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On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
—Virginia Woolf
Working for the Church while your life falls apart.
Singin' hallelujah with the fear in your heart.
—Arcade Fire, "Intervention," Neon Bible
I have friends with whom I share a perfectly silly, carefully cultivated, pop music snobbery. I say "silly," but we're true believers. And we're completely serious when we speak of Tom Waits or U2 shaping the way we view the world, informing our decisions, and generally revolutionizing our imaginations. So it was a very big deal when three of them (Gar, Todd, and Geoff) agreed behind my back that a band called Arcade Fire had accomplished—with their first full-length album, Funeral (2004)—something on par with OK Computer, Blonde on Blonde, and Joshua Tree; something comparably culturally crucial. I hadn't heard it yet, but I'd heard it touted by folks unduly swayed (to my mind) by whatever Pitchfork christens (not that Pitchforkmedia isn't often wonderful), and I was prepared mentally to take them all on by way of a one-versus-three intervention if they'd lost their minds and there was nothing but hype-driven, bandwagonesque folly behind their very bold talk. As a ministry unto the as-yet-ungospelled me, Gar was kind enough to leave a copy of Funeral on my front porch.
And Arcade Fire had me at Hello. The music felt somehow medieval and fresh and urgent all at once, with strings and electric guitar, marching band, minstrel/gypsy/ troubadour fare coming out of a tavern full of clear-eyed, optimistic, coed worker priests. It felt wise and young and in unself-conscious continuity with some long forgotten, undeniably authoritative, ancient broadcast, a dusty, old, strong-as-an-oak culture. They're very much a communal activity (sometimes with as many as 10 people on stage), but they appear to be led by a married couple, Texas-born Win Butler and Regine Chassagne of Montreal, coming at us like a good-news, deadpan circus.
There was a moment in the late Eighties when pop music took on an earnestness, a sort of seamless social justice concern, that later came to feel (for no good reason) somehow embarrassing. Some might say that only U2 and REM survived it, but I happen to think it's aged wonderfully. Human interest pop, we might call it. I'm thinking of the following vagabond voices: Hothouse Flowers, Lone Justice, 10,000 Maniacs, the Cure, Ocean Blue, Suzanne Vega, the Water Boys, Midnight Oil, Big Country, and (if I may be indulged) Tears for Fears. And in a very moving way, Arcade Fire's Funeral felt like a vindication of and a majestic return to all of this.
Imagine a 59-year-old David Bowie (or Youtube it) joining the band on stage to sing the following lines from Funeral's slow rocking, Springsteen-leading-an-orchestra-and-children's-choir anthem, "Wake Up":
Somethin' filled up
my heart with nothin',
someone told me not to cry.
But now that I'm older,
my heart's colder,
and I can see that it's a lie.
Throughout the album, there's a sense of generations having been handed a very bad blueprint concerning life, love, and meaning, up to their necks in false covenants; generations now trying fitfully to grieve the loss of wisdom, lament lost time, and gather together what goodness remains amid the risk of losing each other to vampires and a sleep epidemic. Think "Rock Album as Exorcism." The driving conceit of Funeral is "the Neighborhood," subjected to futility and yet stubbornly awaiting better days, even in its ongoing death-dealing dysfunction ("The power's out in the heart of man … nobody's cold, nobody's warm"). "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" records the disconnect whereby one generation has grown so deaf to the voices of its own history that it can't come up with names for its infants. The line of associations culminates in the sudden recollection of parents, sung by Butler like a caterwaul: "Then we think of our parents, / Well what ever happened to them?!?"
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