On February 13 of this year, the Montreal rock band Arcade Fire, known for their spirited live shows and ragged emotionalism, arrived at the Grammy Awards with low expectations. Their third LP, The Suburbs, released on the independent label Merge, was inexplicably nominated for album of the year, up against efforts from four of the biggest acts on the planet: Lady Gaga, Eminem, Lady Antebellum, and Katy Perry. The past decade has been hard on the music industry, but the Grammys have generally been content to go down with the ship, doling out prizes in accordance with establishment tastes. Few expected a bunch of shabbily dressed Canadians to beat out the luminaries who brought us “Poker Face” and “I Kissed a Girl.”

Read the rest. From the December 2011 issue.

Also, I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

An obituary for Jack Layton

Why Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded

Arcade Fire, Tune-Yards and growing up

The Corner Store at Pop Montreal

Fireworks in the age of digital isolation

Bon Iver, irony and the return of soft rock

Hosni Mubarak is a Dead Man

by Drew Nelles

If Egypt’s revolution does nothing else—if it dies at the hands of the state’s thugs with their American guns—it will at least have exposed with crushing clarity the monstrous unfairness of US foreign policy. Yesterday the world watched Hosni Mubarak, tone-deaf and deeply insulting, refer to the people he has long oppressed as his “children”; he darkly insinuated that his opponents were backed by foreign forces, as if his regime hasn’t been on the American dole for decades. As if the only thing keeping Mubarak’s Western benefactors from throwing him to the wolves were not his peace with Israel and his jowly, raccoon-eyed fear of political Islam.

Read the rest.

Why I Love Bad Hospital Food

By Drew Nelles

I have spent more time in hospitals than someone who is young and healthy ought to. When I was seventeen, my best friend was paralyzed in an athletic accident and a close family member was diagnosed with cancer. (My father died many years ago, though I was too young to remember those hospital visits.) Because I was a pretentious teenager I even recorded a concept album about hospitals for a high-school English project. And when I think about hospitals, I always think about hospital food.

Read the rest.

Pop Montreal 2010: Music Made With Machines

John Cage once said, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” We reached that point a long while ago—we can now record and manipulate any noise on earth—but Western music still sounds largely as it did at the height of Cage’s weirdo powers. Even when it isn’t straightforward pop, or when it uses found sounds, or when it’s outright noise music, it still has elements that strike us as familiar: tones and semitones that please our European-influenced ears. Music still sounds like music. The difference is that we have many more of Cage’s “electrical instruments”—we have many more machines with which to make sounds.

Read the rest.

Pop Montreal 2010: Palimpsest Loves Print

Palimpsest magazine is part publication and part time capsule, a search engine in a shoebox. In the age of the beginning of the end of print it worships the physical relentlessly, far beyond the charge of mere Ludditism; Palimpsest loves the internet too, for all it has done to mould us. For this year’s edition of Pop Montreal, the brains behind Palimpsest will produce a daily newspaper documenting the festival’s goings-on, but don’t expect a mere newsletter. Here, collective member Danielle St-Amour talks Pop, print and personal music journalism.

Read the rest.

Pop Montreal is the best, just so you know.

Interview With Sean Michaels

by Drew Nelles

Sean Michaels started Said the Gramophone in 2003, when he was still an undergraduate at McGill. It was Canada’s very first mp3 blog, and has since become one of the most influential independent music websites in North America. Michaels also happens to be a talented fiction writer whose words fall just so, creating small, affecting dioramas of human delicacy.

Read the rest.

3 Myths About Anti-G20 Protesters

by Drew Nelles

1) The Toronto lockdown is all the protesters’ fault.

Following 1999’s spectacular demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and 2001’s protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, international political meetings of this kind have almost exclusively been held in small resort communities.

Read the rest.

Shock of the Old

By Drew Nelles

Every so often, usually after a paycheque arrives, I head to the nearby record store and sift through rows of vinyl. LPs are rarely significantly more expensive than CDs, and sometimes actually cost less—one local artist’s hand-assembled record was $12 to the CD’s $18. Buying the music on iTunes would be cheaper, but just about every new LP in the store carries a sticker that reads, “Free high-quality digital download included.” When I get home, I put the needle to the album. Then I go to the record company’s website, enter my download code, and the mp3 files appear on my desktop. I have both analog and digital—no need to choose.

Read the rest. Also, you should just go ahead and buy the issue. It’s pretty good.

Are MEC’s new bikes worth the price?

Mountain Equipment Coop’s new line of bikes, made available across Canada this week, has been a long time coming. As a retailer of goods targeted towards both young, professional weekend warriors and the granola-crunching set, cycling seems like a natural fit for MEC. After all, the Vancouver-based non-profit has been selling bike accessories since 1978; why shouldn’t it make its own bicycles, too? MEC, however, is not just a retailer—it’s a sort of well-meaning behemoth, and its foray into cycling has drawn heat from the fiercely independent bike community.

Read the rest.

From Reader’s Digest:

How to Tune Up Your Bike

So your bike has been in the garage all winter and looks a little worse for the wear. No worries—you can give your bike a quick tune-up yourself.

Read the rest.

What if Avatar Took Over Harper’s ‘Findings’?

by Drew Nelles

James Cameron’s mother dreamed of a twelve-foot-tall blue woman. Cameron wanted Avatar’s alien sex scene to be more explicit, Na’vi females had breasts even though the race was not placental, and Hustler will make a pornographic Avatar parody. Google China treated its staff to Avatar after threatening to leave the country.

Read the rest.