This Book Is Broken

Last week I finally got my hands on a copy of This Book Is Broken, Stuart Berman’s detailed (and authorized) account of the Broken Social Scene story. It is as much a visual representation as it it a textual one, combining candid photos and scrapbook mementos provided by many of the BSS family, and pieces of interviews and commentaries by those who have been there through the development of the underground musical mountain that sprang up in Toronto at the start of this decade.

Having been a fan of the band and it’s splinter groups for awhile now, it’s been an eye-opening read in that many of the lines that connect the bands and the scene are being filled in. At first, I thought, “Shit, if I consider myself a fan, I should know all these connections already,” but as you get deeper and deeper into the fabric of this collective, you realize that only someone so intimately connected with BSS would know all this already–there’s just far too much information for the casual fan to gather and connect. I also realized that, though basically coming from the same starting point, many of these musicians went on to create diverse and distinct careers for themselves, and don’t all play the same type of music. At one point–any for the life of me I can’t seem to locate it in the book to correctly attribute who says it–a comparison is made between the Toronto scene and the many “scenes” that develop in U.S. college towns that follow a musical trend and then peter out or lose steam; in Toronto, there wasn’t any unifying musical theme other than doing your own thing, so these artists were constantly drawing inspiration from and feeding off each other. Metric doesn’t sound like, Broken Social Scene, who don’t sound like Stars, who don’t sound like Apostle of Hustle, who don’t sound like Jason Collett, and yet, they are all tied to one another in more ways than just being friends.

For anyone remotely interested in a good musical read, you can’t beat Berman’s love letter to the whole collective around Broken Social Scene and Arts & Crafts records. After all, how often is it that a book comes with a ready-made accompanying soundtrack of such high quality?

If it ain’t broken, then what good is it?

MP3: Broken Social Scene “KC Accidental”
Myspace: Broken Social Scene

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