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.

The festivals and amusement parks that dominate the summer months can contribute to what sets summers apart because of the carnivalesque pleasures they provide, set apart from daily life. A Labor Day weekend trip to Noah’s Ark Water Park  in the Wisconsin Dells reminded me of just how important a role amusement parks play in both the commercial value of summer (to both media franchises and tourist economies) and its often important role as a carnivalesque release valve in a labor intense society. While the franchise is an obvious part of a lot of summer entertainment, most evident in the sequels and franchise video games that are released, it is becoming an increasingly big part of other parts of summer that I nostalgically fantasized were more bucolic or carnivalesque.

It is possible to look at the carnival as detailed by Bakthin less as an instance of real subversion and more as a release valve for the tensions built up in every day life. When I walked into Noah’s Ark to be greeted by the sound of high pitched screams, it seemed that I was seeing this part of carnival in action. Release seemed to be the order of the day, as even the tamest rides and attractions evoked screams along with laughter.

As I too began to brave these behemoths, screaming at steep drops, practically drowning as water shot at my face as I rode the Black Anaconda, I wanted to chalk up my enjoyment of this park up to the carnivalesque. The rides invited me to relinquish control, to experience the catharsis of fear and relief, to scream in public without the injunction to remain calm. The park allows its patrons to relinquish many of their every day constraints. They are invited to: lose control of their bodies, make spectacles of their emotions through screams and laughter, and be allowed to look ridiculous in these public spaces, all in the service of pleasure.  I wanted to think of this park experience as an example of a more classical kind of popular culture modeled on the carnival … then I came face to face with Sponge Bob.

He was several stories tall, adorning a building to announce the park’s 4D Sponge Bob Square Pants Movie. Suddenly, I noticed that Sponge Bob was everywhere. His face appeared in the gift shop, on lunch boxes at the snack stands, and on t-shirts on the patrons. The idea of an amusement park getting in bed with a media franchise is certainly not novel, indeed this country’s most famous parks were founded on just such a partnership. However, franchise figures have rarely been a huge part of more local theme parks that may be associated with more nostalgic ideas about community entertainment.

Sponge Bob’s presence at Noah’s Ark was neither an anomaly nor an inevitability, but rather an important part of the experience of carnivalesque pleasure that summer amusement parks and festivals can provide. Sponge Bob became the most obvious embodiment of the complex matrices of commerce, labor, leisure, and pleasure that underlie much of the summer entertainment industry. The Sponge Bob Square Pants 4D Movie functioned as a marketing tool for the water park in an attempt to capitalize on the franchise success, the film (which is shown at many theme parks simultaneously) gives Nickelodeon an opportunity to reinforce and extend the Sponge Bob Square Pants brand, and the licensed products at the gift shop and snack stand are beneficial to both parties.

I was initially tempted to see Sponge Bob as an interloper into the more “authentic” community-centered cultural experience I believed I was having, but it became clear quickly that his function was more complicated than that. The involvement of the Sponge Bob franchise at the water park threw into more distinct relief the importance that commercial interests have in this location of summer culture; it made the reality of the presence of commerce amongst the pleasures of the carnivalesque inescapable. It also did not negate, and in fact may have extended, the more carnivalesque pleasures. Theme park patrons could use Sponge Bob as a bridge between the pleasures that they experienced there and something that is part of their everyday life.  The insides of those Sponge Bob lunch boxes may go on to carry in them the foods featured during Sponge Bob’s commercial breaks but they may also bring with them the memory of what it felt like to let go and scream. For someone who is about to return in earnest to the business of teaching about, writing about, and thinking about media, this reminder that pleasure, commerce, and community experience is wrapped up together in many texts — this living example of the complexity of media literacy — was just the thing that I needed as I left the carnival of summer behind.