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February 8, 2010
BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #4: ARCADE FIRE - FUNERAL
Remember those ads for THE DARK KNIGHT: "Why So Serious?" I'd like to ask that question to Win Butler and his memorial to a burning arcade, but I'm afraid he might cheer up. Butler's seriousness - one part Eeyore, one part U2, one parts a Clash-esque group of freedom fighters with guitars instead of guns - has resulted in two loud, seriously interesting albums. As I noted re: NEON BIBLE, there's nothing here that reeks of irony or the silliness that most bands indulge even amidst talking about pain and memory.
A lot of people have read the first song, "Neighborhood #1: Tunnels" as some of post-apocalyptic nightmare. I don't: it seems like a nine year old boy try to talk a nine year old girl into running away with him and imagining the future. But what does he imagine in the future? Missing his parents. But the closing lines, where a "golden hymn" is capable of "purifying" his mind seems to be more mission statement than metaphor. We are dealing with someone who thinks music can change the world, who writes rock and roll polemics about being enslaved by modernity, and who harbors no mythologies about his childhood yet misses it dreadfully.
A lot of people think I'm taking their solemnity too seriously (haha), but I've yet to find any moment that seems like a throw-away. The second song compares a prodigalolder brother to a Russian dog who was sent to space to die. The Neighborhood is a prison, parents are wardens who we love nonetheless; the images of the neighborhood possess an otherworldly mystery: the shadows and streetlights hide secrets.
A while back I read a tome called GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE by some Rolling Stone writer, which did a pretty thorough (if typical) job of tracing the suburb from its earliest development and makes grim predictions (in 1993) that have more or less come true. If anything, that narrative seems a little familiar, and the Arcade Fire has done a nice job of complicating that. No matter how mechanical the reproduction of suburbs are, we will invest our "neighborhoods" with meaning nonetheless. We will memorialize its mysteries, amplify its secrets, mythologize its events, and make it the idyllic place it never was. And then we won't, which is why the words "Wake Up" are divested of their empowering potential: in this case, it's necessary to adjust, to feel things deeper, and to realize that its all a lie.
I admit my analysis of this album is sketchy. I really don't have the skills to do it justice. But if you can tell me that the last lines of the album harbor some hope, you'll defy me. Instead I think these guys are like Jeremiah-esque prophets, deeply invested in some tragedies that the rest of us ignore. Those lyrics:
I like the peace
in the backseat,
I don't have to drive,
I don't have to speak,
I can watch the country side
Alice died
in the night,
I've been learning to drive.
My whole life,
I've been learning.
| By Andytown | 7:28 PM