I am often hard-pressed to explain my devotion to Broken Social Scene to long-time friends. After all, I listened to nothing but hip-hop and Natalie Merchant until college, and even then only added a couple of college radio faves during my WVAU days.
After moving to California and seeing Metric in concert, then being passed a copy of “Anthems For A Seventeen-Year Old Girl” by Scott Rosenberg (my source for all things good in all things), I immediately took a liking to the band. And when I found out more about them, I started to fall head-over-heels.
Why? Professional jealousy.
Broken Social Scene is a collective that, at any individual time, could be made up of between six and 18 members. Most of these members are in other bands – Amy Millan and Evan Cranley in Stars, Emily Haines (…swoon) and Jimmy Shaw in Metric, Feist on her own, Andrew Whiteman in Apostle of Hustle. But they come together into this massive collective to create sometimes beautiful, sometimes shambolic, but always honest music.
I find myself drawn towards collectives. That’s both in fandom (seeing Doomtree, a Minneapolis hip-hop crew next month) and in my own life (I tried to create the same thing at the Alliance, though it failed). The creative process can be a lonely one, especially for writers, and getting together a troupe or crew of fellow travelers can become difficult. So I find myself happiest when creating in a group, like when putting up a play with Giraffe Hunt or Range View or trading pages at Writers Boot Camp.
Watching Broken Social Scene on stage and off, it's easy to see that this is a band whose members love and hate each other. They'll speak at each other's weddings and, eventually, funerals. They laugh, they cry, they fight, they fuck.
Or, as Kevin Drew would sing, “this is the blood I love to share.”
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