RECENT POSTS
- This Flu Kills
August 29, 2009 - Serious Doubts on Healthcare
August 27, 2009 - Ted Kennedy Dies
August 26, 2009 - Two and a Half Men: The Return of the Sitcom
August 24, 2009 - MJ's FBI File
August 24, 2009 - How Youth Make a Difference
August 22, 2009 - Hurricane Katrina Four-Year Anniversary: Have We Done Enough?
August 21, 2009 - Bringing Guns to Obama Town Halls
August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Neon Bible: The Way Forward
The Arcade Fire (Photo: Frecklescorp)
The Arcade Fire were and are the first band of my generation that I could really get behind. They’re Canadian and so am I, but that's not the reason. It has more to do with their timing.
Funeral, their 2004 debut album was a cohesive and deeply personal exploration of coming of age, of parents and children, of growing up and moving on and what these things really mean in the light of day. Hitting me as it did the summer I graduated from university, living in another new city, working my first real fulltime job, I played it near-constantly for about six months. Their abstractions and metaphors rang true in so many ways, speaking to the mountain of questions and doubts that appeared in front of me as I entered the world of adults, not really feeling like one. “Children wake up, / hold your mistake up/ before they turn the summer into dust.”
In the two interceding years things have changed for me, and judging by Neon Bible, their new album, things have changed for them, too. Where Funeral looked inward, this one looks out at a world besieged by violence and unrest. Strings, harps, a xylophone and pipe organ swell and fade like a raging sea beneath frontman Win Butler’s plaintive vocals. All, clearly, is not well.
As with Funeral, the songs still speak to my mind, and comfortingly, the pace of their changes has matched my own. The questions raised in these new songs, of what to do with this world we’ve been given, of how to deal with the very real threats facing our population and planet, are ones that occupy me constantly. It rejects the rising tide of uniformity, a product of the mass-culture on which we’ve been raised (“MTV what have you done to me?”) and speaks to the concerns of a generation tasked with confronting the mistakes of the last one.
The Arcade Fire sing of protest and of the same unwillingness to take on our parents’ institutions as did the rock heroes of the baby boom generation, but they make it their own. "The tide is high, and it's rising still," sings Butler, "And I don't wanna see it at my windowsill." Music like this, resonant, defiant, and seemingly custom-fit is the sort of thing that defines an era. It is a rebellion, yes, but it is a pragmatic one, and one, once again, that I can get behind. Amidst all of its darkness and turmoil, Neon Bible is at its heart an expression of hope for a new generation. It is empowering in the best way rock and roll can be.