There's actually several children in it
I’ve been slowly working my way into the newish Arcade Fire album, “The Suburbs,” and every listen is a process of what you might call letting go. That heavy thematic foreground – um, suburbs? Are you really going to talk about the evils of suburbs for a whole album? – is a problem for somebody who, though not very fond of suburbs as a place to live or get stuck in traffic in, genuinely loathes suburbia as a target of satire and smug critical harangues. I also suspect that my loathing of the the critical trope “suburbia” has become so widely shared (I mean, everyone hates American Beauty by now, right?) as to have emerged as a tired counterpart to the suburbia trope itself – which doesn’t let Arcade Fire off the hook; it just means the topic is so overworked that saying it’s overworked is also overworked.
So it speaks to Arcade Fire’s defining charms that they can tread into these barren fields and make you think they’ve discovered something to sing about. Their sensitive-ten-year-old approach is a sort of challenge – to make yourself un-jaded enough to bewail the suburbs all over again. And since they traffic more in sorrow than in smugness, and since they’re quite good at translating their naive disappointment into a sort of churchy beauty, they do force you to drop your sophistication and resistance and get a little sad for a while about the things they’re sad about, the suburbs or, on their previous album, the war. Arcade Fire creates muscular, lovely, and often majestic pop music precisely because their animating passions are so simplistic, so close to the heart and so far from the brain.
So this is the musical force working on me, tugging on my jacket, cajoling me in the voice of a ten-year-old boy – “Hey, mister…Hey, mister…” – to let go of my suspicion that these renaissancy Quebecers are trying to teach me a lesson I haven’t needed to be taught for a long time, as I reach the sixth track on Suburbs, “City With No Children”. The Arcade Fire spell is working. I’m letting go. I’m sitting in their hipster church, suspending disbelief. And then this verse comes along:
When you’re hiding underground
The rain can’t get you wet
But do you think your righteousness could pay the interest on your debt?
I have my doubts about it
There was a really terrible band in the 90s called Live, and this verse is pretty much exactly how that band was terrible. The last line, especially, mimics Live’s method for being terrible. (I can see the little shaven-haired lead singer for Live strutting around the stage with his hands on his hips and slowly shaking his head like Aretha Franklin as he answers his rhetorical question about the patently dubious thing any decent person would have doubts about by saying oh yes, I have my doubts about it, let there be no mistake about that.) But the second-last line, that rhetorical question, is the real buzzkill, the real spell-lifter. It’s hard to describe how bad this line sounds as sung. The rousing, anthemy set-up of the song, complete with hand-claps, prepares you to experience the terribleness not just as incidental but as definitive, as the climactic appearance of a hidden essence. When Win Butler tries to sneak the five syllables of “righteousness could pay” into a space where four syllables (and preferably four entirely different syllables) should to go, my heart sinks, every time. He’s obviously really committed to that awful debt metaphor, and he really wants to stuff the unsightly flab of that word “righteousness” into that tight spot, so there’s no explaining it away. He really means to say “righteousness could pay.” He really wants to pull off that unfortunate metaphor. And if the mangled meter isn’t enough to establish the seriousness of his commitment to whatever the hell these words are supposed to mean, he goes and answers the dumb rhetorical question that contains his bad metaphor. In that moment, I realize that my allegiance to Arcade Fire has been a fragile construct built on a combination of anxiety that they had it in them to say such a thing and relief that they had miraculously avoided saying it so far. But now that they’ve said it, so doggedly, so willfully, I can’t help thinking it’s what they’ve been trying to say all along.
This post pretty much exactly mirrors my feelings about the album and (sadly) the band. Nevertheless, I believe the new album is still something of an improvement over Neon Bible, which had even more just terrible lines— “mirror mirror on the wall, tell me where the bombs will fall,” “hear the soldiers groan, we’re goin’ it alone,” every line of “(Antichrist Television Blues)”.
But what “The Suburbs” really hammers home is that the relatively good writing of “Funeral” is gone forever. Now Win Butler’s just angrily attacking one vaguely leftist intellectual cliche after another, nevermind that his subjects are (as you note) so cliched that even complaining about their old chestnut status has become passe. There are still some good anthems mixed in, “Intervention” and “Sprawl II” being great examples of powerful songs with just embarrassingly bad lyrics. But no more singalongs for me.
— Drew · Sep 27, 04:25 PM · #
I’m pretty much in agreement. The line I always hated from Neon Bible (which I actually think is pretty good overall) was “Eating in the ghetto on a $100 plate.” Just way too on the nose.
I think that’s something than can normally get to work in their favor, though. As you alluded to at the beginning of your post, there’s an earnestnes about the facade that they bring (I mean, really, they dress up like American Gothic in their off stage life? Ok, if you insist…) that makes you want to forgive them their lyrical foibles.
I’m a fan of the band, but I’m nervous for the day that they indulge too much of this side of their personality and just throw out a stinker.
On the plus side: They really kept Regine’s voice in check in this album and the sweetness of it shines through in really effective ways. I love The Sprawl mostly because I can listen to her voice on it all day. The only other time I could really say that was In the Backseat.
— Dylan · Sep 27, 09:37 PM · #
I find I don’t like “The Suburbs” as much as “Funeral” or “Neon Bible”, but mostly because the band seems to have taken the idea of sprawl and applied it to a number of otherwise-great songs. “Ready to Start” and “Used to Wait” both get the long, slowed-down outro treatment, and I always want to skip to the next song before they finish.
I’m surprised that you only find them saying negative things about the suburbs, though. There’s a heavy dose of conflicted feelings apparent throughout the whole album. I see it more as Win Butler looking back on his time growing up in the suburbs, and even though politically and aesthetically he doesn’t find much appealing to the suburbs now, he’s puzzling over why his childhood memories of them still seem so rich.
— DM · Sep 27, 09:47 PM · #
Ditto the earlier comment. The lyrics on Neon Bible were beyond dreadful. But beyond that, I want to cut AF some slack.
Recent pop culture revolves around two opposite poles: authenticity and artifice. The forces of artifice (irony, snark, self-conscious appropriation, etc) are easy cop-outs. You’re not really putting yourself out there. You’re winking as you do whatever it is that you’re doing.
Not so with Arcade Fire. They really try and they really put themselves out there. And when they fail (as in the embarrassing lyrics that you point out), they fail.
The Arcade Fire have yet to put out a flawless album. The first album sounded fresh, but to my ear, the songs lacked confidence. In order to keep the listener’s attention, fully three songs have a tempo change in the middle. And the lyrics could be just as bad as anything on the Suburbs (When daddy comes home, you always start a fight / So the neighbors can dance in the police disco lights). Not as bad as Neon Bible, but still.
And there are great lyrical moments on the new album. I love how it wraps up with “If I could have it back / all the time that I’d wasted / I’d only waste it again / If I could have it back / I would love to waste it again.”
Art always has flaws. But as a whole, I find a lot to like in what the Arcade Fire has created.
— Sho Kuwamoto · Sep 27, 09:49 PM · #
I can’t tell if you guys dislike the lefty politics because they don’t work as music or because you dislike lefty politics.
— Freddie · Sep 27, 10:06 PM · #
FWIW, I’m a lefty. Well, in my hometown of San Francisco, I’d probably count as middle of the road, in that I dislike Bush and Nader equally.
I just think “eating in the ghetto on a $100 plate” sounds ridiculous. It’s like the kind of philosophizing about society that 19 year olds who grow up with rich parents do after they move to the poor hipster parts of town. “My Body is a Cage” is another example of teenage-level philosophizing.
— Sho Kuwamoto · Sep 27, 11:20 PM · #
Like so many pop music critics, you focus on language, and respond with language about the language. Which, of course, misses the point: It’s the music that moves us, transports us, captivates us (or, not.)
As for the suburbs, I guess it’s expected that an urban sophisticate such as yourself would feel this a worn out and cliched topic. I do not. The band’s take on the suburbs resonates for me. Oh, and I, for one, don’t hate American Beauty.
Hope you can pull your head out of our ass soon, and enjoy live and love and great music.
— jmaharry · Sep 28, 12:04 AM · #
Re: Live’s suckiness. “And hope is a letter that never arrives, delivered by the postman of my fear!!!” -Live.
Let it sink in and ferment, that suckiness. For starters, if it never arrives, it hasn’t been delivered by anybody, including the Postman Of Your Fear. Etc.
— Bat Dad · Sep 28, 12:32 AM · #
jmaharry – that’s actually a trenchant observation re music criticism and language. I’ve made it myself recently. I don’t think it holds for me and AF, though, because, I said, I’ve been actively digging their music since Funeral and intentionally ignoring their lyrics, combined with appreciating what the naive passions behind the not-always-bad lyrics infuse their music with, since Neon Bible. This is the dynamic that several people are talking about here. The problem with the verse I cite is how it topples the equilibrium by making it impossible to ignore the lyrics. The willingness, I mean, to be grossly unmusical in language and thus rubbing the listeners nose in a line that, on several different criteria, just shouldn’t have been written. I don’t want to push this too hard, of course, because the equilibrium I speak of is not general. It’s mine. But, still, I’m not going to apologize for liking smart lyrics in pop music, and listening for them.
Freddie – I don’t think worthwhileness of AF’s lefty politics is in play at all in any of these comments, nor with my post. Not only do I expect lefty politics in pop music, I welcome the less constrained humanism and romanticism that informs left politics as something like the meat and potatoes of popular art in the modern era. Maybe the dopiness/pomposity threshold is higher for people who share the politics, but that’s not what I find in the (almost exclusively lefty) critics I like best.
— Matt Feeney · Sep 28, 12:46 AM · #
Hmmm I think you are reading more implied critique into my comment than was intended— I was really just asking.
— Freddie · Sep 28, 12:54 AM · #
Freddie…in that case, apologies. Defensiveness retracted.
— Matt Feeney · Sep 28, 01:07 AM · #
If only Win Butler had grown up in the funky urban center of Houston, surrounded by museums, ethnic restaurants and gay cowboys, rather than the admittedly bland Houston suburb called the Woodlands. Maybe then he could have been spared all his pain, and we could have been spared his anemic, bathetic indie-rock.
— Mark in Houston · Sep 28, 03:08 AM · #
Describing anything in Houston as “Funky” is delusional.
— Dylan · Sep 28, 03:29 PM · #
I would like to confirm The Woodlands as a particularly unfunky, but not unpleasant, place to live. It explains a lot about the singer if that’s true.
— Kevin K · Sep 30, 04:10 PM · #