Worst Songs Ever: Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used to Wait’

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #23 on U.S. Alternative Songs

In 1982, pop music got the definitive statement on the attractions and horrors of suburbia *. Beginning with a synth pattern played by Geddy Lee on an Oberheim OB-X notable for its warmth, as if providing comfort for blighted youth, Rush’s “Subdivisions” depends on generalizations that are rooted in small truths as much musical as lyrical. In the first minute alone drummer Neil Peart’s drum fills and patterns remain unpredictable, a correlative to the young men — always men in Rush songs — growing up on the fringes of the city, living existences where “it all seems so one-sided/Opinions all provided”; the drums even perk up with anticipatory anxiety at the line “the far, unlit unknown.” Alex Lifeson’s guitar parts don’t concern themselves with the virtuosity beloved by its (male) fans: he sticks to strummed chords that, like Peart, bestir themselves as the lyric demands. As for singer Lee, lord knows warmth isn’t a virtue we often associate with him, but he sings the line “Nowhere is the dreamer/Or the misfit so alone” as if he understood the despair of the budding gay teenager, stuck with Dallas-watching parents and bad weed and Michelob in parking lots.

Almost twenty years — a generation — later, Arcade Fire rode its aesthetic and commercial propulsion into the studio and recorded The Suburbs. Writing a concept album came as easily as critics prizes to Win Butler and his colleagues: Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007) apotheosized kids who dream of far, unlit unknowns; kids trapped by parents and fate. “Rebellion (Lies),” “Keep the Car Running,” “No Cars Go,” another three or four — superb escapsism, with grand arrangements that relied on chewy kitsch centers for animation. But the car ran out of gas on The Suburbs. So long as bands walk boulevards of broken dreams we’ll have songs about how shitty they are.

A mirror darkly then — that’s the relationship of “We Used to Wait” to “Subdivisions.” Instead of the Oberheim synth, Arcade Fire use a piano figure — they’re organic and real, you know. Where Rush used four instruments to design in musical detail a fully inhabited community, no mysteries, unlit or unknown or otherwise, curl around the edges of Arcade Fire’s single. It’s for listeners who’ve already made up their minds. Spare percussive rhythm guitar, that piano, and a kick drum in the second third do an awful lot of the work. The tension between Butler’s falsetto and the sudden addition of a sequencer works — a harbinger of his leaden footed dance experiments three years later. Works in an extra-diegetically sense too, as Butler looks for escape in a sound and ethos he admires but can only duplicate as a received form. The words when they’re noticeable aren’t much better. “Hope that something pure can last” is a motif, a diagnosis of a malady. Oh, how women and liberal politics have suffered at the hands of young men hoping for purity. Geddy Lee’s epicene timbre adds distance and chill; Butler and his arrangement march behind his protagonist. Not that identifying with the character is a disqualifier, as Pat Benatar, obvious forebear Springsteen, and those solid early AF songs showed, but the conceptual raiment rests too heavy on the shoulders of “We Used to Wait.” By 2010 surely Butler and his collaborators could find, uh, mitigating factors — surely the suburbs can’t fully suck if they allow you to imagine beyond your constrictions?

(I hope readers don’t finish this post thinking that writing well about stultifying comfort stopped in the early Reagan years; it’s that writing vaguely or morosely about it — or without the awareness that this stultification is still a comfort when you don’t worry about being shot dead walking out your front door — is the default position.)

The Suburbs isn’t a total loss. I kept “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” a spooky marriage of The Knife and Garbage; and “Modern Man” leans too heavily on Tom Petty to dismiss. It makes sense that this is the record that brought fans and Grammy voters together — the messages require stencils.

* The second definitive statement about suburbia: Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia (The Full Horror).”