Success without mosh pits

Broken Social Scene, along with the community aesthetic surrounding the local rock ‘n’ roll collective, earn a 5,000-word treatment in The New York Times Magazine. The feature by Alissa Quart – the author of books on teenage marketing tactics and the dilemma of gifted children – leapt from mid-week subscriber e-mail delivery to the Stille Post message board, allowing the article to be heckled a few days before the Sunday brunch set flip past its pages. While it’s doubtful any NYT subscriptions were cancelled last October after critic Jon Pareles complained that Broken Social Scene, their self-titled record, “refuses to ride on Montreal’s momentum”, the attention merits comparison to Seattle circa November 1992, when a Sub Pop employee responded to a Times request for some indigenous hipster slang with their own contrived grunge glossary. And while this latest scenester overload was doubtlessly fact-checked to a fault, the hometown media pendulum has already swung back to dance clubs, due to the arrival of deported NYC nightlife kingpin Peter Gatien, even if accessing that martini-soaked society requires a disposable income, not to mention a wardrobe that wasn’t bought by the pound. Woven through the article are essential tips for any other town looking to cash in by projecting poverty: “He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie,” is how BSS celebrity Kevin Drew gets described, followed by an explanation of how, until recently, he lived “in a splendidly filthy room that he calls ‘a nest of destruction,’ where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong”. The resident chanteuse, Leslie Feist, is “eating fried fish cakes she’d purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation”. While no one dares admit to making money, Broken Social Scene gloat of rejecting ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard, but only because of their objection to the specific products being sold. “When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you,” explains Mr. Drew. “But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial.”