Reflections on Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs”
I listened to The Suburbs for the first time when I was 12 years old. I was very convinced at the time that rock’n’roll was the best genre and a family friend had a large album collection of which she had to ease the size so that she still had room in her car for CDs. She told me specifically which albums she thought I would like more or like less, and with this one I remember her clearly saying “This is not something I think you’d like, but give it a try anyway.”
Since then, I think I have listened to this album 3 times. While I’ve actually listened to it at least a hundred times or more over the last decade, there’s been at least three distinct interpretations I’ve had: the one I had from ages 12–15, the second from ages 15–18, and the one I’m in now from 18–22.
On first listen, most of the themes didn’t really present themselves to me. I was vaguely aware of a powerful sense of alienation, a displacement. The sound made me feel like I could see a world that was brushable, one I could tiptoe across or perhaps even hold for a brief moment, but contact would never last. Embracing this world was impossible. There was only the option of a distant viewing, a stare from a veil of my own making, with a faint sense of nostalgia for times that never happened and an eternal mourning for the thing that never was. If 10 year old me were interviewed then, I doubt he’d be able to express this, and yet the feeling has imprinted itself so heavily upon me. The title track of the album sets this tone of unease, this unstable relationship between heaven and earth, within the very music. You don’t need the lyrics to reach this — I certainly didn’t need to, I couldnt understand them. The F# major chord that really does not belong there, for example, should be an F# minor — to make it fit even less, it’s often covered as F#6 where an F#b6 would be far more appropriate. The long, drawn out “-ming” in “screaming” holds an incredibly unstable position— a C# note! against a piece that’s ambiguously in B minor or D major! — that begs to be resolved, clashing in an incredibly beautiful piece of disharmony against the band playing behind it. The lead singer stands in open defiance against the coherent sound of Arcade Fire’s (incredibly large, it’s like an orchestra) backing instrumentals. I rejected things around this time for the first time. Politics opened up to me, as Tony Blair resigned from office around this time, and I began to start asking questions like every other bland coming-of-age article you’ve ever read. All alienation requires separation, separation is by definition alien. It was around this time that this album introduced me, paradoxically, to alienation. As reality, once my childhood toy, drifted apart from me, I moved off on a line of flight only to brush against it now or perhaps to hold it for a brief moment.
The album sat on my shelf for a good few years after that as I settled into being an edgy teenager with unpleasant habits, both social and hygienic. I raged against the dying light of my childhood by actually holding and questioning opinions for the first time, with such incredibly novel and unheard-of insights like capitalism is bad and dudes are hot. At this point, celebration of the incomprehensible veil of separation was something I intended to celebrate. I read fantasy books for some reason and fell in love with the Avatar series, I dabbled in hipster aesthetics but never so much as to actually fit in, I held controversial views — I was a professional disagreer. Such a perfect crock of shit for mental illness to flourish in, devouring my bullshit to poison my bloodstream, had never before been seen. To my viewpoint, I was both a gleaming star of promise and also a deep and brooding intellectual, yet the contradiction never struck me for all my supposed enlightenment. The Suburban War of this album had come, a celebration of all the destruction inherent in my desire to relish in alienation, to destroy myself for the sheer joy in denying others a label for me, “before your war against the suburbs begins, before it began”. The desire to cut my hair and never be seen again reached untold heights at this point, and the melancholy of this track’s simple yet aching lead guitar intertwining with mourning backing vocals shows this. A song filled with pride with violence, determination laced with a deep sadness, I was now priding myself on finally understanding the lyrics of this album as I listened again. I was new, I was different, I was impactful. If you said otherwise, you were wrong. I cut my hair, I never saw me again.
Eventually, this all caught up with me. I moved to a different country entirely for college and stumbled around as my desire to be something better clashed with my destructive impulse that I called a personality, once used against culture, politics, logic, and now against myself. Eventually, I had a mental breakdown and had to start over, “I was left standing in the wilderness downtown”, on my own personality and who or what exactly I was. We Used To Wait gave me a vehicle by which to carry and understand this tension. Refusing to touch or glance that world of childhood or of comprehension would no longer do, spitting at it was not good enough for anyone or myself now. I used to wait for it to come to me, as some times of childhood reality never came. Intolerable. Absolutely intolerable. This track has spoken to me in recent years primarily because it is the first track to truly make demands of the listeners. Some demands are quite mild — a staccato piano part of just two notes that just continues through most of the song, setting the tempo but also somewhat putting you at unease, the just slightly off beat snare drum that hits on beats 2 and 3.5 rather than 2 and 4, and the shout “Wait for it!” at the song’s climax. Wait for it, wait for it, you can be different but restrain yourself, would you? We all know you’re behind that veil, we all are, so simmer down a bit and make something of it. We all used to wait. I used to sign letters, I used to write my name, but perhaps that was the grand error I made this whole time. To destroy the self in the name of the self is not only contradictory, it is a snake eating itself. This is not to say that we simply resolve to let the ego fester, staring forwards at nothing. No, we have options, lines of flight and crisscrossing muddles. So much of my attempts to slash and burn at reality itself had been in a misguided attempt to cut my way out of the wilderness of my veil and find solid ground again, but it seems what I really needed was to wait for it and move again, walk through the pain.
While most reviews of this album seem to mention Sprawl as the grand finale, I’d prefer not to. For me, We Used To Wait holds much more resonance at this point. Trying to end this article with the end of the album itself would be premature — this is not the end of my life, or at least I hope not. The Sprawl, part II especially, is also completely unlike the rest of the album in terms of its sound. The lead singer for the entire album, Win Butler, is switched out for Régine Chassagne, while the guitars and drums are replaced with synths and drum machines, and the strings are gone entirely. Whereas the other tracks operated at the in-between of treble and bass, this one leaps up to the high end of treble. Sprawl II does not slow down or mumble its sadness down to the dirt, it proclaims it to the heavens. While Sprawl I lumbers itself to look the listener in the eye, Sprawl II presents the most vicious eye-contact, an unflinching stare with intensity untold. While Sprawl is not the last track of the album (that would be the reprise of The Suburbs), it represents a massive departure from the album’s themes as a whole. While the lyrics lend into the motifs of the album — suburbia and the tension of having the gall to exist in a world of conformity — it refuses to engage with the ground at all, the land of suburbia. We have spent an entire album, an entire lifetime, thus far swirling with energy or grinding to self-apologetic halts down on the surface level. Sprawl takes us to the absolute lowest point possible of the Flatland by having you talk to the cops who made this whole reality into the dire mess it is, only to then break you out with a dream of Mountains Beyond Mountains.
Perhaps this flight will be possible to me too, as I continue to progress in the quest of maturity, of realising just how stupid I am. Perhaps I can reconcile the Modern Man I am presently, apathetic and filled with critiques without substance, with the vivid and charged reality I once saw. Then again, perhaps reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Such emphasis is placed upon this word, after all, “reality” — perhaps we should stop paying so much attention to it. That certain indignity we feel when someone isn’t relating to reality as we see it or even outright lying, why should we care? Why does it bother us so much while we still enjoy fantasies, a controlled contradiction of reality as they are? This reality, this dream of living on Earth, may not be the useful tool we presuppose. We may be able to model it to near perfection with such searing analysis that all things present themselves to us in the future as simply information to be shown, as concealers of information rather than what they truly are. We may also be able to stop and listen to the harmony, and if that’s true, perhaps it’s time to begin my 4th listen. I suspect this album will follow me for a considerable portion of my life, if not most of it, not that it really matters how long exactly. The Suburbs remains, with houses built to change, and tomorrow means nothing. There is something wild in the night — can you hear it breathing?
