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The Arcade Fire are a band constructed from this kind of nostalgia. They are nostalgic for their own past albums, as the lyrical and musical callbacks on this one demonstrate. They are nostalgic for their childhoods and other people’s childhoods. They’re probably nostalgic for things that happened two hours ago. They’re even nostalgic for things they never experienced – the song “We Used to Wait,” is about writing letters and waiting for a reply to arrive in the mail. It’s unlikely that anyone in this band, let alone in this band’s audience, is old enough to actually remember writing and receiving physical letters.
But that’s the point. The suburbs of the album’s title are a nostalgic fiction too. They’re not actually where you grew up. You didn’t actually learn to drive on empty roads between houses in the summer or look for the girl you loved in every passing car. You didn’t even really want to escape your parents’ house. Rather, you heard that this was what happened to all the other teenagers, and you long somehow to recreate those memories — the painful, ugly, weird parts too — that everyone else was having, that everyone was supposed to have. Rock music has always been good at turning the unpleasant into the attractive. The suburbs, the simple, boring, repetitive, stifling, two- kids-and-a-garage house fantasies, are perhaps the most unpleasant thing to the average teenager listening to rock music, so to admit a longing for exactly that simplicity is how this sentimental, optimistic band locates a legitimate rebellion. There might be better, richer, freer worlds out there away from the suburbs, but they’re also far more difficult and complex. The world beyond the suburbs might be more honest, but often it’s a lot easier just to be dishonest. This album admits these rather unattractive longings, and by doing so articulates a small but important cultural secret: sometimes we just want to go home. Sometimes we just want to lie to ourselves that everything really is as simple as a family in an advertisement from the 1950s.
The New Inquiry - We Will Never Get Away From the Sprawl: Arcade Fire Resurrects the Suburban Dream
Ok. The part about the band and its audience not remembering writing or waiting for letters is bunkum — I would argue the converse; the band’s target audience DO remember writing letters, and that’s why they listen to the Arcade Fire in the first place.
BUT! The second graf, about the fiction of the suburbs?That’s what I’ve been trying to say for weeks now. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to talk about how reading everyone’s reactions to this record has been so entertaining because you can almost tell instantly those who:
- a) never experienced the reality of the American suburbs firsthand
- b) didn’t grow up in a suburb but an urban area
- c) didn’t grow up in a suburb but a rural area
- d) those who did grow up in a suburb and didn’t have a problem and in fact still live in one
- e) those who did grow up in a suburb and resented it terribly and who now live the Richard Florida dream in an urban area teaming with cultural capital, and
- f) the people who never got over high school.
I didn’t grow up in a suburb, but didn’t grow up in a major urban area either, or the country. I grew up in no man’s land. So for me, the land of The Suburbs is a fiction — like suburban Chicago in John Hughes movies. And to a certain extent, when I listen to this album, I think it is for the Arcade Fire, too.
It’s easy, when a band is mostly known for injecting their music with personal details, to take their output as some kind of standard-bearing flag-waving personal crusade.
The thing is, I don’t necessarily think that’s what the Arcade Fire, as a project, is about. The author of the piece quoted above is moving in the right direction when she talks about nostalgia — there’s definitely a thematic agenda running through their music that is about looking backwards. I’m not sure, however, that the songwriting is strictly “issues-based” — believe me, I’ve done a lot of thinking about protest songs past, present, and future.
So what are these songs, then?
It’s like this: last week, I listened to Funeral, Neon Bible, and The Suburbs a few times, in order. Then, I flipped them around and listened top-down instead. And the weirdest thing happened at that point — suddenly, it was like I was sifting through a bunch of dirt and as I shook the sifting tray, there were all these (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) totems, these signposts, and I started seeing that there was a bigger story arc trailing through all three albums. I laughed and I thought, yes! Yes! They are being PRESUMPTUOUS, OVERBLOWN, GRANDIOSE. The Arcade Fire is holding up a mirror in our general direction and reflecting ourselves back at us. And, like a bunch of dysmorphic teenage girls, trapped in the suburbs and hating it, we don’t much like what we see, so we kind of get kind of ugly about it.
And I thought about Ray Bradbury and I thought about Don Delillo and I thought about The Virgin Suicides and David Lynch and I thought about Talking Heads.
I thought about what I remember about the reception of Neon Bible; I thought about the dumb kid (frat boy?) at the Judson Church show who cackled meanly about how Regine was fucked up and crazy and so clearly on drugs.
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And I realize, yes, I realize that this whole conversation about the album was kind of almost over, but it’s going to flare up again because of the sales figures. Because it certainly presents something that cannot be denied: This is what people want to listen to. Think of this: People went out of their way to pay for this record. In the demographic that, frankly, doesn’t pay for music. An accomplishment, to be sure. (I’d give anything to see the sales numbers for each format, though — anyone know how I can get those numbers?)
And the amazing thing is, no other indie band that powered to the top of the wheezing, near-antiquated album charts caused quite this level of discourse. Sure, we were irate about Vampire Weekend’s cultural posturing, but Spoon, those wily bastards, aren’t making statements — they just want you to shake your ass.
Which is to say, though The Suburbs may not make my top albums of the year — yes, it’s too long and overly ambitious and flawed — it is, in the end, lovable. And I’m enjoying talking about it with you, even if sometimes I just want to throw up my hands in disgust and wander off by myself for a while, to think about other things.
