“We Used to Wait”
*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.
I used to play this song for my 8th grade English classes. This was at a large suburban middle school north of Austin where I worked for five years, the longest single job stretch I’ve had to date.
I would say abject horror best describes the attempts from those young teens to imagine not just minutes or hours between text responses, but whole days, weeks, months. It evoked a palpable kind of terror, and related to the exclamations from several during a different unit that should they have to endure months hiding out in an attic as Anne Frank did, they’d rather kill themselves than do so without their phones (teenagers are given to hyperbole, and I highly doubt they’d say the same today, given the rapidly shifting — for the better — sensitivity around suicide).
The track is a tribute to anticipation of a particular kind, the sort that knows it may never see its longing fulfilled. “We used to wait” is followed repeatedly by “sometimes it never came”. The build-up to the first chorus is also several bars past what any sentient producer would advise for optimal radio play, a fact acknowledged by Butler: “Now we’re screaming ‘Sing the chorus again’”. A secondary theme is the time supposedly squandered during the waiting days. “We used to waste hours just walkin’ around… All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”
This sort of waiting seems idiomatic to the suburbs of a bygone era. People of the city or country have always had occasion to run into each other on the fly. There’s the happenstance meet-up on the tube, in the elevator, at the corner Duane Reade. There’s the Friday night football game, the local Dairy Queen, the Sunday church potluck. In both cases, the urban and rural landscapes facilitate chance encounters.
Nothing of the sort exists in the suburbs. Geographically speaking, they are broad and meandering. They usually include several grocery stores, banks, Targets, Starbucks, libraries, gas stations, greenbelts. Few possess an actual city center. Then there’s the issue of cars.
Not for nothing does the album kick off with driving. If there is a quintessential feature of the ‘burbs, it is the driveway and the two-car garage. Automobiles not only fail to encourage spontaneous communion, they actively prevent it. We get into our large steel pods and transport about in personalized, isolated style. We have our air conditioning, heated seats, automatic headlights, Sirius radio, snack stash in the console. We are all ready for absolutely anything. Anything but encounters with other IRL humans.
I lived for two years in a previous suburb, and knew at least two dozen people well enough to say hi should we spot each other out and about. That event occurred precisely once.
Growing up in the suburbs, if you wanted to see someone, you would usually do so only by intentionally arranging a time and place (there were exceptions: “the kids next door”). If you had a friend who lived very far away, or who didn’t attend your school, then you might develop a pen-pal relationship.
And that brings us to the old timey written letters around which “We Used To Wait” orbits. The song opens with “I used to write/I used to write letters/I used to sign my name.” Butler’s next line pivots, swift and unapologetic, to what is neatly both the consequence of no more snail-mail and the very reason everyone stopped in the first place: “I used to sleep at night.”
In case anyone wondered what contemporary pox is behind the past tense, Butler clarifies his letter habit thrived “Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain.” The song is a direct commentary on 21st-century tech, the advent of the Smart Phone in particular.
There are days I think this is the saddest song on the album, despite its signature Arcade Fire anthemic buildup. The nostalgia stabs you right in the heart, it’s hard to get over. Many of us who did not grow up with cell phones will remember the most excellent joy of finding a letter in the mailbox. You’d open the envelope, unfold the lined notebook paper, and there you’d see words with their meanings, yep, but you would also see the distinctive penmanship on display, belonging to that one and only person, your friend, and you could sometimes feel their laugh in the curlicues or imbibe their lovely faux-cynicism coming through a freakishly small box print.
It may seem that Butler has sung here an elegy to the lost art of the love letter, but I don’t think that is his song’s main forgotten beauty. Again, the real longing is for the excitement that can only exist when its object of fulfillment is not immediate. Hand-written letters take time — to compose, to fold, to address, stamp, drop in the postbox, and eventually — at last — arrive in the recipient’s own black, metal mailbox.
We do not take that time anymore. We text, we email. Our words look electronically exactly like our coworkers’, the same as any news story or Facebook screed or listicle. We may refer to certain websites as pages, but they are not — they are only, always, a screen.
