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Overview
Eric Eidelstein's The Suburbs explores this weird, utopic recollection of youth by comparing the album to suburban scenes in film and television, such as Blue Velvet, Mad Men, The Americans, and Spike Jonze's Scenes from the Suburbs. Through the close examination of film and televised depictions of the suburbs, both past and present, Eidelstein delves into the societal factors and artistic depictions that make the suburbs such a fascinating cultural construct, and uncovers why the album creates such a relatable and universal sense of reminiscence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501336461 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2017 |
| Series: | 33 1/3 Series |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Sales rank: | 568,090 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.70(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Who is Arcade Fire?
It was February in 2011 when Barbra Streisand took to the Grammys stage to present the award for album of the year. When she opened the envelope and announced Arcade Fire's The Suburbs she stumbled over the word "suburbs," as if, backstage, she had been prepped to declare other nominees Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, or Eminem as winners and was suddenly and inexplicably betrayed by the Recording Academy.
Arcade Fire were shocked too. Régine Chassagne, one of the Montreal-based septet's founding members, covered her mouth in awe while her husband Win Butler gave a quick, garbled speech. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Butler towered over the microphone as he thanked the Quebec city for housing him and his bandmates, his family, and concluded with an awkward but endearing, "We're going to go play another song because we like music." Chassagne shouted her own brief thanks, but in French, and the band proceeded to close the ceremony with a stirring albeit ironic (again, they were closing the evening) performance of "Ready to Start."
Grammy viewers were confused. Despite having two very different critically acclaimed records under their belt — Funeral and Neon Bible — and a loyal indie fan base, the public at large (and most likely Grammy viewers) didn't know much about Arcade Fire, or at least didn't expect them to beat out Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Eminem, or even Lady Antebellum for the coveted award. They could not have imagined that it would go to some indie band with too many members to count.
Naturally, what ensued is what always ensues when a horde of people are confronted with a pop culture phenomenon: an internet meme was born.
Out of the frenzy came a Tumblr account called "Who is Arcade Fire?" — a viral site that poked fun at those confounded by this relatively unknown indie band's rise to mainstream fame. The site, still up even though it hasn't been updated since 2012, features intentionally poorly photoshopped JPEGs, digs at the losing nominees, and, most spectacularly, a gem of a tweet from Rosie O'Donnell.
"album of the year ? ummm never heard of them ever"
While it became popular enough to pick up attention from Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, like all memes "Who is Arcade Fire" died rapidly, without an afterthought. Sure, it was succeeded by "Who is Bonnie Bear?" which similarly explored an indie band's transition to mainstream popularity after Bon Iver won the best new album award at the Grammys the following year, but the bit probably became hard to keep up when — two weeks after the Grammy win — The Suburbs leaped from No. 52 to No. 12 on the Billboard 200 list.
Overall, the meme's legacy may not be that significant (what meme's legacy is?), but the implications of Arcade Fire's win — especially considering they were by no means an overnight band but a group already respected for their small oeuvre — inevitably distinguishes The Suburbs from the band's earlier efforts.
One would think the Grammys propelled Arcade Fire into the public eye, but from the moment The Suburbs was released in August 2010, Arcade Fire were met with exceptional record debut numbers. The Suburbs debuted at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album charts, making it the second album of the year to come from an indie band to debut at the top spot. Vampire Weekend's Contra was the first.
In its first week The Suburbs sold over 156,000 copies — about 30,000 more than Contra. Eminem, who would later join Arcade Fire with his album of the year nomination, debuted in the number two spot of the year with 152,000 copies sold. It may not be feasible to enter the minds or the souls who crowded the Target and the Amazon sites to purchase the record, but something about The Suburbs must have resonated on a grand level — grander than either Funeral or Neon Bible, whose numbers, although not as impressive as The Suburbs, are still nothing to scoff at. They're not the first band to write about suburban anxiety, being young, but it's the way they do it, the way they are so raw with what the feel — this is what feels unique.
Arcade Fire arrived to the music scene with their 2004 debut record Funeral. As its title implies, the record is a meditation on death, grief, and how one is able to grow in the wake of tragedy. Funeral was inspired by several major losses: Chassagne's grandmother, Win and his brother Will's grandfather, and Richard Perry, another Arcade Fire bandmate's, aunt. Arcade Fire received raves for their highly personal and raw debut. Pitchfork's David Moore writes, "So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance."
Sincerity. From the get go Arcade Fire is distinguished by their contagious earnestness — even when they're at their bleakest — and their bold approach to diving into difficult, powerful, and extreme emotions headfirst. While the album received the warmest of reviews, including an A from Robert Christgau, the rawness of the record was off-putting to some. Even Christgau says, "And that's how the album goes — too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful." It seems like an apt descriptor for all of Arcade Fire's endeavors. They make take on weighty subjects, but they're unafraid to go in headfirst, to let themselves explore and feel it all.
There's a truth to Christgau's "too fond of drama" caveat, particularly when lyrics like "If the children don't grow up / Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up / We're just a million little god's causin' rain storms / turnin' every good thing to rust" exist. The band's greatest fans would call lyrics like these visceral, central to Arcade Fire's schtick: bringing hard-learned truths about weighty themes like life and death to the surface. On "Wake Up," Will Butler's vocals appear strained, almost as if he's summoning forth a teenage version of himself — a boy with greasy hair who sings emo tunes about love and loss in his parents' garage — even though he's actually a grown up. The song also features a choir of supporting vocals, transforming the rather melancholic tune into an uplifting one, enough so that it caught the attention of Spike Jonze, who used the tune for the trailer of his film Where the Wild Things Are, a goose bumps–inducing adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book.
Arcade Fire's biggest critics would probably highlight how fantastical in a roll-your-eyes kind of way the band can be, how they lack any sort of subtlety or restraint, are all about the so-called drama. They're intense — their first album has a no-nonsense title like Funeral, after all — and not everybody is about that life. A still mostly positive A.V. Club review from Noel Murray reads, "Funeral's layering of sound and wide-eyed posing can be overly dense, and though the band utilizes nice melodies and lively arrangements, the nostalgia-steeped-indie-rock-orchestra pool was pretty much drained before The Arcade Fire dove in."
Yet, the power of their first record clearly resonated, and three years later they brought the world their sophomore record Neon Bible, which debuted in the No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 92,000 records in its first week. Unlike Funeral, Neon Bible isn't as internal or even bombastic, and instead the band offers up pretty straightforward — without sacrificing the angst — commentary on everything from television to religion to the government (there's a song on it called "Black Mirror" that's title is the basis for the eerie TV series).
Released near the end of George W. Bush's presidency, Neon Bible is heavily critical of the US government, and in an interview with The Guardian Butler states, "You don't have to have an entire plan of how to withdraw from Iraq in order to say something about it. I'm not a fucking political planner, I don't know how to bail Bush out of this shit, but it doesn't make it any less evil." Neon Bible is as political as Funeral is personal. The record also feels more distinctly American, often Springsteen-esque, and not only because it consists of songs like "Keep the Car Running," which Springsteen happened to cover when he played with the band at a 2007 concert in Ottawa, and "No Cars Go." It's as preoccupied as Lana Del Rey is with cars and the open road — images that return in The Suburbs — but the record is also blatantly political, in a distinctly American way. It's a late 2000s staple, a record completely aware of the realities most Americans are facing: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a continuing post–9/11 distrust of the government's role in our lives, and an anxiety about the increasing role technology plays day to day.
Writing about the album in honor of its 10th anniversary, Kenneth Patridge at Billboard drew his own parallels to The Boss. "Springsteen himself wrote about senseless warfare ("Last to Die," "Gypsy Biker"), distorted reality ("Magic"), and the dehumanizing effects of mass media ("Radio Nowhere") on his 2007 album Magic, the last truly great thing he's done. Although Bruce ultimately paints a sunnier picture than Arcade Fire on Neon Bible, both albums capture life in the waning days of Dubya."
Neon Bible certainly marks a departure from the severe and intimate nature of Funeral — something that the band would pick up again with The Suburbs — but its existence asserts that they're not just one note, in terms of both the themes they wish to explore and the sounds they want to adopt. It also serves as well-executed interruption to what many fans and non-fans alike probably expected from the band's second effort, a continuation of the charged scene that Funeral brought forward.
Take "The Well and the Lighthouse," by no means a standout from Neon Bible, but a fun track nonetheless. It provides a simple narrative about a criminal at his darkest hour who is redeemed after given the opportunity to look after a lighthouse, to make sure ships don't wreck as they come to shore. It's a mundane story about a twisted redemption and — in addition to have a fable-like quality to it in the vein of Springsteen's writing — the track also almost feels like it was taken from a John Steinbeck story, even from Elia Kazan's adaptation of East of Eden, about a troubled young man who causes a lot of mischief and ends up working the land to gain his father's approval. It's an American tale, a parable for the American Dream perhaps, even though — ironically enough — the record was released shortly before the housing crisis. The contradiction in this — and Arcade Fire seems so fond of them — is that it is just a fable and the idea of everyone having a purpose in this country, of working hard to achieve financial success and happiness, is just a fantasy. The song offers up a sweet fantasy amidst a record more preoccupied with the many wrongs committed by the Western world.
Like any halfway decent band, Arcade Fire builds on itself, and the band's newer projects are always a culmination of their older works. We see ideas and images and sounds from before but there's also a freshness to each endeavor. That's not to say their growth is linear, that each new record is objectively better than the previous, but that there's a clear interest in going just a little bit deeper each time.
Before we move into The Suburbs, it feels important to have iterated what came before, how Funeral introduced a band's bold relationship with the bleakest of emotions, articulated them in 80s sounds reminiscent of The Talking Heads and The Pixies. Neon Bible widened their scope, had them looking outward, at ponderous topics like technology, surveillance, and, ultimately what it means to be American. The Suburbs unites these feelings and themes, and perhaps that is why it exploded. With it Arcade Fire may have — intentionally or not — delivered their most relatable work.
CHAPTER 2
What are the suburbs?
The Suburbs works alongside several pieces of media that all attempt to illustrate what our suburbs look and feel like, what the implications of suburbia are, and why so many of us share a collective unconscious, of sorts, when it comes to articulating the makeup of that special region that exists between the core and periphery. But talking about the suburbs, defining them, understanding their history, feels like an important first step in understanding what Arcade Fire is up to.
Suburbia is not universal. And while I'm certain Arcade Fire wants as many people as possible to feel something when listening to their album, it is essential to understand that a popular conception of suburbia is heavily colored by a Western ideology, and that this ideology was formed by and for a privileged population (white and wealthy), particularly in the earliest appearances of what we now know as the American suburbs. As romantic as the suburbs can be, as safe and warm and nostalgic as they can be, they are also inherently sinister, by no means a "universal" haven for all. In his book Screened Out cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard critiques this universal, and states, "Every culture worthy of the name comes to grief in the universal. Every culture which universalizes itself loses its singularity and dies away." The suburbs affirms universality through uniformity. Whether intentional or not, it demands a sameness among its inhabitants. It is in this that it is most dangerous, most also most alluring.
Arcade Fire may be capturing a specific suburban mood, one that may be familiar to many, but The Suburbs also offers critique. As the band would undoubtedly argue, The Suburbs is not a defense of urban sprawl, does not glamorize a certain privileged and exclusive youthful experience. There's romance in their record, which may only be possible coming from a place of privilege, from an experience where there is a certain safety one may feel growing up in the suburbs, but there's also something distinctly apocalyptic about the record too. It's never just one thing.
Spike Jonze's "Scenes from the Suburbs," a short film that accompanies the record, presents us with the expected: kids riding bikes, kids talking about sex, kids at house parties, etc. Then, there are the disruptions: a young man who suffers from PTSD after returning from a war, military figures populating the town, violence, fear, and heartbreak. Jonze shows that beneath the utopic exterior that makes up an understanding of the suburbs are several cracks. Perhaps it is the point where, as Leslie Jamison argues, "We feel sentimentality punctured. ... If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling — oversimplified and unabashedly fictive — then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt."
A bubble can only exist if people are left out, and that does not feel like the purpose of The Suburbs. As we delve into the images and sentiments that have come to be common symbols and signifiers of suburban living in American society, it's important to always keep in mind that this cannot be true for everybody, that the ideas expressed in the record are personal and not meant to be prescriptive or revealing of some absolute truth about a suburban experience. It's also important to understand an unintentional but still significant contradiction present in the album. There's an inherent privilege in the sentimental, in being able to look back with any sort of longing — even in being able to wrestle with an image of suburbia as a "love-hate" sort of environment. That's not to say that The Suburbs is a record about privilege, only that there's a certain privilege that must be acknowledged in looking at the album — and suburbia — with a longing for it.
"Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture; it is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of American society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness," writes Kenneth T. Jackson in his book Crabgrass Frontier, which systematically breaks down suburbia in America before the term was even used.
Jackson — who wrote Crabgrass Frontier in the 80s, as the suburban dream began to fall on its head — is quick to establish this phenomenon as uniquely American, highlighting how suburbs around the world aren't necessarily planned the same way. While many of us see our American suburbs as semi-urban areas with a strong middle- and upper-middle-class backbone where you move to for the good public schools, a product of the American Dream away from the city's debauchery, the same can't be said everywhere, particularly abroad. "In Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City, and Lima, the most degrading poverty exists on the outskirts, where flush toilets sewers, running water, and fire and police protection are virtually unknown." For some of these cities, and even some more Western ones like Paris, the city center houses the wealth. We can't generalize.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Suburbs 33 1/3"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Eric Eidelstein.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Track ListingIntroduction
1 - Who is Arcade Fire?
2 - What are the suburbs?
3 - Where do you kids live?
4 - What's up dog?
5 - Why do I have these headaches?
6 - Why are there people like Frank?
7 - Why are you so profoundly sad?
8 - Surely expulsion is not the answer?
9 - Should I move past the feeling?
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