A universal suburb is almost as much of a nightmare, humanly speaking, as a universal megalopolis. — Lewis Mumford, “Suburbia—And Beyond,” The City in History
I
The strobes blinded the viewer as Arcade Fire performed their song “Month of May,” from the album The Suburbs, on the Grammy Awards Show in February 2011. The lights were meant to celebrate the excitement of Arcade Fire’s sound, but the production was so over-the-top it almost seemed somebody was out to conceal the song’s message in a show-biz blaze of arena-rock bombast.
From within the laser-beams, Arcade Fire’s lead singer Win Butler peered out, gazing over the crowd in Los Angeles’s Staples Center out into television land. In moments when you could see Butler through the spots, he was doing something different from your typical rock star: instead of basking in the glow, preening and prowling the stage, or making love to his microphone, he stared right back at you. Butler surveilled the lonely crowd from a penumbra of light. He seemed to sing about what he saw out there, especially among Arcade Fire’s most ardent fans: “the kids are all standing with their arms folded tight,” Butler noticed, when they should “come on and blow the wires away.”
Come on and blow the wires away. Was this just an age-old rock call to run wild in the streets, a call so familiar and reassuring that it wins Grammy awards? Were we back with the Stones and other street fighting men, were we returning to the Clash’s Garageland? Or was Arcade Fire taking us out toward a new horizon?
The performance of “Month of May” hurtled relentlessly forward that February 2011 evening, but the song also came close to being sucked into a vacuum, absorbed into the spectacle of the Grammys. On one level, it was almost entirely neutralized, this year’s latest flash of rock stars constellated on the stage risers. Still, as the band shot through the song, roaring with energy, a power spread, dispersing in all directions. This energy was the sound of something in eclipse, and yet also something new being born.
Almost immediately after Arcade Fire’s surprise victory at the Grammys for the 2010 Best Album of the Year, a backlash began. First there was bafflement, as in the now-infamous “Who Is Arcade Fire?” Internet meme. Then there was anger from certain quarters of the music industry. Hip-hop impresario Steve Stoute went so far as to take out a full-pageNew York Times advertisement to complain the win was fixed, in part because of prejudice against hip-hop. And soon enough, we may well see a backlash against Arcade Fire from within the original ranks of the band’s fans: the middle-class, indie-rock, Pitchfork.com audience of the very suburbs they sing of so powerfully on their 2010 record.
But negative reactions to Arcade Fire, I’d contend, originate from the very same quality of the band’s music that’s attracted established rock stars. U2, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and David Byrne, among others, like the group because Arcade Fire taps into a key rock legacy. They attempt to create the impossible dream of mass bohemia, pop revolution, and authentic connection via the mechanisms of consumer capitalist marketing.
In this way, the band strives to reconnect contemporary sounds to an old lineage. But a closer listen to The Suburbs, also suggests something else at work: the band’s music has, to my ears, a ghostly quality, as if its history has arrived filtered, measured, and, ultimately, repurposed. As much as this group links to a rock tradition (a strange tradition, one should note, of seeking to make a revolutionary break with tradition), The Suburbs is just as often about establishing distance from that past. Old music-hall piano on the title track mingles with the crunchy, robotic guitar of the Cars on “Modern Man” and “City with No Children” only to swoop into orchestral magnificence on “Rococo” and “Half Light II (No Celebration).” The album returns to tried-and-true jackhammer Ramones power chords on “Month of May” and “Ready to Start” then gives way to swirly New Wave songs such as “Empty Room” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”
The band does not abandon rock so much as play it through a kind of time-warped echo chamber. We hear the familiar bombastic sounds but as if through a long corridor below the arena. Above ground, on stage, the group’s storied live performances are in the grand rock tradition. Notoriously cathartic and chaotic, they are full of efforts to break with expectations, to blast through the wall between audience and performer, to discover a fresh space of expressive communion. But The Suburbs itself is an album about something else entirely: it explores hesitancy, isolation, a fearful sense there’s no free space in the world anymore, that there is now, truly, nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide. The band may be rocking out on tour, but the arenas are out off the interstate, surrounded by parking lots and gated communities, isolated from nagging problems surfacing in even the most affluent places. The Suburbs tries to leap over this chasm between live connections in performance and deadening anxieties of the larger world.
The Suburbs identifies a “suburban war” going on, but what it is exactly, and who is fighting, remains something vague, peripheral, a kind of real life drama just beyond the air conditioning, green lawns, and chirping crickets. Within the suburbs is the sensation of paralysis and detachment. What the album replays is Betty Freidan’s problem with no name, the deep alienation rampant in the very places of supposed success and fortune, of middle-class and upper-class safety and comfort—places such as the Woodlands suburb of Houston where Win Butler, and his fellow band member and brother Will, grew up. In the suburbs on The Suburbs, there’s only the feeling the personal has been cut off from the political.
To “blow the wires away” in the “Month of May” (the month that celebrates May Day, after all) is to try desperately to reach out, to get back, to shake oneself out of lethargy by destroying the existing infrastructure in hopes that something more real, tactile, meaningful, and humane lies beyond. The singer of “Month of May” must “start again,” even if it means a riskier world. Better to die and let the wind take your body away, struggling against the wires and blowing them out, than to be endlessly circling subdivisions and end up “shocked in the suburbs.”
“Month of May” is a wish. It’s not about achieving breakthrough, but rather it’s precisely about never quite achieving it. The singer and his audience may wish they were doing it in the road, moving their bodies in the wind, pumping fists in the air instead of keeping their arms folded tight; in reality, almost all the music on The Suburbs is about a feeling about to arrive. It never gets there—it has passed or it is coming—but in the moment, it is absent.
“I’m moving past the feeling again,” Butler sings on the very opening track of the album, as if something has already ended. “Wait for it!” he and band cry out about the rousing feeling of reaching a favorite chorus on their song “We Used to Wait.” But that chorus itself is not a summation—instead, it’s about waiting for the chorus. “First they built the road,” we learn in “Month of May,” “Then they built the town / That’s why we’re still driving around / And around and around and around and around / And around and around and around.” In the suburbs, and on The Suburbs, one is, Arcade Fire affirms, “lost in the sprawl / living in the sprawl.” The “mountains beyond mountains” here are not Paul Farmer’s endless challenges of overcoming poverty in the developing world, but rather “dead shopping malls.”
On that track, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” Régine Chassagne, co-leader of the group and married to Win Butler, pleads, “I need the darkness / Someone please cut the lights.” I wonder, did that thought cross her mind at the Grammys?
II
What is the contemporary connection between pop music and politics? On the surface, Arcade Fire practices a noble if conventional liberal politics. Chassagne herself is a Canadian expatriate from Haiti, and Arcade Fire donated ample funds to rebuilding efforts after the earthquake in 2010. The band’s approach echoes well-established rock politics of contributing funds, providing publicity, and spreading information via booths at concert venues. Arcade Fire now regularly gives a percentage of ticket prices (usually one dollar per ticket) to organizations such as Farmer’s Partners in Health, which aids impoverished nations in fighting disease.
The band is noble, but its members try to keep some space between their social activism and their music. As Will Butler, brother of Arcade Fire lead singer Win, pointed out to theWall Street Journal: “We try to leave art out of it a little bit. …We try to keep them a little bit separate because I think if they get too entwined, it can hurt the artistic process. Once we start making that album then I think we’re getting a little more preachy.”
What‘s intriguing about The Suburbs, however, is that it offers a different kind of politics, a far deeper and stranger politics that has roots in the bohemianism of early twentieth-century America, with its most widespread incarnation found in the 1960s. The whole New Left student movement of that period, inspired by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), focused on the conundrum of linking the personal to the political. Participatory democracy, as elucidated in the famous 1962 Port Huron Statement, was precisely an attempt to identify the alienation of middle-class Americans from larger political efficacy and to attempt to imagine procedural structures that might redress this problem. It was this linkage of self to society that was at the heart of so much of the decade’s political and aesthetic ferment.
And while punk rock and postpunk music and politics in the 1970s and 80s reacted against the failures of the 1960s in many (admittedly inchoate) ways, these cultural movements did so in the name of demonstrating how 60s activists came up short when it came to connecting personal experience to political action. What gave punk the fire in its belly was not its rejection of 1960s politics, but rather its effort to reassess and reshape the very search for authentic connections of the personal to the political.
Arcade Fire draws upon this lineage. Mentioning that quintessential punk political group the Clash, Will Butler explained to the Wall Street Journal he and the other members of Arcade Fire “really loved the Clash” because “their work evolved with the world around them.” The goal of their music was not to preach a certain political position but rather, according to Butler the younger, “It’s more about being engaged with the world around you and writing about all facets of things.” For Butler, “The world is very complex and we try not to oversimplify things with our descriptions of them.”
At the core of this complexity, as one listens to The Suburbs, is the difficult, fraught, but powerful desire for a transnational, cross-class politics. The album longs to make music a vector that connects middle-class kids to a much larger populace of impoverished people. Could, the album asks repeatedly, places such as the Woodlands outside Houston, site of Win and Will Butler’s engineered if bucolic youth, be linked to the favelas, shantytowns, and ghettos on the outskirts of the world’s megalopolises? In a sense, we all increasingly live in the suburbs now. Even city centers and the most rural of landscapes are wired in to this middle ground. There is indeed some kind of suburban war going on, and the question is how to draw out the links of solidarity in this space where rich and poor overlap, and where, for Arcade Fire, a kind of liberating wildness is endangered.
III
You always seemed so sure
That one day we’d be fighting
In a suburban war
Your part of town against mine
I saw you standing on the opposite shore
But by the time the first bombs fell
We were already bored
—Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”
Pray to God I won’t live to see
The death of everything that’s wild
—Arcade Fire, “Half Light II (No Celebration)”
Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through,” beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control.—SDS, Port Huron Statement
In a bizarre Canadian film from 2009 called The Trotsky, set in a suburban area of Montreal, the very city in which Arcade Fire found its voice as part of a fervent rock scene, a teenager named Leon Bronstein believes he is the reincarnation of Trotsky and sets off on a surreal John Hughes-gone-hammer-and-sickle quest to form a radical union at his public high school.
The school principal, played by Colm Feore, sporting a stern Lenin goatee, claims Leon’s attempt at revolution will fail because students don’t care. Leon himself replies the issue is not apathy, but rather boredom: a kind of purposeful numbing of young people’s yearning to care, to make their lives matter, and to change the world is what stands between the status quo and social transformation.
The dynamic of “Boredom vs. Apathy” is exactly what Arcade Fire address on The Suburbs. “Ready to Start,” for instance, finds the singer trying to keep his balance on a simple, propulsive, see-saw guitar riff. He’s getting accustomed to compromise, even to complacency, but he’s also uneasy. And from this discomforting uncertainty there begins to emerge a new path beyond The Trotsky‘s choice of boredom or apathy.
Win Butler tries to remove himself from this dynamic of accommodation. “All the kids have always known,” the protagonist of “Ready to Start” sings, “That the emperor wears no clothes.” But, frustratingly, they still “bow to down to him anyway / ‘Cause it’s better than being alone.” Butler wants something more than a feeling of paralysis in the face of what SDS called “the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life.” All the existing choices feel false, premade, well-trod. Even the superficial cynicism of the art-school crowd seems a dead end. For this rock ‘n’ roll singer, “If the businessmen drink my blood / Like the kids in art school said they would,” then the answer is not simply to stay “pure,” but rather to seek out the unknown, the truly wild.
Refusing a neat slot of rock star fame that is now hackneyed—an old history of pseudo-rebellion—the protagonist of “Ready To Start” wants to get back, deeper into the past, further back to his own suburban heritage. There, he will seek out a new beginning, a kind of re-beginning, in the sprawl. “I would rather be wrong,” he sings to everyone, “than live in the shadows of your song.” He rejects the rock stars who came before him, the record company execs seeking to cash in on his music, even the art-school indie crowd that demands that he stay DIY. Instead, recovering the memory of life in the suburbs, the very place everyone seeks to escape, he will try to find a true darkness.
As he sang on The Suburbs’ title track, the time has come to “move your feet from hot pavement and into the grass.” This is the place where, Butler hopes, “My mind is open wide / And now I’m ready to start.” Here, even though “You’re not sure,” still “you open the door / And step out into the dark,” because “Now I’m ready.”
This isn’t back to the future, but a kind of future found in the backwaters of the past. It’s not a getting back to roots, a la the Beatles. Instead, it’s a getting back to what Win Butler refers to as “All those wasted hours we used to know.” It’s a return, a recovery, and most crucially a remaking of the open, bored spaces of middle-class suburban adolescence as a fertile (and furtive) seedbed for change. What a place to turn, but it’s there Butler and band discover an energy, an opening, a darkness on the edge of town, a magical wildness where city meets country, where the “distant stars” of cities collide with the pure darkness beyond. Surprisingly, from there, in the margins of affluence, a revolution might spring forward.
How, though, one might ask? “Rococo” turns a critical eye on “art school kids.” “They seem wild but they are so tame,” Butler sings of middle-class aesthetes trying to stay pure, untainted by complexities of the modern world. “They’re moving towards you with their colors all the same / They want to own you but they don’t know what game they’re playing.” The art school crowd doesn’t have the answer. With “their arms folded tight” they miss the opportunity to be free. “I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light,” the voice of The Suburbs sings on “Month of May,” “But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”
Nor is 60s rock history a place to turn. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” might be about many things, but its references to San Francisco connect Arcade Fire to the counterculture’s Summer of Love dream of social revolution. Except, as Butler sings, “Now that San Francisco’s gone / I guess I’ll just pack it in.” Instead, he decides he wants to “wash away my sins / In the presence of my friends.” For, “Even in the half light / We can see that something’s gotta give.” Butler sings “You and I, we head back east / To find a town where we could live.” Goodbye 1960s. And as “we watched the markets crash,” it all comes into focus, “Some people say / We’ve already lost / But they’re afraid to pay the cost.” The music shifts into a soaring, breathtaking, Big Country chorus. “For what we’ve lost / Pay the cost / For what we’ve lost.”
A history is ending here. The history of the twentieth century, for one thing. The history of the Old Left and the New Left, and all the sectarian lefts between. “Though we knew this day would come / Still it took us by surprise,” Butler muses, as much to himself as to his bandmates and his audience on “Half Light II.” Now, “In this town where I was born / I now see through a dead man’s eyes / One day they will see it’s long gone.” For Butler, the little light that lingers from this death is a kind of darkness, once again. A good kind of darkness. A soothing, life-affirming, body-soaking, group-binding, individually-liberating darkness. “Oh this city’s changed so much / Since I was a little child,” he sings, driving away from San Francisco, “Pray to God I won’t live to see / The death of everything that’s wild.” A scream right after that lyric, just a little yelp, affirms something wild still lurks out there in the dark—and in Butler and band, too.
But what is this wildness? It’s the same thing as in The Trotsky, a film that cares little about twentieth-century internecine leftwing political conflicts, but means rather to rework this history, transgressing its taboos, its genre boundaries, rules, and sides. There’s a scene in The Trotsky at which the kids are on their way to a “Social Justice Dance.” Marching through suburbanesque streets of Montreal to music that sounds like it could have come right off an Arcade Fire album, we see young Black Panthers fall in step with Zapatistas and Chinese communists and Sandanistas and Cuban guerillas, all in costume. It’s a willy-nilly pastiche of radical icons who care not about who sided with whom in revolutionary struggles of yore. Instead, they want to dance by seizing history for their own wild devices. They want to snap out of their boredom without a care for carefulness.
Though Arcade Fire never comes close to mentioning the specter of communism on The Suburbs, there is some kind of war, whether real or figurative, going on: a “suburban war.” Which is to say there is a struggle going on to wake up (a title to one of Arcade Fire’s most beloved songs on the album Funeral), to be alive, and, perhaps most of all, to connect with others in an illumination of collective solidarity. It should come as no surprise then that one high school class Win Butler did well in was a course on communism. “In high school,” brother Will Butler told Rolling Stone, “he was always bad at history. But he took one class on Communist China that triggered him. He got an A, because it was within the circle of light.” Or perhaps of that wild darkness.
The point is not that Arcade Fire calls for a cultural revolution, just as it’s not that The Trotsky calls for a permanent revolution. Accurate history is not the goal of these popular artworks. What fuels both this album of great sophistication and this film of silly brilliance, is clarity that the old politics no longer matter to a new generation of middle-class kids. Communism is only a placeholder here for a belief in self and global transformation that seems gone, out of reach, forever past. Communism is equated here not with historical materialism or Marxist analysis or a faceless, Orwellian bureaucracy. Rather, communism is a faint dream of wildness, of the feeling of getting free oneself as part of a larger collective liberation. In the darkness, communism’s history is getting recrunched into a useable past as young people search for new kinds of solidarity.
As the sharp-edged U.S. punk-indie-rocker Ian Svenonius argued in his odd little 2006 pink book The Psychic Soviet (get it? Mao’s Little Red Book turned pink), it’s the psychological loss of an alternative to neoliberal capitalism after the fall of the USSR in 1991 that hovers over the lives of middle-class youth. It’s also one thing that links them, spiritually, culturally, and perhaps (though not yet) economically and politically, to the far more profound suffering of the world’s impoverished populations. Svenonious’s history is all wrong, just as The Trotsky‘s is, and just as history on The Suburbs is being reexamined and recontextualized, but The Psychic Soviet joins this murky pursuit of refashioning a useable past. Communism here is a far cry from a coherent political program; instead, it’s a stand-in for an alternative. It’s a cultural imaginary of solidarity, a belief that some kind of common cause across disparate class positions, places, pasts, futures is still possible—maybe has never been more possible.
If the 1990s was what cultural critic Greil Marcus called “a land of no alternatives,” on The Suburbs, as in Svenonius’s strange book and Jacob Tierney’s weird film, something is slowly stirring. “We watched the end of the century / Compressed on a tiny screen,” Butler sings on “Deep Blue.” “A dead star collapsing and we could see that / Something was ending.” On The Suburbs, this old history is gone. But only because it is getting processed into something new, something that lingers just beyond the screens and wires of the Internet Age. “Here in my place and time,” Butler sings, “And here in my own skin I can finally begin.” At the passage from one epoch to another, he seizes the present in all its sensual immediacy. He will “let the century pass me by, standing under a night sky” (there’s that good kind of darkness again). As the song blossoms out from its simple acoustic tracks to a pulsating throb of electricity, not only is the past gone, but so too, for Butler, “tomorrow means nothing.” There is now, at long last, for a moment at least, only the present, with its simultaneous casting off of all other time and collapsing of history and future into a singular prickly aliveness.
The Suburbs shows Arcade Fire isn’t interested in socialism in any programmatic or coherent way. The album sticks to an individual’s meditations on himself and those around him. He’s guarded, keen on recognizing situations, aware of ironic twists and turns. The Suburbs most of all expresses a socialism of the spirit, a desire to locate freedom, to retake wildness from the mechanisms that feign wildness as a means of exerting ever greater control. This is not a search for community so much as a search—frustrating, confusing, but empowering—for a robust solidarity, a deep connection through which individuals might feel liberated in a collective turn beyond the existing dominant of in-betweens. Beyond the surburbs, more suburbs? Or something else? Maybe even a home? Maybe even a true place to thrive? We’re not sure yet. As Butler describes on the almost spoken-word track “Sprawl I (Flatland), “The last defender of the sprawl said ‘Well, where do you kids live?’ / Well, sir, if you only knew what the answer’s worth / I’ve been searching every corner of the earth.”
It’s this search that The Suburbs returns to repeatedly. It’s what links Arcade Fire to a deeper rock history. It’s what, at some level, won them a Grammy (yes, yes, the music is great, the band is great, but there are deeper energies at work in Arcade Fire’s music). At the same time, this is what had to be hidden in the light of the show-biz performance at the Grammys. The win confirmed die-hard dreams of classic rock and punk narratives, but Arcade Fire also seethed with another message: that the times were a-changin’ from the typical message that the times are a-changin’. There was a glimpse of a new wave of solidarity and transformation. There was the feeling in the music that out there, in unlikely corners of the suburbs, there might be new sensibilities that can, perhaps one day, bring together the subdivisions with the subdivided.
“Hey, put the cellphone down for a while,” Butler sings out in falsetto on “Deep Blue.” He whispers, his words buried, almost totally lost in the song’s pounding drums and electronic buzz. His message slips right past you in the chorus’s nonsense chant: “La, la, la, la, la.” But there it is, if you want to listen: “In the night there is something wild / Can you hear it breathing?” Then he continues, pushing onward, “And hey, put the laptop down for a while / In the night there is something wild.” Then, placing us with him, ready to start, at the beginning of something that hovers, just within grasp: “I feel it,” Butler mumbles, “It’s leaving me.”
IV
Sometimes it never came
Still moving through the pain.
—Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”
It’s this desire for wildness that The Suburbs seeks out: the darkness beyond the sprawl, the twinkling stars of the heavens (and the manmade stars of the cities). It’s a kind of effort to name the problem that has no name and to gesture to liberating alternatives that cannot quite be fully articulated and envisioned, never mind actually brought into being.The Suburbs is an album about how a certain affluent, if increasingly imperiled, sector of society (young kids in the suburbs) still haven’t found what they’re looking for. Like Arcade Fire, who vocally supported President Obama’s election, many of these kids thought they might have located a political answer for their deepest longings in the election effort of 2008, but now they are not so sure. Measuring the past, looking to the future they find themselves caught in the present, trying to make sense of its confusions.
In this context, Arcade Fire’s album evokes ways in which a suburban upbringing leaves an imprint even on those who have escaped to hip quarters of the city or to other, less alienating places. The Suburbs makes music from the suspicion that despite these temporary escapes, there may be no permanent alternatives to the suburbs. Both its physical and its psychic sprawl are too all-encompassing now, even as, after the real estate bubble burst, there are miles upon miles of cul-de-sacs turned into ghost towns.
There must be a confrontation with the legacy of suburbs, Arcade Fire’s album suggests; and this reckoning implies, at least in music, that while history may have ended, there’s still a kind of hope. For at the edges, on the margins, in the suburbs and in the shantytowns, there’s a kind of humming, just beyond consciousness. Perhaps it’s the sound—a musical sound—of history getting reshaped, of a wild unleashing of individual and collective freedom roaring back into the picture.
It was just this energy erupting from the margins that one glimpsed—and more importantly, heard—after Arcade Fire won their Grammy award. Taking to the stage in the last few minutes of the show, the band launched into “Ready to Start,” singing of how they were caught between businessmen drinking their blood and art school kids. On screen, the band’s performance was interrupted by scrolling credits and advertisements for sponsors. But though broken off visually, the song continued to echo in the background, as if competing sonically with all the signs of business as usual. Did it leave an impression in the lives of viewers? Were they shocked out of the suburbs by the band’s surprise victory?
V
As if speaking to this question, Régine Chassagne sings on the last, rousing track of The Suburbs that there are those who would demand her band, “Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” And even if she allows that “These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,” nonetheless “late at night the feelings swim towards the surface.” For Chassagne, what’s surfacing is a lurking sense of solidarity with others. That’s what is “calling at me, ‘come and find your kind!'” Solidarity, if not forever, then perhaps in the future, or perhaps right now.
American cultural critic Lewis Mumford argued that in the decades after World War II, suburbs had “become the favored home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all-powerful.” This was a world in which “direct contact and face-to-face association” had become “inhibited as far as possible.” In this new, motorized, fragmented living arrangement, a “sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” since “all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.”
In the suburbs, Mumford believed, ultimately “every part of this life, indeed, will come through official channels and be under supervision.” In the mechanized, mass communications empire, society would be “untouched by human hand at one end” and “untouched by human spirit at the other.” The people who live in suburbs would become the happy robots that C. Wright Mills feared would replace democratic citizens. Or they would merely be left to rust. Or both.
But as we know from that seer of rock ‘n’ roll, Neil Young, rust never sleeps. Arcade Fire might agree with Mumford, and yet in the half light, The Suburbs senses something else going on too. True, in a place where, as Mumford put it, “we have sold our urban birthright for a sorry mess of motor cars,” Win Butler sings of how “first they built the roads, then they built the town.” Yet in the song “Wasted Hours,” as they drive endlessly around the suburbs to a loping acoustic-guitar and electric-bass riff that sounds like it wandered off the Beatles’ White Album, what Arcade Fire notice most prominently “are kids in buses longing to be free.” This may be a prison without walls, but for Butler and band, it’s also where they discovered “wasted hours before we knew where to go and what to do, wasted hours that you make new, and turn into a life that we can live.”
In the bored spaces of youth in suburbs, there is a hidden opening to a politics that links middle-class kids to people everywhere. The freedom of cloistered seclusion, The Suburbshints, could be a kind of portal—an escape hatch—to a quest for larger, universal freedoms. For among the sprawl, in the brush, at the edge of the playground, under the overpass, where the pavement meets the grass, there are still kids on bikes, spinning their wheels, making out in parks, shielding their eyes from the glare of a policeman’s flashlight, running away even when “we don’t know why.”
On The Suburbs, Arcade Fire plays rock music that harkens back to a now long-running tradition of adolescent restlessness. But the band also reconstructs that legacy for the present moment. We hear kids running into darkness, well beyond the sparkle of existing illuminations. Perhaps they will make it through the twilight to something new, to a more solid footing for solidarity. If so, I will follow.