Arcade Fire, deadmau5, and The Great Canadian Genre Chasm

In their two headlining sets at Coachella, Arcade Fire unleashed a pair of burns against EDM artists and their growing presence at the festival. Win Butler closed the first weekend with a "shout out to all the people still playing actual instruments at this festival." Then, in the second weekend, the band brought out a pair of Daft Punk impersonators to play a slowed down, sloppy version of "Get Lucky." The crowd went nuts at first, thinking the rampant rumours of a Daft Punk appearance had come true, but understood pretty quickly that something wasn't right. Butler cut them off after a couple minutes, yelling, "What the fuck is happening? What is this?" Then Arcade Fire kicked into the opening guitar riff to "Normal Person," while "Paft Dunk," as they were called, danced along.

So between their "shout out" and the Paft Dunk stunt, the Montreal band was making a point: EDM is crap, bands who play instruments are good. EDM artist deadmau5 responded to Arcade Fire in a series of tweets that were right on the money. "A computer is a tool, not an instrument," he wrote, and "Arcade Fire needs to settle down. Some dudes devote their lives to instruments, others to electronic composition. Dafuq's your problem?" And on the issue of performing with instruments vs. computers, he wrote, "I don't expect to see Daft Punk pull a Steve Vai on stage, I expect to listen to some decent music, n' see some cool robots. No problem. If I wanna watch real artists perform, I'd pick the opera before wasting a fucking minute of my life with Arcade Fire. #doyouevenscorebro? But since some EDM is enjoyable to me, I'll go watch them fake it, and enjoy it more than you hate the fact that they can't play guitar."

Arcade Fire haven't responded directly, but took a jab at deadmau5 this weekend at their show in St. Louis when they brought out a performer wearing an LCD screen mask displaying deadmau5's face. So far, they've done this with George W. Bush, Rob Ford, and Michelle Bachman, so one can reasonably assume it wasn't meant as a compliment.

This is especially weird coming from Arcade Fire, who have gone to extra lengths to embrace dance music over the past year. First they made an album with James Murphy, the guy responsible for shaping the early-2000s dance rock sound. Then they held a string of surprise shows in a disco/salsa club. Now, they ask attendees to dress in formal wear and costumes for their shows, claiming it creates a special, communal atmosphere, and encourage people to dance instead of standing around and watching.

In a lot of ways, you'd think they would envy deadmau5's ability to get people moving. So he just presses a few buttons on his computer when he performs live – why does it matter if the music is good and the show is fun? People at EDM shows wear neon tank tops instead of face paint and suits, and deadmau5 wears a big mouse mask instead of an oversized paper mache face mask. Everyone is dancing and enjoying the music. Why split hairs?

What people who take Arcade Fire's stance don't appreciate is that it's just as hard using a computer to make music as it is using a guitar and other “actual instruments.” Countless hours of production go into writing a good EDM song, and, if anything, it's more difficult coming to a killer final product when there are so many digital instrumentation and production options available. Sure, there's crappy EDM out there, but there's plenty of crappy rock music, too. In a lot of ways, electronic music production has undergone major innovations over the past fifteen years while rock production has remained more or less the same. Arcade Fire have an unfounded superiority complex, and it's insulting toward all of the talented, hard working electronic artists out there. It's also completely backward-looking, and threatens to brand them as Canada's youngest dad rockers.

Their position is not a new one. The war between rock n' roll and electronic music has raged since the 1970s, when synthesizers entered pop music and disco exploded in popularity. Since then, members of the rock n' roll camp have feared the evil spectre of electronic music, threatening to take over the airwaves, suck music of its soul, and leave a world where one talentless schmo after another writes banal songs by pressing a few buttons on a computer. In the 80s, it was house music, hip-hop, and synth pop; in the 90s, it was electronica; now it's EDM. In all of these cases, the threat of electronic music was overblown by rock traditionalists who feared losing their place at the top of the popular music world.

Arcade Fire are arguably the most successful band to come out of the early 2000s Canadian indie rock boom, when an abundance of musically innovative artists experienced international success and critical praise. Their peers are acts like Wolf Parade, The New Pornographers, The Unicorns, Death From Above 1979, Malajube, The Dears, Final Fantasy, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Metric, and Feist. A diverse group of artists, one thing they have in common is that they all play “actual instruments.” This makes them distinct from a more current wave of Canadian crossover acts, like Grimes, Doldrums, Blue Hawaii, Majical Cloudz, Purity Ring, Karneef, Digits, Solar Year, Sean Nicholas Savage, and Technical Kidman, to name a few, who embrace samplers and other electronics and are ambivalent about playing instruments live. This also makes them distinct from Canada's unappreciated hip-hop world, from its EDM scene, and from deadmau5, who got started at the same time as Arcade Fire but has followed a very different path to success.

The thing is, Arcade Fire and their peers' preference for “real instruments” is all that them makes distinct from the latter group of artists. It has nothing to do with talent or quality of music, and it certainly has nothing to do with electronic music existing in opposition to indie rock. It seems as though Arcade Fire are ready to become rock traditionalists, boxing off themselves and their peers from a younger generation of artists who are more innovative and original. They're stopping somewhere around 2008, saying “music ends here,” turning around, and looking only to the past.

In doing so, they're also embracing a version of Canadian music that is stagnant and afraid of change—a version that feeds us the same singer-songwriter and classic rock CBC playlists over and over, while ignoring so much incredible music happening all around us. They're embracing a Canadian music world that has never given the Polaris Music Prize to a hip-hop or EDM artist, but only to musicians playing “actual instruments.” They're embracing a world where hip-hop and EDM virtually never get played on the CBC, while Chris Hatfield's song with Ed Robertson from the Barenaked Ladies tears up the charts.

Arcade Fire and their generation of artists are reaching a point where they're entering the Canadian classic rock canon. Now it's up to them whether they shake things up, or let the old and outdated dividing lines stay in place.

Greg Bouchard pushes buttons. He is on Twitter.