Laundry tumbling in the drum
It’s frustrating to look for the news within the story, as if the facts are immaterial to the clicks and the rage of it all. Today, of all days, there is news of a record from the Arcade Fire, but the facts are buried below the promise of a click.
Win Butler, Arcade Fire frontman, was accused of multiple counts of sexual misconduct in 2022, covered initially in Pitchfork by Marc Hogan before filtering out to the masses. Following the first wave of news, which came at the head of a tour with Feist (who dropped off the tour after a show in Ireland), Butler made public declarations of his innocence, and following in the footsteps of innocent men with nothing to hide, hired crisis communications expert Risa Heller — who has worked with the likes of Mario Batali, Jared Kushner and Harvey Weinstein — to manage the deluge of bad press. A fourth person came forward, then a fifth. Beck and Feist both dropped off tours in support of We. Canadian radio stations, despite being bound by CanCon laws bidding them to play a percentage of Canadian music, took them out of regular rotation. Hands began to wring on whether to place the band on endless lists of the best songs of the indie sleaze era because of the allegations, despite the fact that at any given time these lists are already a litany of men who have the same skeletons dancing in their own closets. Whisper networks are born of men like Butler, and it’s of sadly little surprise that he has yet to face any real reckoning with his actions. Rich and wealthy men will always be protected by the machines that built them into veneers of honest attire, and they will always be artists of note first and abusers somewhere down the line, if at all. His victims, brave people who all chose to come forward despite knowing the cost, have received no justice but have had their motives questioned, been put through the court of public opinion, blamed for their actions. And then they became facts buried in links hidden in footnotes.
This isn’t the fault of any one outlet. Almost every music blog and cultural outlet I’ve looked into have covered the upcoming record. Most put a paragraph at the bottom, below the press release, reminding people who are still there that Butler is an accused abuser. Some put the details in parentheses in the lead, offering little time on the broader context of Butler’s abusive history. Some, the worst few, have not mentioned the allegations at all.
This all despite the additional news that information about this new Arcade Fire album was first filtered through their new proprietary app called Circle of Trust, a name built of screaming red flags. According to a press release, they claim that the title of the new record alludes to a paradoxical effect where the effort to suppress a thought leads to it being impossible to avoid. This is not, in and of itself, entirely true. Pink elephants also commonly referring to seeing pink elephants, supposed hallucinatory effects suffered by alcoholics. Imagining things that aren’t there. The idea that alcoholics see things that aren’t there is also a tool used to discredit the accounts of abuse victims who were inebriated when attacks happen.
This is all subterfuge, laundry tumbling in the drum. Circle of Trust as a means of keeping secrets poorly disguised as a community looking after each other. It is not uncommon for people who experience abuse to be told that they are keeping a secret with their abuser, as if they are in on keeping all people, even themselves, safe. Pink elephants designed to convince you the thing you can see plainly is not really there, a hallucination of the mind. Surpressing thought.
There is no law bidding us to action every time wealthy and famous people release something new, or announce a comeback stadium tour like the in the recent case of Brand New. In Brand New’s case, frontman Jesse Lacey has been accused of multiple accounts of grooming and sexual abuse of minors. But they still get a press release of their upcoming stadium tour, they still get the machine to do the work for them. There are passing mentions of the fact that all the venues hosting Brand New have turned off comments on their posts, hoping that like in so many abusive situations, no one voices their concern and outrage.
We do not need to do the work these people so desperately desire. When I posted about this on Bluesky, frustrated by the reporting in Stereogum (although in their defence they are the only ones to put their bare reference to Butlers abuse in the lead instead of burying it as a footnote), multiple people messaged me privately to ask: what did Win Butler do? You can see what comes out when the wash is dry. That people are not given depth of context to properly parse what has happened, what continues to happen.
When news about men like Butler emerges we see the classics played out on the stage — “Who could have imagined?”, “I didn’t like them anyway”, “what can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again” among them. People will proclaim cancellations, and how uncomfortable their own fandom is now that the abuse is public. Lives centre themselves in a story that does not need or include them. This all plays a part of the larger problem, that too many in positions of editorial influence who could choose to report with concern for the victims and the cycle of abuse in so many industries choose to move instead to the whims of nameless clicks. Arms of a machine that make it harder and harder for victims to come forward about abuse suffered at the hands of a person with good enough SEO that they are placed in a place of prominence on an unreachable shelf. Always there to remind you they will never be taken down, just placed out of convenient view until they're needed once more.
