Melancholy is my middle name.

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Gone are the days when Jack McClelland would publish a seminal Canadian novel like Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers even though he confessed to being baffled by it. In a 1965 letter to Cohen, McClelland wrote, “[E]ven though I can’t pretend to understand the goddamn book, I do congratulate you. It’s a wild and incredible effort.” McClelland took a chance on a book that he didn’t fully comprehend, but in which he detected the spark of greatness. Forty-three years later, Beautiful Losers remains in print.
Would Leonard Cohen fare so well today? An argument to the contrary could be made. Yet Beautiful Losers is a great book precisely because of its iconoclasm and idiosyncrasies, because of its wildness and its sheer uncontainability. Naipaul was probably wrong in suggesting that great authors don’t exist today, but they do appear to have a more difficult time gaining access to the machinery of publishing and to securing a readership once they have vaulted that hurdle. The more publishers retreat to the middle ground, the more they are consigning our culture to the wasteland of mediocrity and complacency. And it need not be said that a complacent culture is a moribund culture.

Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’
From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes.
In The New Cold War, his study of Putin’s impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that ‘capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom’.

Discuss.

They are all there, Roy Orbison, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Ennio Morricone, Zappa, Lou Reed, U2, the young Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Morrissey, John Lennon, Talking Heads . . . Arcade Fire call them all in, together with their multifarious sounds and influences and spray them out at us like a fire-eater at a fin-de-sicle, post modern, 9/11 world carnival.

There isn’t one questionable track on this album. Each of them has something to commend it. The mixture of fairy-tale and Armageddon on Black Mirror; the screaming paronoia of Keep the Car Running; the quiet acceptance and inevitability of the times in Neon Bible; the magnificent anger vying with the organ of Eglise St. Jean Babtiste on Intervention.

Black Wave/Bad Vibrations contrasts the sound of a stage musical chorus with the insistent beat of a prophetic warning; Ocean of Noise offers a brief and melodic respite of hope; while The Well and the Lighthouse makes sure we don’t forget that the lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet. (AntiChrist Television Blues) combines a plea with a warning: “I’m through being cute, and I’m through being nice”.

Windowsill combines a Kafkaesque vision of the western inheritance with Dylan’s idea of Desolation Row; while in No Cars Go we are given a glimpse of Eden, “Between the click of the light and the start of the dream”; and the final song is an anthem, My Body is a Cage, which might have been penned and performed by John Lennon.

And gloomy and angry though most of these songs are, after hearing them a few times I found myself singing along, itching to punch the air, unable to resist the lush arrangements, the fiery wall of guitar noise and soaring organ chords.

Neon Bible is an album about the spiritual wilderness in which we spend our days, caged and brainwashed by the chanting rant of God’s warriors as they hustle us ever closer to oblivion.

The planes keep crashing, always two by two

It’s great to think of the numbers of young people listening to this stuff (number 1 in Canada, number 2 in the USA and in the UK). It’s pretentious at times, often quite difficult and inaccessible but most of all it’s imaginative and experimental and completely irreverent. Gimme more.