“See that silver shine”
Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral ends with the soothing image of a backseat nap. “I like the peace in the backseat / I don’t have to drive, I don’t have to speak / I can watch the countryside, I can fall asleep.” But where Funeral is driven by the urge to soothe, to speak honestly, to build new worlds in the wake of disaster, the band’s second album Neon Bible is driven by frustration and fruitless attempts to escape a self-destructive surveillance state.
“I don’t want to see it at my windowsill”
I’ve revisited Neon Bible these past few weeks as a way to process my own reactions to the invasion of Ukraine and *gestures at everything.* The album has a bit of a prophetic quality both in its tone and its uncanny representations of today’s world. The lyrics of opening track Black Mirror call upon the powers of a darkened scrying glass to “tell me where them bombs will fall,” and several lyrics throughout the album call directly to front-of-mind issues. For instance, here’s a few lyrics from my top track, Windowsill:
I don’t wanna live with my father’s debt
You can’t forgive what you can’t forget
I don’t wanna live in my father’s house no more
…
Set me free! What have you done to me?
I can’t breathe! I can’t see!
World War III, when are you coming for me?
Been kicking up sparks to set the flames free
The windows are locked now, so what’ll it be?
A house on fire, or the rising sea?
When I listen I hear our nested crises, I hear Eric Garner and George Floyd, I hear Putin’s warped reference to “denazifying” Ukraine and am reminded that my genitalia leaves me eligible for a military draft. I hear Greta Thunberg’s speech and the Bronx apartment fire and catastrophic climate change. Neon Bible has often been a kind of sacred text or scrying glass to me, a way to reflect my own thoughts and gain some internal insight.
On these recent listens I think about whether the album’s characters believe escaping their dystopias is futile, or if they even want to escape. In the band’s first album, the characters “crawl out the chimney… and forget all [they] used to know” while their parents cry. But in Neon Bible, despite repeatedly declaring “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more,” the speaker locks windows and anxiously awaits fire or flood. They seem too afraid or possibly too comfortable in the house they despise to actually leave it behind. Even the refrain of “I don’t wanna see it at my windowsill” speaks to a threat that looms in the distance, causing pain and suffering elsewhere.
This is the sinister nature of the world Neon Bible reflects. Folks either set a Ukrainian flag to their profile picture or critique others for doing so while proposals to expand military budgets in the United States and here in Ireland sail through without critique because we don’t want to see it at our windowsill. We Minneapolitans and New Yorkers march for Black lives over months and then grumble as a re-elected Jacob Frey and a newly-elected Eric Adams cite rising crime in order to double down on racist policing. Why is it easier for me to focus on how war exacerbates the climate crisis than the immediate death and displacement it causes in Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, and elsewhere? As the voice from The Well and the Lighthouse chides, “You fool, now that you know your end is near / You always fall for what you desire or what you fear!”
“hold a mirror up to the world”
To return to the backseat: cars are common in Arcade Fire’s discography, symbolizing both freedom and our dependence on engines of violence. At the end of Funeral, the protagonist laments “I’ve been learning to drive my whole life,” but still prefers to take the backseat and go along for the ride. In Neon Bible, cars promise escape and urge the listener to “keep the car running” while waiting to flee. But in a fossil-driven world, the escape of the open road is illusory; even behind the wheel you’re along for the ride. The album’s actual escape instead lies in “a place where no cars go… between the click of a light and the start of the dream.” It isn’t a place one can physically enter and it’s one to which we must all venture alone, but unlike the promise of the car it represents a genuine – if fleeting – escape from a fear that feels like a desire.