Arcade Fire "surprised" by win

[Godfather]

Montreal's Arcade Fire had a number one album on Billboard this summer, have sold out New York's Madison Square Garden on back-to-back nights, appeared on "Saturday Night Live" twice and once played with David Bowie.

Yet when the indie-rock group won the Grammy for Album of the Year on Sunday night, many people seemed to have no clue who the six-piece band was.

The resulting confusion led to the creation of whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com, where a number of Twitter and Facebook postings have been complied, many outraged at how such a "no name" band could win over other acts such as Lady Antebellum, Lady Gaga, Eminem and Katy Perry.

Some celebrities got into the Arcade Fire questioning action.

"Album of the year? Ummm never heard of them ever," Rosie O'Donnell tweeted.

"Who the he'll is that fire who," Duane Chapman aka Dog the Bounty Hunter added.

Then of course there are the hundreds of unprintable quotes, incredulous at the "hipster" band's victory.

But to most indie rock fans and many musicians, Arcade Fire's win is just further proof of their massive mainstream success.

"There is hope!!! I feel like we all won when something like this happens!" Kanye West tweeted after the win.

Since their 2004 breakthrough "Funeral," Arcade Fire has been steadily gaining a large following over their two subsequent albums, and their live show is considered one of the best in the business.

Last year, they sold more than 450,000 albums in the U.S., solidifying their "mainstream" success. But for many music fans, all this success isn't enough to put them on their radar.

Arcade Fire is a "macro-niche" band, meaning while they aren't exactly mainstream, they are massively popular to a large, but slightly specific, type of music listener.

But this is not Arcade Fire's fault, it's just the result of a massive upheaval in music culture over the past decade.

Just 15 years ago, you could turn on MTV and see videos of bands from a wide variety of genres rubbing elbows. Now, most music videos are seen on YouTube, curated by one's own personal taste, with little incentive to go outside of your own musical comfort zone.

Radio is largely the same, with mainstream radio seemingly playing the same two-dozen artists within its format and satellite radio allowing for even narrower genres.

Major music magazines like Rolling Stone or Spin, with their monthly cycle and limited space, have ceded their music tastemaker status to websites like Pitchfork, Stereogum and a thousand "hipper than thou" blogs.

And even more likely, much of your musical knowledge comes from whatever is posted in your Facebook news feed.

Modern music culture is not a shared mass experience like it used to be, it's more private and fragmented, played over computer speakers in bedrooms and iPod headphones on the street.

It also means there is more variety and more available than ever -- if you know where to look.

For thousands of scattered individuals, groups like Arcade Fire are their mainstream, but for those still taking in music by osmosis and gossip magazines, they're just Arcade Who?

[DemonGeminiX]

I didn't know who they were either. So I went to youtube and listened to a few of their songs. Avante Garde mood rock. It's been done before, over and over and over. As far as I can tell, there's nothing really new about it.

I guess it's cool that the underdog won, but...

[Godfather]

Well if you youtubed today it that must put you in a perfect position to be a critic

I agree in a way though... I thought it was an overrated album in the indie-rock scene. As far as that genre goes, there were better this year... and yet it beat out the huge names in music for a big award like this It's pretty odd

Still a helluva lot better than eminem or lady gaga/antawhatthehell winning


Also, there was the first song from a video game to win a grammy (strangely it was from Civ IV in 2005). Kinda interesting