Noel Gallagher on the pretentiousness of Arcade Fire: “pry themselves out of their own asshole”
The ideal film is 90 minutes, and the perfect record is ten songs. These are universal rules governed not by my own arbitrary opinions, or even Noel Gallagher’s, for that matter; they are hardwired facts related to how we consume art in the modern age. There is something inherently pretentious about not understanding why that’s the case.
This a fault that the former Oasis man was more than happy to point out and explain to Arcade Fire when they arrived with the 76-minute record, Reflektor, in 2013 (quite why it was spelt with a ‘k’ adds perhaps further evidence to his indictment). “I haven’t heard it,” Gallagher began, but for the first time in the history of critical analysis, that didn’t negate the damnation that followed—in fact, it became a fitting rationale.
“Anybody that comes back with a double album, to me, needs to pry themselves out of their own asshole,” he said of the overly long LP. “This is not the ‘70s, okay? Go and ask Billy Corgan about a double album. Who has the fucking time, in 2013, to sit through 45 minutes of a single album?”
He added, “How arrogant are these people to think that you’ve got an hour and a half to listen to a fucking record?” In his view, pop and alternative music is for the people, and for most of the proletariat, time is of the essence, so bands should be aware of how records are consumed and mould their art to match it, otherwise, they fall foul of ignorant pretentiousness.
Gallagher’s position on this wasn’t even softened when he was informed that his hero David Bowie feature as a backing singer on the titular track. “Oh that’s a shame,” was all he offered Rolling Stone on that front. Moreover, the Arcade Fire album manages to also only be 13 tracks, it’s just that most of them run in excess of six minutes. In the past, that would’ve been considered a commercial kiss of death, but now alternative music has largely given up on commerciality.
Gallagher also reflected upon this. He stated, “Back in the ‘90s, when I was going, guitar music was the main thing in Britain or England. Now the focus has shifted to something else. But that’s all right. You’ve got to find it yourself.”
Concluding, “It’s kind of like going back to what alternative music was before Oasis ruined everything by being massive.”
