by Daniel Kupetsky
(posted by Julian Szieff)
Content warning: discussion of suicidal ideation themes
By like my second or third listen of Everything Now, Arcade Fire’s apparently super uncool and out-of-touch newest album, something about it really clicked for me. Even though I didn’t consider many of the individual songs to be all that memorable, something about the album as a whole was just fascinating and gorgeous to me. I wrote this interpretation over the summer mostly as a reaction to some of the more ugly reviews of the album (“Arcade Fire is dead!”—because of course we can’t go more than a few months at a time without the sensational career death of a beloved indie band), but at least for me, thinking about the album in this way also made me appreciate it a lot more (and made it easier to forgive the band for the abomination that is “Infinite Content”).
In past Arcade Fire albums, singers Win and Régine tended to explore themes through a very personal, first-person perspective; the band’s style was more or less to shout about some societal or personal problem as if it were the single biggest and most important thing ever. Those themes/problems are clear enough in Everything Now—the album is about love, sadness, and consumerism—but there is a noticeable lack of that bashing the band’s thoughts over the listener’s head. Instead, the lyrics seem to explore the album’s themes through a more detached lens. I’ve seen some reviewers attribute this detachment to the band just being ironic—and that’s definitely a valid way of looking at it, but I think Win and co. could be going for something else. What if the band is exploring them through two concrete characters: a person (say, Person A), enamored with and consumed by the capitalist excess represented by Everything Now, falling in love with a Person B, who is evidently both deeply sad and suicidal? In this theory, each song is a chapter of the couple trying to make their relationship work in the face of their own personal problems—e.g. Person A’s consumerism and nightlife addiction in “Everything Now”, “Signs of Life”, and “Chemistry” (a track creepily melding the couple’s love for each other with overzealous advertising); Person B’s struggle with suicidal thoughts in “Creature Comfort”, “Good God Damn”, and “Electric Blue”; and Person A’s love for and fear of losing Person B, possibly heightened due to Person B’s suicidal ideation, in “Peter Pan” (“In my dreams you’re dying/It wakes me up, and I can’t stop crying”) and “Put Your Money On Me” (“I’m never gonna let you go, even when it’s easy”).
This narrative comes to a climax in “We Don’t Deserve Love”, which beautifully mixes all three themes together and snaps the rest of the album into perspective. This is the moment where Person A, evidently not in a good place with Person B, realizes just how much they are suffering. But it’s not their consumerist lifestyle that’s responsible for this suffering—that lifestyle is covering up some deeper, more intense pain (“Been hiding my scars in broad daylight bars/Behind laugh tracks on TV”). So Person A laying off their consumerist ways isn’t enough to save the relationship or bring happiness to either of them. In fact, they seem to be in so much pain that they don’t feel that they deserve each other’s love. Take these lines: “If you can’t see the forest for the trees/Just burn it all down, and bring the ashes to me.” This isn’t a request to, in fact, see the forest for the trees; it’s an admission that one or both of them are incapable of doing so, and that the solution is to just give up. Later, Person A reflects further on the cause of the couple’s pain in what I think is the most crushingly powerful verse Arcade Fire has ever written: “You hear your mother screaming / You hear your daddy shout / You try to figure it out / You never figure it out / Your mother’s screaming / That you don’t deserve love.” To me, this song, and these lines in particular, change the focus of the album entirely: while it still explores the dangers of hyper-consumerism, it is, at its core, about chronically unhappy people who are looking for a way to lessen the pain. And if this is the true meaning of the record, then the fact that it’s an infinite loop takes on a whole new, darker significance: it’s not just a reflection on the fact that capitalism recycles the same stuff over and over again, but also a recognition that this unhappiness keeps coming back in cycles (“around and around again”, as Win repeatedly mentions in “Signs of Life”). The characters will keep succumbing to bullshit content, nightlife, manufactured love, etc. because they are still deeply sad and are barely given the opportunity to acknowledge that sadness before they’re whisked away again into Everything Now. As Win has said before, “it’s never over.”
Like Reflektor before it, Everything Now houses a subtle, beautiful, yet deeply disturbing narrative that is focused on people and their quest for love and happiness; but most impressively, it hides it all in a collection of fun, occasionally (and intentionally) unsubstantial disco-y songs that was promoted by joke marketing campaign involving $100 USB fidget spinners. By burying this very-much-existent emotional core under these layers of self-created chaos, the band moves beyond self-importantly shouting at capitalism and instead models it in the musical, structural, and promotional framework of a deeply human story about love and happiness. This, in my mind, raises the album to the status of a true work of art; it operates on many more levels than any of the band’s previous work, and this complexity makes each of the various emotions hidden throughout its 13 tracks feel that much more earned and profound. It’s not quite as revolutionary as Funeral, but Everything Now accomplishes so much more than it might seem at first listen. If the album didn’t click for you—especially if you wrote it off as mediocre after the first run-through or so—give it another shot!