It was KC Accidental’s work that led Drew to meet Brendan Canning, a quasi-veteran of the insulated Canadian rock world who was seven years Drew’s senior. The duo put out two albums, Captured Anthems For An Empty Bathtub and Anthems For the Could’ve Bin Pills, the latter of which featured a number of contributors who would serve as the foundation for Broken Social Scene.
KC Accidental most resembles what BSS would eventually go on to become, a meld of post-rock and collectivist spirit. It’s a name that will forever be memorialized on the celebratory second track of You Forgot It In People, probably long after the fledgling band itself will be remembered. Of course, all things must have a beginning, and the most significant predecessor to Broken Social Scene was KC Accidental, the first project between Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin. So many artists got pulled into their orbit that what ended up coming out the other side was a compendium of a whole city’s worth of music, and that disparate collection of influences threads itself through every song that the band has ever made. As far as I’m concerned, Broken Social Scene were the entirety of the Toronto music scene for a number of years. For our purposes, just picture a huge family tree of overarching projects and one-offs and loosely associated friends, all converging in the same city and going out and getting drunk together and then making music. It’s easy to cut corners when it comes to explaining their long and storied history, and I’m going to do so because A) it’s extraordinarily convoluted and B) it’s a little boring, and the whole thing is better explained as it’s laid out in This Book Is Broken. To understand how BSS operated in any intimate sense, the Book is essential.Īnd Broken Social Scene were an intimate, complicated group. So This Book Is Broken stands not as some throwaway of an also-ran group, but rather one of the strongest works of modern music journalism, an oral history that mythologized and solidified a band’s origin and rise before they were ever really codified into the canon. 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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