“City With No Children”
In honor of a musical achievement that, despite winning a Grammy in 2010 for Album of the Year, has yet to see the esteem it truly deserves, I’ve written a series of tribute posts to Arcade Fire’s magnum opus “The Suburbs”, like the honest-to-God fangirl I am. These are only loosely based on the songs themselves, and meander often and at will in myriad directions that are at times only tangentially related to the album itself. Navel gazing at its finest, I hope. Enjoy.
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Condemnation upon those who live in the suburbs is not so much argued by the media and cultural bicoastal elite as it is pronounced as fiat. With the arrival of the modern suburb came simultaneously a chorus of critics, and in the past two decades, that criticism dialed itself up to an 11.
Here’s Samantha from Sex and the City epitomizing the sentiment: “I’m always surprised when anyone leaves New York. I mean where do they go?” Or consider New Yorker book critic Katy Waldman’s more recent 2018 review of “Ordinary People,” wherein she blithely characterizes life outside the metropoli as “the living death of suburbia.” It reads almost as if Waldman wrote this as a tautology, an afterthought. One gets the sense she’s even slightly annoyed at giving up the millisecond to type out the line, it is just so obvious.
When I first read that description, I admit, I experienced a wholly new reflexive defensiveness. I thought: “Hey girl. I’m living here.”
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In the grocery store a few years ago, I noticed a publication called “Suburban Parent” in the small rack of magazines for sale. The cover image featured a very cute toddler girl in a black and grey frilly dress with lace and a headband of pearls. Articles included in this particular issue: “A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned”; “Strong Is The New Pretty”; “Good Fats, Good Fiber, And Good Fitness”; and, “Helping Your Kids Find Their Purpose.”
Days later, I looked up the Suburban Parent website and discovered a few pertinent facts about this magazine. Fact One, it is local to the Dallas-Ft. Worth sprawl, which leads to Fact Two: each area gets its own tweaked version. For instance, while the young girl adorning the cover at my grocery store had olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes, the editorial staff chose a very white, very blonde girl for the simple “Dallas” issue, which also (Fact Three) gets its own, chic-adjacent title: “Dallas Parent.”
The specificity matters. It’s the difference between a magazine called “City Parent” and one called “Living Death Parent.”
Just the word suburb grates, doesn’t it? It conjures up a drowsy Sunday afternoon spent watching senior golfers swing a mediocre 9-hole in a summer sun too hot to be enjoyed. It connotes a subconscious misery with no immediately, absolutely identifiable source.
The racial specificity matters too, matters more, but in this case seems the reverse of what one might expect. The City is supposed to be diverse, the ‘burbs racist. And yet, for this particular issue of “Suburban Parent” magazine, it is the Dallas proper constituency that apparently prefers a posh-looking blonde girl. It is the more distant suburban people that will buy a copy fronting diverse-looking kids.
Well, Texas never ceases to surprise. You learn that if you live there long enough.
I didn’t buy a copy. My immediate reaction to a publication called “Suburban Parent” is to grimace, physically recoil in the face and neck region, and shunt the very idea of “suburban” as a “parent” descriptor into a no-go brain space of oblivion.
This is interesting, as I am a suburban parent. My young children (two and four at the time, their younger brother not yet born) were in fact with me, sitting in a bright plastic faux-police car attached to an oversize grocery cart, as I scurried fast from that terrible magazine. “Suburban Parent.”
Say those words aloud and take note of the mental picture that emerges, simultaneous and probably unbidden. It is a mom in workout attire, perhaps a ballcap too, opening a minivan door parked by a large green sporting field. Or there’s dad, with a beer gut, in khaki shorts and rumpled t-shirt, pushing a lawnmower in wide, sad circles. The kids that necessitate the “parent” designation are somewhere offscreen, undoubtedly with messy faces and sticky hands and bottomless needs.
The associated emotions: defeat, resignation. The associated physical reality: exhaustion, dishevelment.
This picture is incomplete. It shows none of the joy. There’s no laughter, no kicking the soccer ball around the backyard, no building a fire in the pit out back, nothing of the rare birds that nest in the trees behind the greenbelt, there’s no mention of chalk art or building bunny hutches or wine on the patio or the Christmas parade downtown.
No one’s seeing here the intricate leaps of imagination that ultimately result in a toy T-Rex dangling a doll’s purse from its stubby arm, and so no one can share the delight of such surreal brilliance — a brilliance emanating regularly from humans in the 3–6-year-old age range.
Still, let us admit that no one dreams of growing up to eek out mortgage payments for a two-story house that looks just like the neighbors’.
Or take Win Butler’s own cheerful derision of the lands beyond cities: “Because I accidentally heard something that made me question: ‘Maybe I don’t have to live in the suburbs of Houston!’ And even though I don’t see anyone around me caring about this, maybe me caring about it is enough to make a life out of it, to make a family, to make shit real. Maybe that’s good enough.”
It is true that cities graft in child-friendly spots as an afterthought. We all know New York was built for grownups. And as grownups, we appreciate this. We relish the acknowledgement that intricate, complicated, diverse architecture and landscapes and dinner options and neighbors are to our matured and maturing taste.
By contrast, the suburbs were designed for babies and toddlers and elementary-aged kids. The youngest amongst us have robotics games and training-wheeled bikes and giant stuffed animals, toys in emergency reserve, stuff, and the suburbs provide. They offer square footage for designated playrooms. They tuck a walk-in closet off the back wall of every bedroom like it’s just an extra hammer swing or two. Easy.
Therein lies the draw. With their sidewalks and good schools, green parks and cautious drivers, the suburbs make an unloseable case that they are the best place to have and house children. Look! The community pool. Over here! The neighborhood playground.
What is there for adults, though? Birthing a child should not necessitate the loss of adult identity. But in American suburbs, your car is your transportation pod and your house is your personal sleeping and eating plot. The suburbs have laid out the road to the mega-grocery store, and they’ve bestowed high-pressure rain showers in the master bathroom, they’ve given you a vaulted ceiling over your head, and they are done. You will drive if you wish to visit antique shops, galleries, restaurants, record stores, boutiques, delis, and you will enter and leave each place a stranger.
The suburbs believe the only human needs are the basic ones.
You are on your own now, adult. Sure, you can walk the sidewalks — but you will not go anywhere. And rare is the traveler you cross along the way.
