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I ended my first article here on rightround with a promise: that I'd be writing about things happening musically here in Montreal. As I said then, "Proximity breeds knowledge and hopefully insight. I'm just not so sure I know what a 'city' really is anymore."
Well, both the Montreal commitment and the question of defining a city are now coming back to haunt me (in a friendly way). I'll be doing a "scene profile" on Montreal for rightround next week, to coincide with the fifth annual Pop Montreal Festival (October 4 – 8) and the Future of Music Coalition's Policy Summit, now in its sixth year, which is happening for the first time in Montreal (October 5 – 7). As I started working on this huge article, I realized there was something I had to explore in terms of what I mean by Montreal, by a city, by trying to represent a place. Hence this preliminary blog.
Leonard Cohen, photo by David Boswell
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It's strange trying to profile a place. What is a place, anyway? A bunch of places? Where do you draw the line? I've been pretty curious lately about what a city is supposed to be these days when it comes to consuming/creating culture. There's always something that gets left out, right? A list of bands, of venues, of record stores...a scene, a profile, and a place are all ultimately defined by the lines you draw around the objects you point to. That said, you ultimately do end up in different geographic ranges, pursuing different ends, and sometimes it is good to know where you are, and what local wisdom there might be (however flawed).
When both Spin and the New York Times did profiles on "the Montreal music scene" a couple years ago, it elicited much eyeball-rolling from locals. People were unimpressed with the somewhat reductionist and facile exploitation of what they perceived as theirs — or perhaps fearful of appearing actually excited because there was some valid reason for these articles to be written. Most people were probably somewhere in between, myself included. Sometimes there is a story to tell, but the sad truth is that the bigger the story is, the more its details and honest roots fade, as though passed along in a game of "broken telephone." (Just look at the religious state of the world: our greatest stories are now wars people yell at each other.)
Wolf Parade
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But sometimes it's okay to sit down and make note of something, register it, record it. The key is that you pass it on. The key is that you hand it off in a way that tries to care for the featured item itself, the place, as well as for whomever you're passing it to.
I love music because I see it as redemptive runoff from breaks in communication…the ironic antidote to the relay's failure. The attempt that knows it's going to fail, and so makes music instead of words.
It's always impossible to know exactly why you love something, why it registers with your own personal tastes as something great. Where do these tastes come from, anyway? I'm sure part of it has to do with this question of proximity in the first place, of a piece of art flowering out of a messy garden you happen to also live in. Maybe you share water and waste, so the art that comes out of it can help you cope, help you to decompose and rejuvenate. Maybe you love your friend's band because they're your friend's band, and you share something that makes their songs touch you both. That doesn't mean your love and your taste for it is compromised. It really does do something for you.
Stars
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A lot of the Montreal artists I love seem to have a sense of this game of broken telephone, of refusing to crash and blazing on anyway. It's the idea that sometimes music that initially seems sad or dark is really the stuff that can make you feel best. Radiohead captured this so well, which is why they were such an important band leading up to and through the turn of the century. You push reality to its honest and often frightening extreme, and then you affirm it anyway. There's a section of the Arcade Fire's "Crown of Love," about 2-1/2 minutes in, that feels like it's getting sadder and sadder, but the waltz of it is getting brighter and brighter, before everything just breaks open and you're not sure if someone has just died or gotten married. Yeah, that's what I mean.
On that note, I'm leaving this preamble to the (forever destined to be incomplete) Montreal profile with a shameless, unapologetic list of what I think are some of the best albums ever to come out of Montreal (with a limit of one release per artist). Some obvious picks, maybe, but someone has to hand off the gold and still really mean it. And there's plenty of room for dark horses and the future of music in the next big piece.
Leonard Cohen, Songs From a Room
The Arcade Fire, Funeral
Sunset Rubdown, Shut Up I Am Dreaming
Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary (and the CBC Radio 3 Sessions!)
The Unicorns, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?
Stars, Heart
Rufus Wainwright, Want One
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
...and throw in Radiohead, The Bends...for fun.
Posted September 2006
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