What Broken Social Scene did wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking or revolutionary, but they provided a beacon of possibility that a community could sustain itself through music, even in the 21st century. You can see their sense of an insular but inviting community in pretty much every music scene that exists today, from the incestuous feeling of the DIY communities in Brooklyn and Boston to the participatory quality of acts like Los Campesinos! or The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die.
When it was published in 2009, it may have felt slightly premature, but a few years down the line, Broken Social Scene’s impact is undeniable. In 2007, Stuart Berman - one of the first to write about BSS in any critical capacity, mainly because he ran in the same Toronto circles as them when they were first starting out - went around and interviewed pretty much anyone who had anything to do with the band or the scene that they inhabited. From the band name on down, Broken Social Scene were destined to lead a fractured, messy existence.įirst off, it’s impossible to write an article about this band without paying tribute to This Book Is Broken, an essential document if you want to know about the band’s formation, trajectory, and initial impact. Broken Social Scene were a collective in the best sense of the word, and the ever-expanding and -contracting nature of the group was built into its foundation. And though Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning would become the axis around which the group eventually spun, there are countless others that contributed to the revered status that the band has today. These bands grew out of - or, really, created - the hotbed that was the late-’90s/early-’00s Toronto music scene, and all of them owe their enduring popularity, at least in part, to the massive force that was Broken Social Scene. Feist, Metric, and Stars are the obvious touchstones - and they all deserve articles like this of their own one day - but even the smaller groups and progenitors of BSS are beyond compare: hHead, Do Make Say Think, Apostle Of Hustle, Cookie Duster, and, of course, KC Accidental. The amount of talent inside and on the periphery of this band is monumental. Has there been a better collective in the past two decades than Broken Social Scene? I really doubt it.
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