I probably played every track at least a few times on my college radio show I journeyed to both Philadelphia and New York on multiple occasions to catch Broken Social Scene live ( with Feist in the lineup!!). It’s hard to think of a record that meant more to me as a young adult than this one did. That said: Writing a 20-year anniversary essay around this particular album is a gut punch. The passage of time is inevitable, and it’s always been a pet peeve of mine when people boo-hoo about how their best years are behind them, it’s been X amount of years since college ended, no good music exists anymore, blah blah - you get it. Usually when landmark records turn A Certain Age, I try not to take it personally or begin digging my own grave. So many Canadian indie-rock figures were born out of the greater Broken Social Scene hive mind that the whole enterprise should be studied - or at least theme an episode of the podcast Sounds Like A Cult. Nowhere is this carousel of talent better exemplified than on the band’s astounding sophomore album, You Forgot It In People, which turns 20 this Saturday.
(Fun fact: Canning was once a member of Len, of “ Steal My Sunshine” fame.)
#BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE PITCHFORK PLUS#
Some of those early names included the Leslie Feist, Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell of Stars, Emily Haines and James Shaw from Metric, the trio of Charles Spearin, Julie Penner, and Ohad Benchetrit from Do Make Say Think, plus Apostle Of Hustle, KC Accidental, Jason Collett, and others that I’m no doubt leaving out. (No offense to the ska community.)īeginning in 1999 as a musical partnership between Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, Broken Social Scene would eventually see close to 30 members cycle through their ranks, with players rotating in and out depending on availability. More than two decades after forming, Broken Social Scene have come to symbolize a maximalist musical time where indie-ensemble bands ruled - the more instruments, the better! Almost like a ’90s ska band, except no one was getting paid just to skank onstage. Broken Social Scene have always been less a band than a collective - a onetime incubator of Canadian indie mega-stars that put Toronto on the map around the same time fellow supergroup the New Pornographers were doing the same thing for Vancouver, and Arcade Fire (*cringe emoji*) for Montreal.
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