We Used to Wait

Def the best Fire album. Obviously the whole album is about time, modernity, convention, and childhood. As many great writers and songwriters spend their years trying to find the meaning of life, to access the world that seemed so joyous when they were children, so too does Arcade Fire. But that's just what we think, how our brains work. When you're in your twenties you may long to be a child again, but when you're in your late thirties you long to be in your early twenties. And it's not just, 'Oh i wish I was young'. As they say, youth is wasted on the young. But that's not exactly accurate since everyone is young. The biggest problem is not death but aging. Time seems unreal. This is the oldest you've ever been, and while that may seem obvious, when you think about it it really subtracts meaning from our world. There's no, next time I'm in Kindergarten, next time I'm in highschool, next time I lose my virginity, etc. The suburbs represent convention. They represent what we're 'supposed' to do. But real happiness seems almost inaccessible in our world (through anything short of a lobotomy), and so while we're told to raise a family and move to the suburbs, what we really want is the past because the past represents a better time, an almost perfect unreal time. Obviously ppl like Dylan and Cohen and Jeff Buckley have devoted their lives to this problem, as have great writers like Thomas Wolfe, and obviously there is no answer. And although we 'used to wait' with 'all those wasted hours', when we look back on it now it's a shame, but in reality, 'if I could have it back, all the time that we wasted, I'd only waste it again.' In regards to the Eliot quote well it also greatly troubled Eliot. And it is most definitely a nod in his direction. Prufrock was his first major accomplishment about a world of being alone in a big city, of being alone even though you're surrounded by people. Although everyone (I think :S) suffers from very similar problems in life, it hurts because sometimes we can be alone and have to deal with the problems alone, even though everyone that passes by is likely (or has likely) gone through something similar, despite what are preconceptions of those ppl may be. And the line chosen is important because it was one that essentially birthed postmodernism. Where poetry before was all 'she is the more beauteous immaculately...she is like a flower to mine eye' bullshit, all of a sudden Eliot compares something to a patient etherized on a table. And it gave us questions, it allowed us to question meaning, as does this album, or as it attempts to anyways, I can't speak to how it was received throughout the world.