The parameters of the campaign suggest that it is no longer enough to simply promote one’s music through the channels offered and preferred by big industry players (i.e. Arcade Fire’s aforementioned NBC special that starred celebrities like Bono and James Franco and the SNL performance), nor to only draw upon avenues in line (philosophically and practically) with more independent means for circulating and promoting music. We are in the midst of a messy, conflicted, yet exciting moment when new promotional practices are being tested against big industry methods for producing, circulating, and performing music. And thus we get the conflation of an unknown band, The Reflektors, and the Grammy award-winning Arcade Fire.

Arcade Fire’s Reflektor campaign overwhelms all channels of communication and ensures a presence on multiple platforms through which today’s music fan interacts with music on a daily basis, both in-person or locally and online. But the campaign also emphasizes local sites of production and exhibition in popular music-making. And more importantly, the campaign has been centered on cosmopolitan cities with rich and diverse cultural and musical histories, namely Montreal and New York. The cosmopolitan city is reflected in both the campaign and the band’s current musical sound and style, and it is the new location in a series of Arcade Fire albums that foreground place – a Montreal borough on Funeral, a church-turned-studio on Neon Bible, and, of course, the alienating Houston suburbs on Suburbs.

While other cities have been integrated into the campaign, Montreal and New York have been particularly central, each doubling as a significant site of production for the band.

A poster for Arcade Fire’s “not-so-secret” secret show as The Reflektors at Salsatheque in Montreal.

Montreal, the band’s home, served as the site for the first show by The Reflektors. A review of the “not-so-secret show” at Salsathèque (a salsa club, not so much a rock venue) was described as “the (local) climax of an elaborate viral marketing campaign for their new single ‘Reflektor.’” The show would become the basis of the late-night NBC special, Here Comes the Night Time (the cosmopolitan city doesn’t sleep), as well as for a number of teaser trailers for the album. Reviewer Lorraine Carpenter points to the Haitian influences that have been added to the band’s look and sound. The band and the city of Montreal are both connected to Haiti. Montreal’s Haitian community is the largest in Canada and band member Régine Chassagne, whose parents emigrated from Haiti, has advocated the country’s need for aid following the 2010 earthquake. The sounds of the diasporas are the sounds of the cosmopolitan city.

Next, The Reflektors headed to Brooklyn, New York, to play two back-to-back events that would, amongst other things, carry the campaign into satellite radio through heavy promotion by Sirius XMU. New York is one of the cities where the album was recorded, with production by New York-based James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (whose synths and drum beats are very much palpable on not just the single “Reflektor” but throughout the whole album). Artists who have been cited in reviews as standout influences on Reflektor (Talking Heads, for one, a comparison made ad nauseum) evoke a New York as heard through the coming together of sounds and styles both distant and local at key moments in the city’s musical history, namely proto-punk in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s (Bowie’s backing vocals on “Reflektor” are key here) and disco (Studio 54) of the late 1970s.

Following the Montreal and Brooklyn shows, The Reflektors continued the series of secret shows in other cities including Los Angeles and Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, with funds donated to Partners in Health and the neighborhood’s cultural center. Only these subsequent shows were not as integral to the campaign itself.

It is important to consider what it means to evoke the cosmopolitan city through sound. Cultural capital is required for navigating and traversing the global and weaving it through the local and this is a privilege attainable through a successful career. Arcade Fire’s cultural accolades and accomplishments (The Suburbs won the Polaris, the Juno, and the Grammy for best album of 2011) are instrumental in this transition from the suburbs to the cultural and musical diversity evoked by the cosmopolitan city. Trips to Haiti, specifically the Carnival in Jacmel, become components of the campaign.

Also connecting the campaign to the cosmopolitan city is a notion of excess, evidenced by the recurring theme of the carnival and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. The campaign saturates a wide range of media outlets just as the city’s carnival overwhelms the senses. A multi-platform, intermedia campaign is a modern carnival steeped in excess; chaos and humor unfolding in reviews, reader comments, internet trolls, tweets, and blog posts. In person at the secret shows, concert-goers were required to be costumed and masked.

Rodin’s Orpheus sculpture on the Reflektor album cover.

To further drive the point home is the myth of Orpheus that recurs throughout the campaign. Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice is the album’s cover, there is a song titled “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” and the album leak was paired with Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’ 1959 film that takes place during Brazil’s Carnaval. Many reviews of the album have pointed to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as it pertains to the theme of reflection, but what is also of significance is that Orpheus is killed by the mythic agents of the carnivalesque, torn apart by Dionysus’ maenads. And here we can locate an important message that the band communicates through the campaign: to be wary of the ways in which the self is cut and chopped into fragments online and in contemporary culture. Our reflections, of our reflections, of our reflections.

To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.