few of them have also slept together, though the BSS'ers tend to be secretive about whom, when and why.
Musically, you could say that Toronto has become a nicer but less aesthetically coherent version of Seattle in the early days of grunge. Broken Social Scene is Toronto's Nirvana, without — so far — the troubled-rock-star antics or the anomie and with a social agenda that puts collective music making above individual success. The second album, "You Forgot It in People," is dedicated to "friends, families and loves."
"We made a lot of decisions to help ourselves be grounded," Drew explained to me. "The whole band is based on people who are closely connected, metaphysically. People with their hearts on their sleeves." If it all sounds hopelessly earnest — another emo band bent on saving one little corner of the world — it isn't, or not quite. BSS has forged what one critic called "endlessly replayable, perfect pop" out of musical sources that couldn't be more disparate. Sometimes Broken Social Scene sounds like Lawrence Welk crossed with the Replacements, with a little Brian Eno in the mix; sometimes it sounds a bit like Pavement; sometimes it sounds more like U2, but with Jane Birkin on lead vocals. In being united every way except sonically, BSS is a lot like the Toronto music scene itself, which has given birth to the florid anti-folk of the Hidden Cameras, the mock angry rock of Peaches, the alt-country of Royal City (now defunct). Musically, none of these bands resemble one another. What they do have in common is a warm emotional timbre and a stress on communality.
BSS is nothing if not the warmest, most community-oriented of them all, to a degree that makes you wonder if the band isn't pushing the family-on-Ecstasy-vibe just a little too far. Onstage, BSS welcomes all comers. When the band played in Japan, a kid in the audience showed up with drumsticks, and BSS let him play. In New York, at the beginning of the 2006 tour, BSS invited a film producer and a graduate student of French intellectual history to join them. That meant there were 25 people backstage, including two drummers and six horn players, many of whom had been in the same band class in junior high school. During the group's three shows in New York last month, there were so many "band members" backstage that there was barely enough room to move. On one of the nights I caught up with them, Haines from Metric, clad in a lubricious black T-shirt dress, her blond hair perfectly mussed, held hands backstage with two other girls, satellite members of the collective, as they talked emphatically about a Charlton Heston movie from the 1970's. Charles Spearin, a Buddhist BSS'er, stood placidly to one side — he was thinking about his idea for an indie-rock activist project tentatively called Broken Social Worker. Even the band's 43-year-old quasi-Socialist producer, Dave Newfeld, was on hand, gearing up to play with the band and eagerly sharing his extensive theories about the secret malfeasance of American corporations.
The practice of having a kind of cabinet made up of different Toronto bands all in one performance is part of the BSS credo, and it is also the credo of Toronto's independent music. Onstage at BSS shows, Drew tends to introduce the members of the collective by announcing the other Toronto bands they are part of, which produces the strange effect of watching an all-star concert that has come together for a fund-raiser — all sublimated artistic ego.
"It's about what we think is right," Drew says. "I've never made music without friends — they are my security blanket. Playing with friends is who we are."
II. Why Labels Do Matter
Toronto's alternative-rock scene is a place where the sweetly familial and weirdly collective rub up against the traditional markers of stardom. BSS is the largest and the most media-ready of the Toronto bands, but it is far from the only band committed to a Toronto-bred arty idealism, known to some as Torontopia. Jonny Dovercourt, a 32-year-old local rock musician and impresario, and his friend Steven Kado, a musician with an interest in hipsterish pursuits like urban planning, coined the term in 2002 to help give utopian ballast to the city's sprawling but idealistic music community. Dovercourt is so committed to Toronto that he adopted one of its street names, Dovercourt, as his last name; his real name is Jonathan Bunce.
I met Dovercourt for a pint at a sports bar, the Rhino. Sitting beneath the large rhino head mounted above the bar, Dovercourt explained that starting in the late 80's, there was a huge roster of local bands, but there was no single Toronto sound. "These were bands struggling in obscurity and were unique from each other," he said. From surfer to punk, they helped lay the groundwork for the Canadian wave that today has a worldwide audience.
Dovercourt has a penchant for arriving at rock clubs and bars with books by the famed urban critic Jane Jacobs, who has made Toronto her home for nearly 40 years. He is a public-space enthusiast intent on defending it from corporate forces and on keeping it open to the improvisational and the unexpected. In his effort to advance Toronto's fortunes, Dovercourt started a weekly music series called Wavelength, held at bars like Ted's Wrecking Yard and Sneaky Dee's. The indie-popular Constantines, which plays a kind of blue-eyed-soul-punk, had its breakout show at Wavelength, which is often described as the center of the Toronto scene and its incubator. In the past six years, hundreds of bands have played in the series, including BSS, Dovercourt's Republic of Safety, Ninja High School, the FemBots and the influential CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), an improv music co-op featuring the filmmaker Michael Snow. On a typical night, two or three bands, almost always local and encompassing various genres, attract audiences of up to 200. This month, Wavelength had its 300th show.
Just as the L.A. punk scene circulated around the SST label and the early grunge scene sprang from and adhered to the Sub Pop label and K Records in Olympia, Wash., the Toronto scene has coalesced around a few key labels. The 25-year-old Kado, who has joined or started more than 10 different bands, started his own extremely independent music label, Blocks Recording Club, in 2003. Blocks now puts out records by local bands at a phenomenal pace — 30 CD's in two and a half years. The most acclaimed is Final Fantasy, which sold 7,000 copies of its last album, a string-heavy CD with full band arrangements, which Kado describes as "orchestral loner music." Unlike A&C, Blocks is a cooperative — CD's are packaged by hand — that divvies up profits between members and musicians. But compared with the even more D.I.Y. Toronto label Consumption Records — which dubs its new releases on recycled tapes — even Kado falls short. Kado may be aware that he doesn't achieve the recorded-on-a-boom-box-and-available-for-barter standard of Consumption — he has a distributor, after all — but he still won't call his label a label. To him, the term "recording club" means what it says. "We do what that community wants done," he explained.
Doing what the community wants done weighed on Drew's mind too, when he was first getting BSS and Arts & Crafts off the ground. But his model was another collectivist music label, Montreal's Constellation Records. Founded in 1997, Constellation is anti-corporate in both its music — it releases the work of Godspeed You!, Black Emperor and Do Make Say Think (two of whose members are in BSS) — and in its merchandising, refusing to sell to corporate chains like HMV. Constellation is also given to issuing polemics about the compromised nature of the music industry: "We have attempted to evolve one possible model for the recovery of an independent music ethic, hoping to summon some real sense of indie rock in spite of its reduction to a branded slogan through corporate co-optation."
For all their commitment to the same general principles, the members of BSS see themselves as being more about emotions than politics. For one thing, Arts & Crafts doesn't reject the major-label business model entirely. For another, says Drew, BSS isn't explicitly political. "Our politics are about human beings — we want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty," he says. "But our records are at HMV and Virgin."
Like many indie labels today, Arts & Crafts both borrows from and rejects the culture of major labels. Jeffrey Remedios and Daniel Cutler, co-owners of the label with Drew, are both former EMI employees who were attracted to the collective feel of the Toronto music scene starting at the end of the 1990's. Remedios met Drew through Brendan Canning, and they became roommates. At the time, Drew was playing in the band K.C. Accidental. Soon, Canning and Drew started Broken Social Scene with the drummer Charles Spearin. They recorded a CD with Paper Bag Records.
"They'd have brand-new material for each show, and the shows became really something," said Remedios, a polished, affable man of 30, with a helmet of black hair and fashionably fraying clothes. "It was the first time I ever felt that level of art coming from the neighborhood." That was around 2000. "It was then that me and Kevin and Daniel had this idea for Arts & Crafts." Remedios continued. "I named it Arts & Crafts as I was trying to show that we mixed art and commerce, and that commerce was going to hold up its end of the promise. I had witnessed the machine," he said, referring to his years at EMI. "I wanted to rebel well."
For Michael Barclay, an author of "Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance," the collective bent of Arts & Crafts and the Toronto music scene has less to do with North American D.I.Y. culture than with a distinctly Canadian temperament and music history. "It's textbook Canadian identity politics — the expression of individual will through community," Barclay says. Above all, Barclay delights in the Toronto music scene's willingness not to take itself too seriously. BSS, he says, is willing to be imperfect: "It's like a workshop, it's a band in progress."
III. All in the Family
Of course, Broken Social Scene didn't invent the music collective: creative collectives in general have a long history. And the last decade has seen an unusual spike in their numbers. In Italy, there is the Situationist- and Archigram-influenced Italian architecture collective Stalker (named after the Tarkovsky film), which stages events in abandoned urban spaces. In England, there's Picture Farm, a British film collective of writers, directors, producers and actors, which makes both documentaries and features. In New York, there is the performance-art fashion label threeasfour (formerly asfour), known for its early Cirque du Soleil-style fashion shows and later for its equally spectacular intrafamily brawls. New York's art galleries have also been twisting the meaning of the term "group show," with exhibitions like Scott Hug's 2003 show at John Connelly Presents, which featured 70 artists collaborating on a "teenage rebel" bedroom.
In Toronto, the collective-music scene has been motivated almost equally by the desire to engage in a cool cultural maneuver as by the practical pressures of limited funds. "The collective spirit happened as much out of necessity as ethics," Dovercourt says. "Most people in the music scene don't like to compete with each other. There never has been much money, so people just cram into the recording studio and cooperate in order to survive."
Walking around Toronto with Drew, it was easy to see what Dovercourt meant. People in Toronto tend to say hello to Drew. They also tend to let him in free at clubs. Strangers offer him unsolicited hugs. So do audience members at shows he plays. Sometimes he gets down into the crowd at a show and hugs as many people as he can manage.
One cold evening as we made our way down Queen Street, Drew seemed to delight in his role as the unofficial mayor of Toronto. He said hello to the hostess and several of the patrons at a local Italian restaurant. He clutched arms with the bartender of his favorite local bar, the Communist's Daughter. A young woman, whom Drew had met once in passing, stopped him and asked him to call her cousin, a victim of a random shooting, who had just come out of a coma. He called the cousin. In between encounters, he rang up a few musician friends to tell them how great their show was and to offer other words of alt-mayoral succor.
When we finally reached one of the city's older rock clubs, the Horseshoe, Drew made his way through the crowd, wrapping his arms around a local music critic, sundry music fans and the heavily pierced co-founder of the recently defunct Toronto indie label, Three Gut, who had a button affixed to her lapel that read, "My Other Girlfriend Is a Faggot."
Until recently, Drew lived within walking distance of the Horseshoe, in a splendidly filthy room that he calls "a nest of destruction," where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong. Drew isn't the only one of his collective to live with a lack of pretensions. Leslie Feist, who sings with BSS but whose solo career has recently taken off, has a home in Paris, a fan base of squealing teenage girls and the look of an art-house film heroine, but she has seemingly adopted few rock-star (or even upscale) habits. When I caught up with her, she was eating fried fish cakes she'd purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation.
It's not just the new crop of Toronto rock musicians who are perched between low-rent communal living and glossy stardom. To some extent it is the city as well. It was gentrification — in the form of two boutique hotels — that, paradoxically, gave the bands new places to play. In 2004 and 2005, two once-grand railroad-era hotels that had become flophouses were completely renovated; a small number of the neighborhood's truly marginal inhabitants, not the imitatively marginal hipsters, still hover around their doors. The Drake Hotel sponsors an artist in residence, hotelwide art installations and even a games night (Monopoly! Scrabble! Exquisite Corpse!). At the Gladstone, just two blocks away, Kado set up a portable recording studio in a hotel room and gave anyone — even bands newly minted on the spot — an hour to create an album free of charge.
IV. When the Collective Spirit Is Not Enough
Thanks to Arts & Crafts (and the labels that put out the work of other band members), Broken Social Scene can stay committed to the notion of being a sprawling, all-inclusive band, even when the reality is often less harmonious. Just getting 11 or more band members into a recording studio is virtually impossible. For now, musicians go in one or two at a time to record individual parts. Touring with such a large crew presents another set of problems. It is expensive and can lead to situations like guest lists that contain 200 names (recently, BSS decided to start charging guests and giving the proceeds to charity). There is also the matter of distributing royalties and fees as fairly as possible. A core group of seven BSS'ers are paid equally when touring. Additional musicians who show up irregularly, BSS satellite players, are paid less for their work. And while each songwriter on a BSS album is paid for his or her contribution to a song, the musicians are compensated according to how many songs they sang or played on. "We wouldn't survive in a major label," Drew explained to me. "We took our art-nerd vows, we took this concept. . .," he said and paused. Then he held up his arm. I could see that the tattoo on his wrist read, "Save Us," which he quickly covered with his hand, as if embarrassed.
In keeping with its "art-nerd vows," the band claims to have said no, on ethical grounds, to potential ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard. Remedios said that the band objected to the products that its music would be selling rather than to the commercialism itself.
"We weren't comfortable with endorsing a gas-guzzling postmilitary vehicle," Remedios says. "We asked ourselves whether we would do a commercial with Best Buy, and we said no. We asked ourselves whether would we sell our music at Best Buy, and we said yes."
Drew put it slightly differently: "When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you. But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial."
Drew may continue to stick to the collective line — compromise only for the greater good — but Remedios seems willing to consider other options. According to Remedios, the band actually came close to selling its music for a mobile-phone ring tone, but there were, he says, "timing issues."
Increasingly, BSS's commercial success rubs uncomfortably against its collective ideals. According to Arts & Crafts, BSS sold 130,000 copies of its second album, "You Forgot It in People," right off the bat, and around 115,000 copies of the new CD, "Broken Social Scene." Not large numbers for a major rock group but large numbers for a group of musicians who for years had no profits to split at all. BSS's indie cachet can at times seem a little precarious. Nowadays the band plays big concert halls and clubs throughout North America and Europe. BSS just completed a tour on a bus outfitted with beds and flat-screen televisions; it also took along a masseuse. And though the band has refused to allow its music to be used as ad jingles, it has aggressively sought out television and film licensing deals. Songs have appeared on the far-from-collectivist television shows "The O.C.," "Queer as Folk" and "The L Word." It's these commercial concessions, along with the Toronto scene's internecine battles over artistic purity, that have led some Toronto critics and musicians to suggest that BSS is neither truly collective nor independent.
"A&C rotates around BSS, and the Blocks Recording Club catalog is more diverse — A&C has distribution in Canada from EMI that gives it promotional muscle, while Blocks is run as a cooperative and reflects the wider diversity of the local music scene," Dovercourt explains. Carl Wilson, a music critic for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, calls Blocks "one of the most committed D.I.Y. labels in North America." Kado tells me that what makes Blocks so different from, say, A&C, is that although A&C is an independent, there's little difference structurally between it and a major label. "A&C is just a label more in touch with the structure of contemporary capitalism than most," Kado says. "They outsource promotion. They are a slick small organization that is a response to the record industry being doomed. I wish they would own up to be being a small business, with a corporate structure. Words like 'collective' are thrown around so easily. Do you work with your friends and are co-owners with them or do you mediate between them and a corporate distribution company for your friends?" Kado was also quick to point out that since the bands are on tour most of the time, they are "not part of the social community. I never see them on the scene."
BSS'ers admit they rarely show up for Wavelength anymore. And even some of those inside BSS have their doubts about how collective an enterprise BSS really is. As the band's guitar player, Andrew Whiteman, told me over his favorite drink, "North American sangria, or orange juice and bad red wine," the new BSS record was Drew's CD. The CD captured Drew's "intimacy, his ambience, his nervous breakdown," he said, in a half-joking tone. At 38, Whiteman is the oldest member of the band, slight, with long hair and a pretty-boy face that has been complicated by a crosshatching of scars from a car accident. He is also the most intellectual and arguably the most talented member of the band — his inspirations include Ethiopian music, the poet William Blake and the San Francisco cult poet Jack Spicer (he likes to repeat Spicer's dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me"). In his sparsely furnished apartment, the attic room of a house owned by a friend, he played some new songs by his band, Apostle of Hustle, on his home-recording equipment: the music was mysterious and densely layered, the lyrics were allusive and playful and as usual, his guitar work was lush, combining numerous world-music influences. But it was also difficult fare.
For Whiteman and some other members of BSS, the music collective is a contradictory enterprise. On the one hand, BSS is true to the communitarian effort, generously sharing the spotlight with satellite bands and musician friends — as good as the last Apostle of Hustle CD "Folkloric Feel" was, without Whiteman's BSS and Arts & Crafts affiliation, it would most likely have sold fewer than the 8,500 it has sold so far. On the other hand, there are some members of the band who emerge as its stars (Drew and Feist) and others who do not (Canning and Whiteman).
It's hard to be in a band with ambiguous hierarchies, in which a singer isn't automatically assigned more value than the drummer. And on occasion I detected a certain steeliness underneath the comforting wool knit of the community. As Dave Newfeld, the producer, put it, it's "like a twisted Christian camping group."
V. With Friends Like These. . .
One night in Toronto, I saw the A&C label and by default BSS in action, in a show featuring Jason Collett, a 38-year-old folk rocker who records solo but is also in BSS; Apostle of Hustle; and Feist. It was in a gilded 19th-century theater called the Danforth Music Hall. The evening started with Apostle of Hustle. Whiteman, in the incestuous tradition of BSS, played a song by the band Metric — Metric is one of BSS's "friends and loves." Then Collett played. His solo music is pleasing, something like Ryan Adams if he worked a day job and also took Ativan. Finally, Feist played, and the crowd roared in appreciation. Leslie Feist, with her ink black hair and tight white pants and her penchant for singing in French, was very appealing — like Dido made over by François Truffaut.
Somehow though, as if by some invisible force field, these three separate acts fused and wound up becoming Broken Social Scene. Kevin Drew emerged, along with Collett and Whiteman, and with Feist they performed a fast rendition of a new BSS song, "Major Label Debut." Drew and Feist do-si-doed onstage, the very picture of Indie Rock Family Values. Teenage audience members jumped up in front of the stage. The grown-ups, mostly in their 20's and early 30's, stood and clapped. I overheard audience members explaining to one another what connected the various people onstage: that one of the musicians in BSS might or might not be going out with Feist and that the 13-year-old boy playing guitar was Collett's son. (For some reason no one seemed to notice that Drew's wife, who isn't even a musician — she's a social worker — was playing the horn with Feist.) The relationships among the musicians onstage clearly pleased the audience — it was like watching a sitcom, with the added ingredient of rock glamour. Perhaps they were pleased also by the A&C ethos on display: the band members hit tambourines and cowbells and linked arms, and the lyrics they sang sneered at the perils of stardom and untrammeled individualism, at being "all hooked up" and having the "masseuse on the guest list."
It was then that I recalled a conversation I'd had with Drew in one of his brief funks. He said he wasn't sure the band would stay together. We went to the Communist's Daughter, a bar whose main contribution to the brotherhood of man is its remarkably low-priced drinks. Drew wondered aloud if his band and his scene would last. He seemed to be quoting one of his new album's longest, messiest and most stirring songs, "It's All Going to Break," a song that starts with lyrics about pederasty and ends with horns and all sorts of suborchestral maneuvers that are more triumphant than miserable. Of course, the answer to whether a band or a subculture will explode is, usually, yes. Then again, there's strength in numbers.
posted by D @ 8:20 AM
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