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The ethical heft of Funeral assaults the listener like a summons to memory and vigilance. While observing the Bowie footage over my shoulder (followed by the sight of David Byrne joining them for a Talking Heads cover), my wife casually observed, "They're helping them save Rock and Roll." I think she's on to something.
And now we have Neon Bible. More of the same, in the best possible sense. More broken dreams, more mass hallucination, and a full-scale poetic assault on what Win Butler refers to as "the American Idol world." The music speaks of, to, and for a culture in the throes of a vast meaning problem, and within the comprehensiveness of Arcade Fire's vision, any attempt to draw lines of separation between religion, entertainment, advertising, and politics will always fail to signify. The categories aren't functional. It's all ideology all the time.
Inserted parenthetically within the second half of Neon Bible sits a song called "(Antichrist Television Blues)," which some observant fan at a live performance found on a setlist under the title of "Joe Simpson," a figure known on reality television (and in reality) as a former Baptist youth minster and the father/manager of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. It's a hard-driving, toe-tapping, disarmingly catchy song that doesn't come off as a send-up or a lampoon at all. In fact, it's an impassioned plea for justice and revelation, for a righteous world that recognizes the purposes of a loving God. The protagonist within the song wants desperately to make a difference and prays fervently that God might see fit to let each of his daughters serve as lanterns of divine illumination: "Lord, will you make her a star, / So the world can see who you really are?"
The lyrics give voice to the impulse (native, we might say, to any of us who try our hand at show business) that imagines a redeeming, ministerial vocation at work in the quest for celebrity status and maximum air time (which would then be an acceptable, effective means to a healthily evangelical end). But the figure who prays his prayer in "(Antichrist Television Blues)" senses something amiss in his heart the more he keeps his eyes on the prize ("I just gotta know if I'm wasting my time / … How come nothing tastes good?"). And he finds himself delivering one of the most devastatingly disturbing double entendres of recent memory: "Wanna hold a mirror up to the world, / So that they can see themselves inside my little girl!"
"O tell me, Lord, am I the Antichrist?" asks the ostensibly successful and concerned parent as the song comes to an abrupt end. And with that question, a good number of demons are powerfully unmasked. Butler has spoken in interviews of the whole of audiovisual culture moving in a "violent-porn direction," as far as the law will allow, with no aspect of human life left uncommodified. And Neon Bible sits alongside Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, and David Lynch's doubleshot, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, as a response to an age of everything-all-of-the-time, escalating anxiety.
How do we live and love well? How to we discern the human other at all (family, stranger, televised image) amid an ocean of noise, an ocean of violence? How do we think and see truthfully and freely? These are among the questions generated by Arcade Fire, never without mirth and joy and passion. The Jesuit, poet, draft-file-burning Daniel Berrigan once observed that brainwash is "that species of untruth which lies so near to the truth as to be able to wear its clothing." And in the theater of Arcade Fire, there's the sense that brainwash, the name of the global con game, is never far away, always broadcasting in a fine frenzy rolling through our heads.
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