"This song is for the condominiums that are coming to ruin this place!” Kevin Drew front man of Broken Social Scene, the twelve-piece Canadian collective, was introducing one of their sprawling chamber pop anthems to a large, colorful, crowd that had packed in tightly on Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island for the 8th annual Siren Festival Saturday. Drew was worried that this, his band’s first appearance at Siren would be their last because of the recently approved plans to develop the boardwalk with luxury high rises.
The concert-goers, mostly hipsters under twenty, were more into downing vodka straight from the bottle, 40’s of malt liquor and smoking weed than fretting about gentrification. When Drew told the crowd that he and his band hailed from Toronto, a city that was also losing interesting neighborhoods to excessive construction, a voice from the mob yelled back “Where the fuck’s Toronto?” Although there is a strong corporate presence at Siren, with the usual PR swag and merch tents set-up, security was relatively lax and the underage revelers weren’t bothered.
The throngs seemed much smaller and more laid-back than last year when the Siren audience numbered 100,000. “This and ‘04 were the best ones,” said Matt Gross, 27, from Cobble Hill, who blogs at musicslut.com and is a DJ. Highlights of the fifteen-band bill included Midwest purveyors of fuzz-drenched lo-fi pop, New Times Vikings, and the obscure nu-rave duo, Helio Sequence, who had an initially unenthusiastic, wilting (it was 95 degrees) crowd dancing and cheering by the end of their set.
The night belonged to headliners Broken Social Scene though. Their lead female vocalist, Feist, is now a crossover star and can’t tour with them anymore, so the band had a wide-eyed blonde fan, sing the melodic favorite “Almost Crimes.” In the electric, infectious moment every successful festival has one of, the swarm of sweat-drenched hipsters sung along en masse with the amateur.
The throng wasn’t entirely made up of Williamsburg kids with white Ray-bans, tattoos and skinny jeans. There were hirsute carnies and nine to five types represented too. One preppy, twenty-something said she was from “a faraway land called Manhattan,” describing herself as an “East Village yuppie.” She thought the proposed plan to develop Coney sounded like a good idea. “It’s kind of too crazy out here.”
Gross, for one, wasn’t worried that Siren will be going anywhere, “It’s the center of the NY summer concert calendar and it makes a lot of money for the Voice, if they pave over Coney Island it will just move to another neighborhood, all of Brooklyn is going to be condominiums in four years anyway,” the blogger, who grew up blocks away from Coney, told us, sounding defeated.
But as Broken Social Scene were hitting the last notes of their finale, a taut, wild-looking man in nothing but French Connection briefs climbed up a chain-link fence and vaulted into the VIP area. Kevin Drew seemingly pleased that the boardwalk’s historically raucous ethos wasn’t dead yet ended with an encomium, “Despite everything, you still remain an original city.”
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