That Arcade Fire Web Site: There’s Not Really Much To Say Other Than “It Launched”

noah | October 8, 2007 9:30 am
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After all that hype and hope that the Arcade Fire fans of the world would, one day, be able to turn Win Butler into a vampire, beonlineb.com opened its virtual doors on Saturday. The site wound up being a reminder to critics that Neon Bible came out this year Web-site-as-interactive-video, with a lot of actionscripting that allowed you to drown Win and play with a pair of disembodied hands and wonder if you weren’t missing something the first, second, and sixth times you clicked through the thing. (Hence the pranksters on Brooklyn Vegan who claimed that certain click patterns would result in winning tickets to a “secret show.” Maybe that was part of the “art”?)

Perhaps it’s because I worked at a site that had its launch party way before its launch date (which, funnily enough, eventually got pushed back to 2127 or so) during the first dot-com boom, but the site reminded me of a glorified splash page for a site that was “coming soon.” Although given the band’s announcements that they would be taking some time off before their next tour maybe the announcement was really supposed to be “coming never.” (Also, launching a site that essentially is a click-magnet time-waster on a Saturday? I know they wanted to beat the In Rainbows blog torrent, but even those people who weren’t heading out to Randalls Island on Saturday have things called “social lives.”)

The Arcade Fire presents [beonlineb.com]

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