I read an article in the NY Times some years back that
when the makers of Sesame Street released Seasons 1 and 2, they had to attach a
warning label that it is not suitable for young audiences.
Virginia Heffernan writes, “The masonry on the dingy
brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a
dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast
track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t
exist.” (“Sweeping the Clouds Away”, NY Times November 18th, 2007)
“The Suburbs,” the newest album from the Montreal—via
Haïti and Houston—band Arcade Fire, is brought to you by the letter M. The
album is full of alliterations surrounding the letter M. They seem to come in
three-syllable units: Modern Man, Millionaire, Month of May, Mountains beyond
Mountains.
We've lost our innocence. We've lost our meaning. The
Arcade Fire has its finger on the pulse of this quickly fleeting and fading
heart of people in the First World West.
"This place has changed so much since I was a little child. Pray
to God I won't live to see the death of everything that's wild." –City
with No Children
I still remember an ad campaign for the General Motors
Company. They were hawking a newer, bigger and better version of the Suburban Futility
Vehicle, the Yukon Denali, evoking images of nature and wildness. Their
tagline: "It's not more than you need, just more than you're used
to." Not too long after GMC declared itself bankrupt.
The bubble burst.
"When we watched the markets crashed, the promises we made were
torn." –Half Light II (No Celebration).
lll
"Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity; a chasing after the
wind." –Ecclesiastes 1
Qoheleth, the Teacher and writer of Ecclesiastes wrote these words well over 2,000 years ago. They still ring true. The Hebrew word he uses over and over again is hevel–translated smoke, vapor, steam, cloud–something that doesn't last; something you can't hold onto. Another way to translate it today in this market is bubble. The dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and now the oil bubble. Vanity of Vanities, everything is a bubble and bubbles always burst! There is nothing to hold on to anymore, nothing that will last.
“Hope that something pure can last.” –We Used to Wait
Arcade Fire redefines hevel
in this album as sprawl, the house of hubris built by those who bought the lie
that "it's not more than you need, just more than you're used to." The
sprawl has been brought to us by cheap oil prices allowing for single drivers
in massive vehicles on 4 lane hi-ways.
“First they built the road, then they built the town. That’s why we’re
still driving around and around and all we see are kids in buses longing to be
free.” –Wasted Hours
Sprawl is perhaps one of many symptoms pointing to a
larger illness in society today. We feed chickens so much food that they cannot
stand up. Cows are stacked upon cows in order to supply our demand. Most of the
food in our supermarkets is made with genetically modified organisms. Is
anything real anymore?
“Strange the new half-light can make a place new, you can’t recognize
me and I can’t recognize you. We run through these streets that we know so
well, and the houses hide so much. But in the half-light none of us can tell
they hide the ocean in a shell. Our heads are just houses, without enough
windows. You say you hear human voices but they’re only echoes.” –Half Light I
Even though the world is getting smaller, more and more
people are separated. Garages are attached to houses now so that you don’t have
to talk to or see your neighbors. Let us not forget that one of the chief ways
that we talk about sin is in language of separation: from God, from each other,
from the world.
“All the kids have always known that the emperor wears no clothes but
they bow down to him anyway ‘cause it’s better than being alone.” –Ready to
Start
We’ve bought into the fake empire and now bow down to the
wrong idol so as not to be alone.
lll
To make the album, Arcade Fire laid down tracks on a
24-Track Tape, pressed it onto vinyl and then recorded it to a digital location
where from they burned cds and made a "Deluxe Digital Package" for
instant download. It is humorous that out of that whole process the word
"package", connoting something tangible that you can hold in your
hands, describes the digital life of the album.
But the album is something you can hold in your hands. It
carries meat and substance. To me it takes their seminal song "Wake
Up" (Funeral, 2004), and pitches
a tent with its themes and meaning: Wake Up! Life is slipping through your
fingers; "listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it
life?" (Mary Oliver). Rococo, the 4th track, is the first real and
noticeable echo to "Wake Up."
"They will eat right out of your hand, using great big words that
they don’t understand they’re singing rococo rococo rococo rococo….They seem
wild but they are so tame" –Rococo
Even its music resonates–though in a muter way–there is a
graspable lift within the polysyllabic assonance and consonance of the songs
title: rococo rococo rococo rococo ro-coco,
RO-CO-CO! What does it mean? I don't know, but I can feel it when I listen
to it. And I like it, even if it is a destruction of what we’ve built up.
“They build it up just to burn it back down.” –Rococo
Musically, this album is tops. The devastating string
arrangements by Owen Pallett on Half Light I and its response in Half Light II
are compelling. The album’s other part one and part two duo, titled Sprawl,
offers one of the other points of notice. Régine’s powerful yet not forceful
voice.
Régine Chassagne sings with great vitality against the
threat of suburban settling (and some would say borrowing from Blondie’s Heart
of Glass).
“If the world’s so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl.
Living in the sprawl, dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
and there’s no end in sight, I need the darkness someone please cut the
lights.” –Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
The lyrics, along with Régine’s haunting voice, are an
echo in the tradition of laments. It should be noted that the sub-title of the
song, Mountains Beyond Mountains, is also title of a book about Paul Farmer, a
doctor who provided medical care to people who could not afford it, most
notably in Haiti, Régine’s home country (see Haiti from Funeral).
My favorite line:
“They heard me singing and they told me to stop. Quit these
pretentious things and just punch the clock.” –Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond
Mountains)
No. Thank you. As Wendell Berry writes, “do something that
doesn’t compute” (Mad Farmer Liberation Front).
Arcade Fire attempted and succeeded in building something
tangible, something we can hold in our hands: a full album with substance and
death as well as just plain enjoyable music. Is it as good as Funeral or as deep as Neon Bible? Not in the same way, but it makes its own way
and one worth taking. It is an aural and physical reminder that life lies
beyond what we possess, what possesses us and its always a good time to just
waste time. As Annie Dillard says, “Don’t save and afternoon, spend it. You
can’t take it with you. Go into the gaps.”
Lastly, this is an album to exiles from the location of
exile. Walter Brueggemann noted that people of faith are exiles in this world
in Cadences of Home. None of us is home and we all feel it.
“The
last defender of the sprawl said, “well where do you kids live?” Well sir, if
you only knew what the answer is worth, I’ve been searching every corner of the
earth.”
–Sprawl I (Flatland)
lll
“People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.”