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Arcade Fire have come under fire for their Reflektor campaign, with claims by a US fan that he felt 'used' by the band's graffiti which built up to this week's single release.
Texas writer Ian Dille has criticised the band, after revealing that Arcade Fire graffiti appeared on a print framing shop in which his wife works, later replaced with a promotional poster for new album Reflektor. He also revealed that the offending items had been scrubbed from the walls of the shop in Austin. See an example of the Reflektor graffiti below.
"I'm not just saying that because my wife's boss spent hours cleaning the posters and paste off the wall," Dille writes in an article for Slate magazine. "As Arcade Fire has achieved mainstream success, they’ve also struggled to maintain their indie appeal. How does a band preserve its counter-culture ethos when it’s on stage with industry stars accepting a Grammy for best album? Many bands have struggled with this problem, and Arcade Fire has generally handled it fairly well."
"The band’s vandalism – er, "guerrilla marketing" –seems, in contrast, decidedly immature, or at the very least socially irresponsible."
Read Ian Dille's full article here
Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler wrote a hand-written letter to Dille, apologising for the work his wife had to do to remove the offending paintwork.
"I'm really sorry that you and your wife had to put up with that," he wrote in the letter. "The logos were supposed to be put up with water soluble paint or chalk so they would come off in the rain. Somewhere down the line someone must have gotten confused and used paint."
