BY ANNA ZALOKOSTAS

In print | Published September 4, 2008

Beneath the layers of violin crescendos, hurtling drums, ambling, gauzy keyboards and hazy, hushed vocals, Broken Social Scene, the Toronto-based baroque pop collective headlining this Saturday’s Large Scale Event, makes music about the everyday, music that comments on the transient relationships that very fortuitously unfold and causally deteriorate, music that strips away at the illusions that people create instinctively to avoid confronting the truth. “You’re supposed to be a social critic as an artist, so that’s what we’re trying to do, in our own way,” co-founder and bassist Brendan Canning said to me in a phone interview one summer afternoon. “We’re not going to hit you over the head with our own political message, we’re just trying to do the right thing.”

And while I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to talk about the cataclysmically explosive moments of quiet in “It’s All Gonna Break,” the cyclical, gossamer melody of “Anthems Of A Seventeen Year Old,” the way the vocals in “You Forgot It In People” blend almost indistinguishably into the quiet haze of creeping instruments, Canning kept coming back to more political imperatives that I had somehow missed in my five years of listening and to what he perceived to be his role as an agent of change: “There’s more to life than playing guitar and entertaining the masses. I think we were all put on the planet to help improve the planet … Music is a gift, and [like other gifts], you can use it to try to improve upon things.”

The politically or socially critical aspects of Broken Social Scene’s music weren’t actually discernible to me for a while. The images that I, admittedly very subjectively, associate with the band’s music — summer solstices, the haze of pollution in big cities, leaky faucets, taking the Downtown 4 train at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning wearing clothes from the night before when everyone else around you is suited in perfectly tailored black Wall Street wool — always seemed to remind me of interconnectedness and the relationships we innately have with each other rather than songs that voice some sort of political concerns.

And while I initially dismissed Canning’s recurrent emphasis on the band’s simultaneous role as social critic and artist as the sort of “If I could change one thing about the world, I’d create world peace” beauty pageant answer that you’re supposed to give just because, I started listening a bit more closely and started to get a better understanding of the way in which Broken Social Scene approaches what they understand to be their task of social criticism. The way they confront their listeners isn’t with hugely broad, epically important, grand world problems but with the small, everyday things that we can more directly control.

And when Kevin Drew’s desperately pleads that he really doesn’t “want to think about those things anymore” in “Superconnected,” his very singing about “those things” really only forces us to confront the things that we don’t want to think about, the things that are easier to deny but more responsible to face up to, the things that we know we can improve upon if we just put in the smallest amount of effort. We might “all want the lovely music to save [our] lives,” but by exposing that there are so many things we try to ignore, Canning, Drew and the other rotating members of the Toronto supergroup boister a sense of personal responsibility (and “superconnected”-ness) when it comes to our local communities and the way we treat the people and things around us.

“I care about a lot of things,” Canning said, seeming almost offended when I asked him to talk about the things that he cared most about (Hey, if anyone should have been offended, it should have been me — he was the one who was “running a bath” while I was trying to have a conversation about music with him).

“I care about having a happy life, living in a city where the air quality is not that good and is everything going to be okay in life … am I going to be happy making music or do I want to do something else and is this band going to satisfy me and is my dog going to stop growling at me and is my garden going to be growing nice flowers until the fall and are my evergreen trees on the side of my house going to dry out because they’re not getting enough rain or are they getting too much rain or do I need to fix the roof before next year or do I not need to fix the roof and should I have a green roof and am I going to go to Africa someday? I care about everything.” And the kinds of things that Brendan Canning cares about are the kinds of things that his band’s music seems, to me at least, to try to get us to take more of an interest in and be a bit more conscious of.

While Canning told me he believes there’s more to life than just playing guitar, it seems like he instinctively creates his own illusions while trying to dispell ours because it’s “not for [him] to believe” that “art can fail you” — his responsibility as an artist is to subtly confront the bleached teeth, flashing smiles and trash talking of seventeen year old girls, not necessarily aggressively or directly, but in ways that are much more subtle, thought-provoking and ubiquitously sensory.

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