The Suburbs was nowhere near the year’s Top 10 sellers - nor were any other rock albums. Recovery was the most popular album of 2010, followed by fellow Album of the Year nominee Need You Now by the pop-country trio Lady Antebellum, which logged 3.08 million in sales. What did that say about the state of rock music? Three months after the Grammy victory, a period when The Suburbs should’ve been enjoying a Grammy-related sales bump, the album had moved just over 600,000 copies, making it Arcade Fire’s best-selling album to date Eminem’s Recovery, meanwhile, was going strong with 3.9 million.
Let’s say Arcade Fire really was America’s biggest rock band that night at the Grammys. He wasn’t attacking Arcade Fire, exactly rather, he was making the case for artists like Eminem and Kanye West “shaping, influencing and defining the voice of a generation,” and arguing that not recognizing the importance of hip-hop’s brightest contemporary stars showed a “fundamental disrespect of cultural shifts as being viable and artistic.” In essence, Stoute was making the same argument that rock fans had used against the Grammys in the ’60s, when culturally relevant classics by Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones were ignored in favor of the latest offerings from Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz, and that ubiquitous Grammy fixture, Barbra Streisand.Įven if you loved The Suburbs, it was hard to dispute Stoute’s point given an honest examination of recent (and not so recent) changes in pop music. In Stoute’s view, Arcade Fire’s win signaled that the Grammys were more out of touch with contemporary pop culture than ever, an opinion he was moved to share in a full-page ad that ran in the New York Times one week after the ceremony. One guy who didn’t join in on the post-Grammys Arcade Fire victory party was Steve Stoute, former manager for the rapper Nas and a longtime record and marketing executive. Arcade Fire’s victory was our victory, a sign that maybe - just maybe - rock music still had a chance to also be popular music. This was the Beatles invading America, the Sex Pistols slaying the dinosaurs of arena-rock, and Nirvana turning on the lights and ending the vacuous party-time of ’80s hair metal. Here was another band “that meant something,” birthed from the fringes of the underground and carried by a wave of inherent greatness to a successful conquering of the middle, transforming music - nay, the culture - for the better in the process. Particularly for indie-rock fans, a demographic group that would’ve scoffed at the very idea of putting the words “prestigious” and “Grammy” in the same sentence right up until the moment a band it cared about was handed one, Arcade Fire winning an award normally bestowed on the Stevie Wonders, Michael Jacksons, and U2s of the world seemed to conform to a recurring story line in popular versions of rock history. To some observers, the shocking news is instantly significant. Babs and Kris have just made the night’s climactic announcement: To the chagrin of heavily favored challengers Eminem and Lady Gaga, Arcade Fire is the winner of the Album of the Year award, for its concept record The Suburbs. For the millions of viewers at home, most of whom have no idea what an Arcade Fire is, the band quickly crowds a matronly Barbra Streisand and her wizened A Star Is Born co-star Kris Kristofferson out of the television frame. The diligently inspirational Quebecois octet has just arrived onstage at the 20,000-seat Staples Center in Los Angeles as the closing act at the 53rd-annual Grammy Awards. “There’s a band onstage that used to be huge / they’re on but no one’s listening.” - Drive-By Truckers, “The Opening Act”įebruary 12, 2011: On a similar night in a different time, you might’ve mistaken Arcade Fire for rock stars. We moved it on.” - Jimmy Page, 2012, on CBS This Morning “What we achieved was to change the blueprint of a lot of things. The division has now evolved into a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste.” - Rock critic Jon Landau, 1969 Zeppelin’s enormous commercial success, in spite of critical opposition, revealed the deep division in what was once thought to be a homogenous audience.
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