| Arcade Fire – Afterlife Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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There's a nice reference to Soren Kierkegaard's essay on the "reflective age"--which seems to influence the album's first song, "Reflektor"--hidden in this song: "It was just a glimpse of you Like looking through a window Or a shallow sea" Kierkegaard writes, "Action and passion is as absent in the present age as peril is absent from swimming in shallow waters. . . ." It seems that our postmodern lover-boy protagonist is given a glimpse of something real, albeit from a distance (I.e., "window", reflection off "a shallow sea"). He feels, perhaps, for a moment, that he might have gained access to his object of passion but ultimately cannot act because "it was just a glimpse of you [her]." The whole album seems to be about the difficulty of action for a population raised on "reflections," or "screens." The afterlife seems a romantic concept, which might shed our obsession with analyzing and making judgments despite these judgements inherently impeding our ability to do anything spontaneous, passionate, or worthwhile. But then, why should we fantasize an afterlife ("what an awful word") when we have a real one that is being neglected. Maybe we, staring our screens, have preempted the afterlife synthetically while eschew the one real life outside of our silly little heads? Butler seems to confirm this idea in an interview with Rolling stone. When asked about Kierkegaard's influence on the album, butler says, "It reads like it was written here, basically. He basically compares the reflective age to a passionate age. Like, if there was a piece of gold out on thin ice, in a passionate age, if someone went to try and get the gold, everyone would cheer them on and be like, "Go for it! Yeah you can do it!" And in a reflective age, if someone tried to walk out on the thin ice, everyone would criticize them and say, "What an idiot! I can't believe you're going out on the ice to try and risk something." So it would kind of paralyze you to even act basically, and it just kind of resonated with me — wanting to try and make something in the world instead of just talking about things." |
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