Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk Myself to Death: Symbolism

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Symbolism

[UPDATED BELOW] [UPDATED AGAIN] [AND AGAIN]

A couple of hours ago, Win Butler of the Arcade Fire smashed his acoustic guitar after the band's first song on Saturday Night Live (if it's not already, no doubt the performance will be available somewhere on YouTube in no time). As if to magnify the significance of the act, when the band returned for its second song, Butler was playing a mandolin, as if he had no other guitar. I suppose I'll have to find an Arcade Fire message board somewhere to learn what the words on that guitar meant. Maybe it said, "This machine kills fascists" in another language.

I don't know whether smashing a guitar means anything at all anymore. I did see Pete Townshend smash a guitar back in the day (actually, it was my day, but it was several years after Townshend's day), and I'm not sure it even meant anything then. Still, I smiled when Win Butler did it tonight. It doesn't always take much to make me happy.

UPDATE--As expected, the video's up. [Or not. See below.] It appears that Butler broke a string about two-thirds of the way through the song, so maybe the smash meant nothing more than that he was frustrated.

UPDATE #2--The words on Butler's guitar were "Sak vid pa kanpe." According to Wikiquote, that's a Haitian proverb (band member RĂ©gine Chassagne was born in Haiti) that translates as, "An empty sack doesn't stand up," which means a hungry person can't do anything. That reraises the question--if Butler saw the guitar as an empty sack, did he intend to smash it all along? Was the action a symbol after all?

UPDATE #3--Apparently NBC has had the video pulled, but a clip of the guitar being smashed is still available. And just because we can (for the time being, anyway), here's the second song they performed on SNL, "Keep the Car Running."

2 Comments:

At 9:28 AM, February 26, 2007, Blogger Stevie T said...

I saw Arcade Fire's 2nd song on SNL, but missed the first one, and now I've waited too long to watch the YouTube version, greeted only by the message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC Universal." The guitar smashing part is still up on YouTube though.

Also, Doug, your knowledge (and mine for that matter) on guitar smashing seems to date you. I found this comment on an alternative rock forum at Topix.net: "On Saturday night, stick-thin Canadian Win Butler, the lead singer of a music group called Arcade Fire, reinvented the art of rock performance with a single drastic act of nihilistic destruction."

 
At 9:33 AM, February 26, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That "reinvented" quote was actually from a "blurb" on gawker.com.

 

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