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    Track by Track Essay Laila Weatherly 1

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    Arcade Fire is considered one of the most talented bands of the decade. They have maintained a unique sound while sustaining popularity in mainstream culture. The document explores four of their most iconic songs - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" which sets the nostalgic tone of their debut album Funeral; "Wake Up" which moves past childhood to examine the sadness of adulthood; "The Suburbs" which reflects nostalgically on suburban teenage life; and "Deep Blue" which references the famous chess match and criticizes overreliance on technology.

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    Track by Track Essay Laila Weatherly 1

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    api-436710420
    107 views2 pages
    Arcade Fire is considered one of the most talented bands of the decade. They have maintained a unique sound while sustaining popularity in mainstream culture. The document explores four of their most iconic songs - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" which sets the nostalgic tone of their debut album Funeral; "Wake Up" which moves past childhood to examine the sadness of adulthood; "The Suburbs" which reflects nostalgically on suburban teenage life; and "Deep Blue" which references the famous chess match and criticizes overreliance on technology.

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    track by track essay laila weatherly 1

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    Arcade Fire is considered one of the most talented bands of the decade. They have maintained a unique sound while sustaining popularity in mainstream culture. The document explores four of their most iconic songs - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" which sets the nostalgic tone of their debut album Funeral; "Wake Up" which moves past childhood to examine the sadness of adulthood; "The Suburbs" which reflects nostalgically on suburban teenage life; and "Deep Blue" which references the famous chess match and criticizes overreliance on technology.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    107 views2 pages

    Track by Track Essay Laila Weatherly 1

    Uploaded by

    api-436710420
    Arcade Fire is considered one of the most talented bands of the decade. They have maintained a unique sound while sustaining popularity in mainstream culture. The document explores four of their most iconic songs - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" which sets the nostalgic tone of their debut album Funeral; "Wake Up" which moves past childhood to examine the sadness of adulthood; "The Suburbs" which reflects nostalgically on suburban teenage life; and "Deep Blue" which references the famous chess match and criticizes overreliance on technology.

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    Arcade Fire is, in my opinion, one of the most talented bands of our decade.

    The group
    holds this special place in my heart for a multitude of reasons, but the real deciding factor is their
    astonishing ability to sustain a firm presence in pop culture whilst maintaining an unfiltered,
    unabashedly unique sound. Their style is lyrically complex yet musically catchy, with an
    instrumentation that harkens back to a distinct 80’s new wave sound. Delving into every Arcade
    Fire song would be a long and quite honestly pointless endeavor, so the following is an
    exploration of four of their most quintessential tracks.

    Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
    Serving as opener to the band’s critically acclaimed debut album, Funeral, “Neighborhood #1
    (Tunnels)” sets the nostalgic, thoughtful tone to be embraced wholeheartedly by Arcade Fire for
    years to come. The track begins with a solitary guitar line that soon morphs into a symphony of
    sound and a heartbreakingly ethereal melody, and it depicts a story of young love. This fairytale
    love story takes place in a snowstorm and serves as a childish escape, chronicling the speaker’s
    journey to a hazy, apocalyptic world. He says he’ll “dig a tunnel from my window to yours” and
    live out an alternate reality in which he and his love “let their hair grow long and forget all they
    used to know”. The repeated choral lines “you change all the lead/sleeping in my head to gold”
    are both dark and beautifully pure, summing up the theme of the song as a whole.

    Wake Up
    Wake Up is another archetypal track on Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Featured (fittingly) on The
    Secret Life of Walter Mitty soundtrack, this song explores the emotions associated with growing
    up and seeing life for what it is after departing from childhood- “now that I’m older/ my heart’s
    colder/ and I can see than it’s a lie”. While Neighborhood #1 views the world through a childish
    lense, Wake Up moves past this and explores the repression and sadness associated with
    adulthood- “our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up”.

    The Suburbs
    The namesake of Arcade Fire’s 2010 release, The Suburbs, opens with an upbeat, catchy piano
    tune sustained for the entirety of the song while lead vocalist Win Butler employs an impressive
    range and falsetto. Lyrically, the track is nostalgic for the simple innocence of teenage suburban
    life amidst the fading glory and impermanence of adulthood. The speaker informs us that “in the
    suburbs/[he] learned drive”, and later, that he’d like to have a daughter while he’s still young so
    he can “show her some beauty before the damage is done”. The Suburbs as a track is illustrative
    of the album in its entirety, drawing on a reflective yet dull suburban sentiment that evokes a
    childish sincerity.

    Deep Blue
    Deep Blue is considerably less popular than many other Arcade Fire tracks, but deserves to be
    included nevertheless.The most interesting aspect of this song is far and away its allusion to the
    infamous (yet decidedly niche) Kasparov vs. Deep Blue chess match in 1996/7. For some
    background, this event was a series of chess matches between world champion Garry Kasparov
    and IBM’s revolutionary supercomputer, coined “Deep Blue”, in which it was decided that the
    two were quite equally matched. Arcade Fire uses this reference to explore the rise of technology
    and artificial intelligence; lyrically, the track actually reads like an opinion piece on the
    technological revolution of the 21st century. In the end, the song criticizes this advent, advising
    listeners to step back and return to nature: “put the cellphone down for a while/in the night there
    is something wild/ can you hear it breathing?”.

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