Defining a Decade: Arcade Fire Funeral (2004)

Malcolm Gladwell says that a tipping point is “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”  He published his book in 2000, about 4 years ahead of what I liken was the tipping point in music for this decade.  Upon its release in September 2004, Funeral, the debut album from Montreal’s Arcade Fire, seemed to attract positive reviews and praise like a magnet.  Pitchfork gave it a 9.7 out of 10 rating, ensuring that every hipster from Hoboken to Honolulu was going to hit the peer-to-peer networks and search this record out.

And that’s where the power of Funeral really lies for me.  It was the first time that I got swept up in the frenzy of reading about and finding a record online, as opposed to waiting for the newest edition of my monthly music magazines to come in.  I found and downloaded a pirated rip of the album, and then made copies of it for people I knew who I thought would love it as much as I did.  It wasn’t the first album I ever downloaded, but it was the first digital record I fell in love with, and that paradigm shift was not lost on me.  Here I was, a guy who used to make regular trips to a series of record stores in order to buy a physical product, who cherished and cared for his record collection like it was a branch of the Library of Congress, and I was in love with, essentially, a computer file.  From Funeral on, my record collection hit the tipping point where the digital part of the collection began to outnumber its physical counterpart.

What I and those who also cherish Funeral are drawn to is the vulnerability and emotional soul of the record.  It’s been rightly described as “apocalyptic” in tone thanks to the illusions to tunnels beneath city streets, massive power failures and a society in chaos (burning seniors as witches in “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)”).  What was thankfully lacking in Arcade Fire’s music was the staid formula that indie-rock had fallen into through the first half of the 200s.  That tends to happen after artists release landmark albums that become mini tipping points: they influence other artists to create similar sounding records and eventually what was once a remarkable, singular work gets lost among a sea of imitators.  Arcade Fire broke out of the pattern with Funeral and created a symphonic indie-rock record chameleon.  From the epic and sweeping opening movement of “Wake Up” to it’s 60s Motown influenced conclusion, you were never sure where a song would end up from where it began.  “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” may be the album’s emotional centre as many would argue, but “Wake Up” is its mission statement and defining moment for me: “If the children don’t grow up/our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up/We’re just a million little god’s causin’ rain storms turnin’ every good thing to rust/I guess we’ll just have to adjust.” To borrow a line from Paul McCartney, it’s chaos and creation in our own backyard, and we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

If the weight of expectation weighed heavily on Win Butler and Régine Chassagne’s shoulders, you’d never know it by Neon Bible, the follow-up to Funeral.  It’s also an album worthy of note, although it’s more of an extension of what was laid down by Funeral.  We have Arcade Fire to thank for bringing Owen Pallett to the world’s attention, and for the beauty and complexity that is Bell Orchestre, both of which also released notable records in the decade.  But we are eternally grateful that they have brought Funeral into the world, kicking, screaming and covered in blood, sweat and tears.  Like a new born babe exposed to the harshness of our cruel world, it wailed and demanded one thing from us: love.  Funeral got it back in spades.

MP3: Arcade Fire “Wake Up”
Myspace: Arcade Fire

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