The Arcade Fire is about Fear

I realized recently that the Arcade Fire is about fear and that was why I never much liked them. There is a distinct sense of terror throughout all of their work, from the “making of” mythos about grandparents dying during the making of Funeral, and not to make light of it but it’s not like the death of a grandparent can be said to be unexpected and out of the natural order of life, to their latest album The Suburbs which features videos of camouflaged impersonal soldiers, of the totalitarian police state that leftists can only hope to be lucky enough to oppose, invading an otherwise innocent and idyllic suburb. There’s also the general tone of their work, from the way Win Butler’s voice quivers to the sharp minor tones of the guitars, which strikes me as uniquely fearful, as if they unlocked the specific timbre of music theory which evokes fear and then made three albums based off of that.

Fear can be fun, of course, which is why Hollywood made like seven Scream movies and like fifteen SAW movies, but the fact is that the Arcade Fire are completely serious about the fear in their music; there’s no campiness or tongue in cheek, nothing gleefully over-the-top, no hint of humor in any of it. They feel fear in making their music and they want you to feel fear in listening to it. 

Because fear does remove you from reality. When you fear something you step back and an older part of your mind activates, a more primitive part from the days of hunter-gatherers which had to fear in order to survive. Some of the sharpest memories a person has are when he feels overwhelming fear. When you are in fear, you don’t change the world. You become instinctual, not rational. You accept the world as it is while you try to avoid the challenges of it. The world becomes beautiful once you are paralyzed by fear, but you become a coward, someone that the world happens to rather than someone who shapes the world.

You also make bad decisions when feeling inordinate amounts of fear. Iraq was not really debated due to the fear fanned in the general public which resulted in anyone questioning the war tarred as disloyal. That the Arcade Fire came to prominence in this time says a lot.

But this is just art, isn’t it? Yes it is art. It is art based on fear. And there are other ways to experience beauty, other ways to appreciate a neat little tune, other ways to feel joy when listening to music. Music ends up being a soundtrack to life for me, and fear is just a roadblock to be bypassed.