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 Régine 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."