Arcade Fire’s two guiding principles of late can be boiled down to “we are cool and clever” and “the world is bad.” Their new Spotify mix, currently titled “Infinite Playlist — Start Making Money,” integrates these two ideas pretty thoroughly. With this new feature—surely to be received as a marketing ploy of some sort—the band wants us to know how cool they are by recommending some cool music that they like, but they also want to give us “everything now” in a form that we cannot possibly consume or comprehend: a playlist of (almost) “infinite content.”For one, Arcade Fire keep changing the title of this playlist. At one point it was called “Infinite Playlist — Greatest Hits of 2004” (even though its songs weren’t from that year). At another point it was “Songs For Reading The Morning Paper,” and then “Infinite Playlist — Disco Is Not A Bad Word.” Perhaps by the time you read this, a new tweet from the band will have signified yet another title—or maybe they will have deleted the playlist entirely. Either way, this 541-track-long (at the time of this article’s publication) playlist contains entire albums by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kate Bush, The Modern Lovers, Aphex Twin, Lou Reed, Charles Mingus, Wu-Tang Clan, Arthur Russell, and more (i.e., Very Cool musicians who make Very Cool music). Perhaps the keys to unraveling all the secrets of Arcade Fire’s latest album Everything Now—and also, maybe, our own society—can be found in this playlist, and I hope that whatever person has 36 hours to spare won’t hesitate to let us know what those secrets are. The problem is, much like their recent album, Arcade Fire buries any potentially nuanced point about our culture and its discontents under a suffocating blanket of irony and distance. Arcade Fire are indeed very cool and smart. Setting Metallica’s Master of Puppets between Neil Young’s Live Rust and The Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real is truly a masterful postmodern playlist move, and hopefully one that will allow us to simultaneously extrapolate important comments about our culture and critique ourselves as listeners in a meaningful way. Except that it probably won’t, because Arcade Fire get the wires crossed again, setting out to critique our culture’s “infinite content” by submitting an unlistenable playlist. In the end, Arcade Fire do the music a disservice by keeping the focus on Arcade Fire and overwhelming the good ideas that the playlist contains.
