“The Sprawl II”
*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.
“The Sprawl II” came at me when I lived in Austin, a morning offering from a local radio station, the very first song I heard off “The Suburbs” album. Amazed, I drove north on MoPac, en route to buy groceries or find a Target. I don’t remember what particular errands were going on that day. What I remember is the sunshine, the open highway road, mostly the way this one piece of music dazzled me to the core.
“Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.” This line, I just couldn’t get over it. Amongst my personal set of autobiographical wins, I got to grow up in Colorado. There, in the West, the Rocky Mountains arise — one peak after another slicing up between the rest, an unbroken lineage spanning the entire state, rooted in the ancient and imperial way of nature.
Juxtaposing such a deep Earth power with “dead” malls — ugly, rough, concrete blocks in the business of selling mass-market jeans and long-term despair — was so unexpected that the image itself managed to emerge before I could get any handle at all on what Régine Chassagne could mean by it. Rolling peaks of low-slung department stores appeared mentally, their vast and empty asphalt parking lots sloping up then down towards the next ascending mound of despondence.
It takes balls to write a lyric like that. That’s one of Arcade Fire’s (many) fabulous assets — they will throw down such a line and they will mean it. Hearing this song then, in my mid-20s, in a time and place that was really getting into downbeat electronica, atmospheric tech tracks — that is, music with little-to-no emphasis on lyrics — was a gobsmacking wonder.
I had not heretofore imagined the subject of the ‘burbs could attract the album-length attention of anyone.
Vague mutterings and off-hand commentary about Bruce Springsteen, accumulated through cultural osmosis, had provided me the hazy understanding that The Boss wrote music from and to the hardscrabble working-class New England crowd. Something similar was going on with John Mellencamp and Jon Bon Jovi. (I had not, then or now, really listened to their music.) Well, okay. These men were apparently speaking to definite scenes, ones with specific fields of magnetism. The same can be said for country music and much urban hip-hop and rap. Whole genres are in reference to explicitly particular places, reflective of their location itself, which is to the say the culture of those places, which is to say their people.
When my friends and I were in high school, we were given Ben Folds Five’ satiric “Rockin’ the Suburbs.” We found it hilarious, and Folds’ sendup of white boy teenage angst felt only the tiniest bit hyperbolic. “I’m pissed off, but I’m too polite/When people break in the McDonald’s line” kicks off the song’s second verse, finished by a throwaway line that, from this 20-year distance, smacks of a real underlying menace: “Girl, give me something I can break.” (An aside: many male peers from my youth did seem genuinely angry, all of the time. In college, removed and able to employ hindsight, I decided they might be better described as simply mean.)
Still, I’d accepted that “Rockin’ the Suburbs” was about all we deserved. In our senior high school yearbook, my three closest friends and I all declared that in 10 years we would be “living in New York,” with the hoped-for careers allowing us to do so listed afterwards. The city came first, the job second. We were — we had been for years — ready to run from trim sidewalks and rock-wall landscapes, all these local cul-de-sacs of dead-end ennui.
And then, when I was 26 years old, Arcade Fire — a band of prominence, artistic innovation; a real mover and shaker — declared the suburbs worthy of a theme album.
And I felt the way you do when you’re at a concert, in one of the near-stage rows, and the lead singer makes eye contact. You see me? To register the answer is affirmative is to feel a kind of soul euphoria. You know it’s ridiculous — you know you exist, you know this person does not **really** see you. But for a wondrous, fleeting moment, your being has been granted the dignity of acknowledgement from someone whose opinion on the matter means something to you.
“The Sprawl II” is pretty brutal on the suburbs. In the first verse, an amorphous suburban “they” responds to Chassagne’s artistic inclinations with the rebuke, “Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” Her follow-up: “These days my life, I feel it has no purpose.” Welp.
The lyrical bleakness is obscured by the song’s upbeat, glittering orchestration. You can dance to this song, and you want to. Catharsis pumps through “The Sprawl II.” The first half allows all who were once suburban children and teenagers to lament and let go of the dead-mall mountains that once enclosed — and implicitly diminished — their young lives. You do this through dancing, with an interactive video that demands the viewer stand up and groove.
But this is Arcade Fire, so THE CITY is not going to land the role of utopian savior. In the second verse, Chassagne hears the metroplex “calling at us, ‘We don’t need your kind.’” In an earlier bit of cheekiness, Chassagne sings that her feelings “swim to the surface / ’cause on the surface the city lights shine.” Life may look effervescent downtown, but dig a little deeper. Ah, there’s nothing much to discover city-side for a hungry soul either.
I felt then, at 26, that Arcade Fire had not just spoken for me, but put in the work to do so with artistry and devotion. They had singular gifts and they were using them to distill a particular lifestyle that I had, to my dismay, been obliged to participate in. They too understood the suburbs were Not Good, but their nuanced lyrics and majestic orchestration insisted the people who emerged from them deserved the dignity of human recognition.
My God, this album was a gift.
