- A still from EMA’s video for “Satellites”
Rock bands hate the Internet—or at least they’ve turned their hesitations and anxieties about hyperconnectivity into fertile ground for songs. You’ll find it in the first Death From Above 1979 album since they came out of hibernation and all over the latest Parquet Courts side release; you can hear its echoes on EMA’s new album and in certain pockets of a new St. Vincent song. It was spelled out most clearly in Arcade Fire’s interactive video for “Reflektor,” which asked viewers to hold up their smartphones to their laptop screens and then blared the words “BREAK FREE.” What makes these bands so dismissive of the technology that they depend on to disseminate their music?
Like Arcade Fire did with “Reflektor” and the album of the same name, Parkay Quarts and DFA1979 flaunt their memories of a pre-Internet time to distinguish themselves from young people who have never known another world. It’s a vein of thought that social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson has dubbed “digital dualism;” you’ve got your “real life” and then you’ve got the digital life, which is fake. Jurgenson asserts that there’s no real divide either practically or psychologically between the environments you traverse outside your window and the ones you visit through your computer screen.
