Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Merge, 2010) and other ephemera
The Part About Arcade Fire #1
The Suburbs is an infuriating album for a variety of reasons. It sits in an awkward place in Arcade Fire's discography between their youth and nostalgia oriented chamber pop material and their later dancier, synthier work. It's lyrical content both feels like a ode to growing up delivered from an older couple glaring at you from their mansion's porch. It also won the Grammy for album of the year in 2011. It's a small blip in the grand scheme of rock and roll, especially for the enlightened who could not possibly give a shit about the Grammys, but it felt like the first nail in the coffin for the hipster. This article from The Ringer details the aftermath better than I could, though I have fond memories of infuriating myself by reading the "Who is Arcade Fire?" Tumblr blog. Multiple articles and entire books have been written about The Suburbs, actually. The Grammy win was a big cultural moment for a lot of young music fans at the time, myself included. It felt validating, like the good guys finally won on the grandest stage of them all. There's something a little pro wrestling to it - the underdogs from the independent territories getting called up and triumphing over Corporate Evil on the biggest platform they could. It was inspiring. But what happened after that? What was Arcade Fire's, and this period of indie rock as a whole's, place in cultural history?
A funny thing to write about, I know. A lot of the previous essays on this blog have been about the concept of authenticity, in as much that it's a bullshit concept that ultimately doesn't lead to better art. In that context, it feels odd to try to make the point that the hipster was killed by mainstream acceptance - after all, that was what those dudes in tight pants seemed mad about the whole time.
I'm going to get a little Inside Baseball here, so bear with me for a sec. I've been working on this essay for months because I haven't really figured out exactly what I want to say or how to say it. This all started back in December 2020 when I had two glasses of wine and listened to Neon Bible for the first time in years. I will go on record as saying that Neon Bible is probably the best Arcade Fire album. It's got it all: reverb, unrest about a growing war with the Middle East over religion and oil, and a whole slew of songs about the anxiety of growing older and trying to reckon with how your current traumas are going to affect your future self. It put me in a real Arcade Fire - and by proxy, all of the other indie rock I liked in high school - mood. Funeral is more of the same, so I wanted to look forward in their career to see where they went next.
Before working on this essay, I think I could sing you about half of The Suburbs with pitch perfect accuracy but couldn't even hum you the general idea of the other half. Even after a couple of attentive relistens, a large chunk of the album doesn't fully click for me. Arcade Fire seemed very reluctant to repeat themselves too much on this album. Funeral and Neon Bible hit very similar notes musically. Both are indie rock/chamber pop hybrids that fuse traditional indie rock instruments (guitar, drums, bass, piano) with more left-field sounds (hurdy gurdy, mandolins) but even beyond that, both feel epic. There's a lot of nostalgia doing heavy lifting there, but Arcade Fire intentionally made their songs sound like the sense of awe you have as a child. When you're a kid, everything seems bigger; the hills in your neighborhood feel like mountains, the hours stretch on for days, and every small event feels like a complete sea change. Arcade Fire's first two albums absolutely live in that feeling.
Everyone has to grow up sometime, even indie rockers. Growing up isn't suddenly becoming a fully formed mature adult, though, and Arcade Fire recognized this. The Suburbs is rough. It's more the sound of puberty than the sound of maturity. There's a reason songs like "Deep Blue" and "Wasted Hours" didn't stick with me into adulthood -they're too self serious. The Suburbs, in part, feels like a reaction to the expectations that Arcade Fire created for themselves. You want kids swinging from powerlines? The Suburbs exists in a city with no children in it. They're all acoustic guitar and rambling, wordy odes to adulthood, not sweeping symphonies of color and youth.
The Suburbs represents more than just a change in style and lyrical content - it marks a new era in mainstream indie music: the dawn of the Self Conscious Indie Rocker. Well, not really a new one, but one that was embraced by mainstream audiences more readily than Arcade Fire's more unabashedly wide-eyed, naïve early records. On the surface, this seems like nonsense. Mainstream American culture decided it hated hipsters because of their overreliance on irony and their disenchantment with post-Clinton America. While The Suburbs is not an ironic album, it does smack of the same nihilism that irony does.
Arcade Fire would later embrace irony outright, but The Suburbs took a different approach - outright disdain for their audience. We'll get back to that later, but it's worth noting that Arcade Fire's first brush with mainstream success and acceptance (and, arguably, indie rock's first brush with those things as well) came from an album that actively talked down to the same people that bought their first two records. It's a very cartoony view of maturity, honestly. It's almost a reflection of a child being told "because I said so" by their parents and thinking that that is the peak of what being an adult is. There can't possibly be anything more adult that telling a child that they're wrong, right?
Reflektor, Arcade Fire's fourth album, is their first album in full on Mature Mode. It's impossible to talk about Reflektor and Arcade Fire's trajectory as a band without talking about it's producer, James Murphy, and it's impossible to talk about James Murphy without talking about the dissolution of LCD Soundsystem.
The Part About James Murphy
I watched the entirety of both LCD Soundsystem's final concert and the accompanying documentary Shut Up and Play The Hits back-to-back and came to a singular conclusion: James Murphy is almost singularly to blame for the advent of the Self Conscious Indie Rocker. The documentary revolves around a sit down interview between James Murphy and journalist Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman as an interviewer choice is almost too on the nose. His 2003 travelogue Killing Yourself To Live is two concepts in one: a story of Klosterman visiting the sites of famous deaths in rock and roll and a screed on the nature of authenticity in the unyielding, blank face of irony. Klosterman sees himself as largely above the then-current class of hipsters (including, one would assume, a young James Murphy) who he characterizes as not being able to enjoy anything intrinsically. Everything is shielded and couched in a second meaning. More importantly, everyone besides Klosterman is doing it wrong.
The LCD Soundsytem creation myth is as follows: James Murphy was a successful DJ in New York City. His hallmark was playing songs that didn't sound like they should go together. He would play a Stooges record next do a dance tune, or would drop Liquid Liquid in the middle of a set and make sure to play the long parts of "Cavern." Then, one day, he heard a younger DJ playing the same tunes at a club. "Those are my songs!" he says. Then he has a crisis. That crisis, when set to music and couched in the ironic distance of an author self-insert character, becomes "Losing My Edge." This is the existential crisis of the tastemaker, the perpetual race against time. By creating no value and using art created by others as the basis of your personality and self worth, you're setting an inherent clock on your time in the limelight. Tastemaking is a very "adapt or die" way to live your life, especially when your entire formula is finding good songs from the 70s. If that's what your self worth is hinging on, what do you do when someone younger than you figures out the formula?
LCD Soundsystem's self-titled (including the bonus tracks from the associated singles, which is the version most widely available) is a direct reflection of that existential dread. It sounds a bit like I imagine an early James Murphy DJ set would sound - there are flirtations with punk, krautrock, whispering dance music, and a whole lot of shoutouts to the artists that Murphy likes. It's honestly a confusing listen without the context of Murphy's life as the backdrop, but it reveals who Murphy truly is: a man who is scared of aging into irrelevance.
Murphy is the ur-example of a type of person who doesn't exist anymore: the True Hipster. The concept of being a "hipster" has been folded into mainstream society and has bent so far back around that they're uncool; nobody wears chunky glasses anymore, nobody wears tight pants anymore, and no one cultivates their entire personality based on their beard length and record collection. I say "no one," which I know is technically incorrect, but society doesn't reward people for doing that anymore. The countercultural currency of being a hipster ceased to be worth anything the moment people figured out the formula. Anyone can wear tight pants and buy a TV on the Radio CD if they want to feel the warmth of the hipster aura, so why shouldn't they?
That's what's always made hipsters an easy punching bag: it's just stuff. I've seen a viral tweet (or seven) that said that men traditionally have hobbies that revolve around purchasing and consuming things; it's a a way to cultivate a personality without actually creating anything of value. It's a very capitalist way of looking at hobbies, sure, but when making purchases becomes your metric for self-worth, what happens when someone else makes the same purchases as you? Hipster credibility relies on the extremely thin veil of being a cool, mysterious person who knows something that you don't. The irony of it all is that the secret knowledge isn't really that hard to find or even that cool in the first place.
Eventually LCD Soundsystem shaped itself into something resembling a real band with a real sound and a real mission, but that's not as important right now. What is important is their end. One final blowout concert (that happened 10 years to the day that I'm writing this) at Madison Square Garden. One last four hour party featuring (almost) their entire discography and special guests. The concert isn't as important** as the apparent finality of it. Most bands don't get to control or plan out their breakup, it just happens one day. Murphy, fed up from getting sick while touring and missing the "real" parts of his life, decided to make the MSG show the gig to end all gigs.
It wasn't the last one. You probably know that. LCD Soundsystem reunited six years later, resumed touring, and put out a fourth album. In between all of that Murphy produced the fourth Arcade Fire album, Reflektor. Murphy claims he didn't do much on the album and that it was mostly fully formed by the time Arcade Fire stepped in the studio, but the two are intrinsically tied together. They always have been, really. Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem toured Europe together. Members of Arcade Fire show up during the Madison Square Garden concert to sing backup vocals on "North American Scum."
In a sense, Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem represent two opposite ends of the post-9/11****, millennial miasma: overly sincere nostalgia and cold, cynical irony. James Murphy's existence clearly pokes a hole in my Self Conscious Indie Rocker because his entire existence is self conscious. He's the guy whose debut single was eight minutes of dunking on himself for being old. Murphy's background isn't being a musician, though. He's a DJ by trade, and someone who rests his self valuation solely on how he is perceived by others. This is what the cloak of irony provides him and, by extension, the archetypical 2000s hipster. Irony as a personality trait is a way to manipulate the way you are perceived so that others never perceive your "true" self. It's a shield made of different piece of pop culture, art, and metatextual humor.
I think that's part of why LCD Soundsystem's reunion is a hard pill to swallow. The comeback album itself, american dream, is perfectly fine. I revisited it for this essay and found parts of it to be on par with some of their best work pre-reunion. Sure, there are duds like "call the police," but it's not like that isn't a far cry from "Drunk Girls" sitting at track two on This Is Happening. Songs like "oh baby" and "emotional haircut"***** do the LCD Soundsystem greatest bits in a satisfying way, and songs like "how do you sleep" push the band in new directions. It's kind of exactly what you'd want out of a reunion album. So why did I go into this essay thinking I hated it?
There's two reasons, I think, and they're related to each other. The first is that "tonite" is probably the worst song in the LCD Soundsystem discography. It's an update of "Losing My Edge" written by someone who has been aging very poorly for fifteen years; instead of having an existential crisis over the mortality of his hipness, he is raging against the pop music he's hearing on the radio. It's a larger metaphor for Murphy contemplating his own age and realizing that he's become the old man yelling at clouds, but it's hard not to take the framing device at face value. Acknowledging that he's doing something and couching it in an ironic distance does not mean that he's not doing the thing. It's not fun. I don't feel like I'm relating to James Murphy and laughing along with him, I feel like he's filling time on a record by attempting to recapture the feeling he had fifteen years ago, but he can't bring himself to do it. Is that compelling? Arguably, yes, but for me, it's the second reason I couldn't (and still can't) call myself a fan of american dream. Listening to it requires a certain level of investment in James Murphy as a person that I just don't have. It doesn't justify it's own existence to me, which art has to do, especially when it's trying to vault over the piled up agitation I have for Murphy reneging on the implicit promise that he would not bring back LCD Soundsystem.
I was freshly 18 when LCD Soundsystem played their farewell show from Madison Square Garden. I was a little in and out of the Pitchfork livestream, but I was devastated by the news. It was hard to watch any footage of the concert for a long time. I didn't feel angry at the band for breaking up, but I just couldn't bring myself to feel that catharsis until years later. LCD Soundsystem felt like my kind of band as a teen: brainy, forward-thinking, funny, and easy enough to show anyone and have them enjoy it. I got all of my friends into the ultimate "no, wait for the drop" song "Dance Yrself Clean" and saw a lot of myself in the band. Even if I couldn't watch it, I was glad the concert existed. There's something very rare about a band who announces their own breakup well ahead of time. There's no infinite hiatus, no left wondering if they will or they won't put out another album. There was plenty of time to prepare myself and come to terms with the fact that one of my favorite bands would just cease to exist on a specific day and time. It was impossible for me to take american dream at face value because I wasn't excited that they were back. I felt betrayed. I'd already mourned LCD Soundsystem, why should I have to accept them back into my life? It's melodramatic, but even at age 24 in 2017, I was ready to poke holes in every single song on american dream. That anger didn't just come from LCD Soundsystem's breakup, though. It also came from Reflektor.
The Part About Arcade Fire #2
Reflektor is a difficult album to evaluate, and one that has always stuck out in my mind as being a great example of trying to view a record for what it is vs. what your expectations are telling you it should be. For a long time, my go to response to "do you like Reflektor?" was no, because it didn't do what I thought an Arcade Fire album should do. I felt that it didn't play to any of their strengths, and while artists are allowed to grow in any direction and don't owe me anything as a listener, Arcade Fire's turn to disco and African rhythms filtered through a new wave lens kind of lost me somewhere along the way. Again, this was very shaded by my teenage perception of what Arcade Fire was to me and the function they served in my life. They were the band I would put on when my parents were fighting. They were the band I put on when the world stopped making sense to me. They sounded exactly like being a teenager. Reflektor just sounded like a band making songs.
For what it's worth, I do honestly like a good bit of Reflektor as an adult. I've always liked the title track, but songs like "We Exist" and "Joan of Arc" hold a little more appeal to me now. As I've gotten older, I've appreciated bands taking a risk and making the jump into another style and will, in a sense, excuse weaker songwriting or unstuck landings if the concept is engaging enough to grip me. I'm just not sure the concept works. I'm obviously not the first person to make this comparison, but Arcade Fire's dramatic shift in sound and tone reminds me a lot of the holy trinity of 90s irony - U2's Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop. The accepted U2 mythos is that U2's ideas generally come in threes: the first album is the concept, the second album is the concept taken to it's highest acceptable point, and the third album is the concept taken so far that it's repulsive. This doesn't hold up for their entire discography, but it does for the 90s irony trio. Achtung Baby is the critical smash that combines U2's heart on their sleeve with their newfound willingness to push their sound into more abstract, electronic directions, Zooropa is basically that with no hits, and Pop is that but with a smirk. Listening to Pop feels like a prank is being played on you, like Bono and the gang know that songs like "The Playboy Mansion" completely suck but they have you and your wallet by the balls, so you'll buy it anyway.
I bring this up not to dunk on Pop (which I like) or to say that Arcade Fire had ambitions to sound like U2 (they did) but to make a point about how the average music listener's brain works. Most people are resistant to change, but if it's presented the right way, they're on board. It has to actually make sense for it to work. U2 had gone from shimmering post-punkers to Elvis and gospel obsessed arena rockers to Americana obsessed goobers. A turn to irony was almost a welcome change because they seemed so unaware of themselves. The Suburbs was too aware of itself for it's own good. Reflektor wasn't their Achtung Baby, it was their Zooropa - a solid album that marked the beginning of the end for the band as a critical darling.
Which, obviously, makes Everything Now their Pop. Maybe in 20 years we'll all be re-examining Everything Now to see if it was actually a forward thing, smart album the whole time. I doubt it.
The Synthesis
Ultimately, relistening to Reflektor reminded me of a few things:
1) The period of time where indie rock was the predominate form of art playing soundtracking teen dramas like Gossip Girl, which was truly a halcyon era for independent art.
2) Ian Mackaye's quote in the 33 1/3 book about Fugazi's incredible In On The Kill Taker: "Irony is the refuge of the educated."
3) The passage from Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live about how all music critics do is review their mail for a living and how that more or less means his own existence is not justified. He realizes this while on a cross country road trip where he sees himself as simultaneously superior (more intelligent) and inferior (more fragile) than every other person he encounters. This then reminded me of:
3a) Nietzsche's rant on how every other philosopher before him was doing it wrong at the end of The Will To Power and the thought that Nietzsche probably died while unaware of the irony.
The Conclusion(s)
This, overall, leads me to two conclusions.
1) By the time The Suburbs came out, Arcade Fire was no longer a group of The Kids. They were playing sold out shows at Madison Square Garden sponsored by credit card companies and directed by Terry Gilliam. Even worse, they started talking down to the kids for the first time in their career. Suddenly The Kids are "using great big words that they don't understand" and are so wrong about the capitalist overlords being blood sucking vampires. They really aren't half bad once you get to know them and get to cash their checks. The concept of selling out is undoubtedly complete and utter bullshit, but talking down to your peers? The same Kids you spent two albums picking up, dusting off, and lending an ear to? That's why Arcade Fire faltered. Not because of reverb, synthesizers, world rhythms, or James Murphy. They failed because they thought they were too good for their audience.
2) My point changed a lot from the time I sat down to write this to the time I'm actually finishing this. I'm actually writing this before I have written anything about Everything Now, and that's assuming that I'll actually be assed to write anything about Everything Now. I had that first conclusion sitting in my drafts for four months. Four! Because I couldn't figure out how to get there! Along the way, I listened to the complete discographies of two bands, watched a three and a half hour concert film, watched a two hour concert film, watched a different two hour professionally shot concert, watched even more live footage from both bands, watched fucking Terry Gilliam's Brazil (great film, undeniably the best thing I interacted with for this entire piece) to try to understand one of those concerts, reread Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, and tried to shoehorn the entire run of Gossip Girl into this article somehow. And for what? To say that Arcade Fire sucks? I don't even think that! I think they're pretty good!
While rereading sections of this essay, I noticed an abundance of question marks. Ostensibly, I am asking you, the reader (hi!) these questions but I think I'm honestly asking myself a lot of them too. I've said for years that my ideal job around music isn't being an actual musician, it's being a blogger or DJ. The idea of tastemaking and gatekeeping appeals to me in ways that creating art itself doesn't. It's less vulnerable, less soul bearing. There's an easy shield to hide behind, which also means that anyone can walk behind it and take your spot.
I see a lot of myself in James Murphy. I am aging. I don't understand anything anymore. The things I like are not cool, which does not particularly bother me, but leads me rudderless in an unsteady, changing future. I have no credibility to lose, but what little credibility I have in these spheres gives me a sense of joy that I don't think playing music ever has. I get more out of a virtual companion telling me they purchased the Guardian Singles self-titled album than a close friend saying they liked a song I performed on.
Isn't that fucked up?
The Resolution
**= i took the time to watch the whole thing, for some reason. i thought i would learn something from it. i didn't. it's fine. it's honestly a pretty good concert outside of the 45:33 section dragging a lot and some glaring omissions (pow pow) from the setlist.
****= i know arcade fire's roots are actually in mid-2001, but they weren't fully formed until 2003ish
*****= james murphy names tracks the same way you would if you were 19 and trying to say something deep but also funny. or maybe just the way i would. i got an emotional haircut recently so i feel it
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