May 18, 2022

Re: Arcade Fire, Søren Kierkegaard, and Seeking Hope Amid Anxiety

In October 2013, not long after the birth of Instagram and Snapchat, the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire released Reflektor—a double album that would go down as one of the best of the 2010s. On the album’s eponymous title track, lead singer Win Butler deliberately invokes Søren Kierkegaard’s 1846 treatise A Literary Review. As Butler explained, he was shaken by Kierkegaard’s observation that, in an age dominated by media and technology, people would become incapable of engaging in meaningful activity and cultivating deep relationships. Instead, they would gravitate towards critique, gossip, innuendo, and rumor—each a surrogate for a more ardent and profound purpose. “It sounds like [Kierkegaard] is talking about modern times,” Butler said in a 2014 interview, “He’s talking about the press and alienation and you kind of read it and you’re like, ‘Dude, you have no idea how insane it’s gonna get’.”

The song “Reflektor” begins with Butler hinting at the digital borstal now capturing the world. We are, he sings, “Trapped in a prism, in a prism of light,” where a barrage of images and sounds occlude genuine relationships. It is as if the nature of eros and agape have been reconstructed, now marked more ruminative doubt than genuine feeling:

Now, the signals we send, are deflected again
We're still connected, but are we even friends?
We fell in love when I was nineteen
And I was staring at a screen

Even God has been digitized. We can read about God in a Wikipedia entry; we can debate religion on Twitter. But what is the upshot? In a world of “ghosting” and “phubbing,” there is no bodily redemption, only an endlessly deferred promise. As the late David Bowie, acting as the chorus to Butler’s dramatic cries, sings on “Reflektor”: “Thought you would bring me to the resurrector / Turns out it was just a reflektor.”

If Reflektor represented Arcade Fire’s first attempt to translate Kierkegaard’s insights into pop music, the band’s latest album WE might be seen as its sequel. Released on May 6, WE takes its title from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel of the same name (Мы). Though a Bolshevik, Zamyatin grew disillusioned with Soviet communism not long after the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, citing the totalitarian policies of Soviet Chairman Vladimir Lenin and, in turn, Russia’s descent into mass conformity. Zamyatin’s We is often read as a thinly veiled invective against the Soviet Union—indeed, it was banned by Soviet censors upon its publication—and the book is said to have been a precursor to English-language dystopian literature such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). To be sure, in calling the novel We, Zamyatin intended to suggest the political eradication of individuality: his “One State” identifies people by numbers rather than names, and all are bound to act in accordance with a technically determined logic.

Of course, as I have written elsewhere, Kierkegaard himself was concerned about the problem of mass conformity in modern, technologically-driven societies. In fact, the Dane’s warnings precede Zamyatin’s by several decades. In a sense, then, Arcade Fire’s WE is actually a continuation of the band’s Kierkegaardian interests on Reflektor as well as its successor Everything Now (2017). This aspect of the WE is made clear at the outset. The album’s first two tracks are entitled “Age of Anxiety I” and “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” respectively. Both songs signal a preoccupation with anxiety itself—what Kierkegaard once referred to as “the dizziness of freedom” or, more prosaically, the possibility of becoming a certain kind of self. As Butler sings on “Age of Anxiety I”:

When I look at you
I see what you want me to
See what you want me to
When you look at me
See what I want you to see
What I want you to see

Anxiety manifests that nothing is stable. Everything is a worry. “Are you talking to me or about me? / Am I talking to you or about you?” Butler almost mutters towards song’s end.

The next track, naturally, builds on this theme. Over a melancholy piano line, which soon gives way to a dance-inspired beat, Butler casts the self in metaphorical terms. “Rabbit hole (yeah) / Plastic soul (yeah),” he sings along with his co-bandleader (and wife) Régine Chassagne. Moreover, as the song unfolds, it is implied that smartphones and social media exploit the self’s capacity for possibility. People are drawn, almost against their wills, into the void of nihilistic pleasure:

Born into the abyss
New phone, who's this?
A silver thread, a French kiss
Arcadia apocalypse

There are, needless to say, attendant social ramifications. WE’s third track is a suite of songs grouped under the heading “End of the Empire.” Arcade Fire is not a band known for its subtlety, and here Butler is a bit heavy-handed: “I unsubscribe / I unsubscribe / This ain't no way of life.” This lyric is taken from the fourth cycle on “End of the Empire,” dubbed “Sagittarius A” for the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Thus Butler indicates that digital culture is absorbing, even devouring, all things human. Extinction seemingly beckons.

Still, in good Kierkegaardian fashion, Arcade Fire does not give up. Despair and suffering are capable of pointing the way to redemption. The highlight of WE is a pair of songs that effectively constitute the album’s fulcrum. Entitled “The Lighting I” and “The Lightning II,” these tracks survey the barren horizon of the present age and look for traces of the transcendent. As Butler sings in “The Lightning I”:

The sky is breaking open, we keep hoping
In the distance, we'll see a glow
Lightning, light our way
'Til the black sky turns back to indigo

Meanwhile, “The Lighting II” is a rousing track, which will doubtless play well on Arcade Fire’s summer tour. But it’s also a hint at the band’s raison d’être. After all, one might wonder why Arcade Fire continues to create art amid such apparent degradation. But Butler, it seems, has found purpose in serving as a “voice crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23):

I heard the thunder and I thought it was the answer
But I found I got the question wrong
I was trying to run away but a voice told me to stay
Put the feeling in a song

Doubtless this is not a solution. Like Kierkegaard, Butler remains “without authority.” For now, however, WE is content to celebrate passion, patience, and the virtue of expectancy:

A day, a week, a month, a year
A day, a week, a month, a year
Every second brings me here

Waiting on the lightning
Waiting on the lightning
Waiting on the light, what will the light bring?