Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.

Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by student assistant Georgia (class of 2025) and features Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs. Thanks, Georgia!

Arcade Fire
The Suburbs

Canadian Band Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is an indie rock, baroque pop exploration of suburban life in modern America. The album is inspired by the singer’s upbringing in The Woodlands, Texas, a suburb of Houston that I visit regularly to see my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. The town is filled with tall trees and smooth concrete, and every retail chain and restaurant you can name. I remember 110 degree summer days spent indoors, malls and movie theaters, pools and Tex-Mex, long drives and drive-thrus.

It is both a sense of placeless-ness and nostalgia that define this album, especially in the reflection on and mourning of the city or town you once knew as a child. Going from a placeless neighborhood to a faceless job, wanting children in a world abusing itself into extinction, mourning time wasted, these are all explored in this album that I believe connects to what it often feels like to be an American today.

Many things lately feel off, almost fake. We buy things manufactured from far-away places, our homes, communities, and jobs are long drives apart, neighborhoods are being rebuilt to look the same as everywhere else. Presidents are celebrities, health care is sold by greedy corporations, recession is approaching, and yet we are being fed facts mistold and fears misplaced. It sometimes feels like we’re living in the shadows of all that’s been built here. What does it mean to be an American right now? How do our communities reflect the world we live in? Where do we truly live? Where are we from?

First they built the road, then they built the town, That’s why we’re still driving round and round