Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" Is A Song-By-Response To Rush's "Signals"

Yesterday, while researching music videos for a post I’d planned to call “Happy RUSH Hashanah” (because, y’know, hilarious), I came across something much more interesting. You’ve watched The Wilderness Downtown, the interactive multimedia project Arcade Fire made as a video for their song “We Used to Wait.” (If not, you should. It’s very cool.) But having watched it, and then watching the video for Rush’s “Subdivisions,” I was struck by the similarities.

Both projects use eye-in-the-sky photography and street-level panning shots to illustrate a kind of teenage suburban anomie/modern-world angst deal.

Also, both bands are from Canada.

And Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson’s haircut is much like Arcade Fire singer’s Win Butler.

Hmm. These twining threads got me thinking.

“While We Wait” is from Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs. “Subdivisions,” for those few of you who did not spend the early 1980s playing D&D; and listening to prog rock, is from Rush’s 1982 album, Signals. Both albums focus, lyrics-wise, on the themes established in the aforementioned songs. Both albums employ synthesizers more heavily than each group’s earlier work. Poppier, bouncier song structure, too.

It soon became clear to me that The Suburbs can in fact be seen as a song-by-song response to Signals-exactly the same way that Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville is a song-by-song response to the Stones’ Exile On Main Street.

(That is to say, not really at all. I pored over Guyville when it came out in 1993, searching for hints of Main Street, the album that is my default answer to the basically unanswerable question of “what’s your favorite album of all time?” The best I ever came up with was is that Phair sings “I want to be mesmerizing, too…” on “Mesmerizing,” and Mick Jagger sings “It’s so mesmerizing, all that inside me…” on “Rocks Off.” Phair has said that her homage had more to do with song tempo and sequence. I don’t know. Let it be a mystery, I guess. The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.)

But anyway, here’s a track-listing breakdown to support my Suburbs = Signals theory.

The Suburbs = Subdivisions (bear with me here, The Suburbs has twice as many songs on it. Exactly twice as many! Another clue!)

Ready to Start = Countdown
Modern Man = New World Man
Rococo = Chemistry
Empty Room = Losing It
City With No Children = The Analog Kid
Half Light I = Chemistry
Half Light II (No Celebration) = The Weapon (Part II of Fear)
Suburban War = Countdown
Month of May = The Analog Kid
Wasted Hours = Losing It (Also = Trying to find the connections between Exile in Guyville and Exile on Main Street)
Deep Blue = Digital Man
We Used to Wait = Subdivisions
Sprawl (Flatland) = New World Man
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) = The Weapon (Part II of Fear)
The Suburbs (Continued) = Digital Man

See? It’s so obvious!

Now, in honor of the holidays, here are some more awesome Rush videos from albums other than Signals. You knew that Geddy Lee is Jewish, right? If not, here’s a handy and sort of disturbing chart about that kind of stuff. Shana Tova.