Now Our Lives Are Changing Fast

July 04, 2011

Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now

These days my kids are both listening to Arcade Fire—you know, the indie Canadian band that stole the Album of the Year Grammy out from under Eminem and Lady Gaga.

Normally I’d be proud of them for their alternative leanings, but AF’s latest album, The Suburbs, cuts too close for me, especially these days. (Not that their debut album, Funeral, sounds like a barrel full of laughs either.) Check these lyrics out:

They heard me singing and they told me to stop. Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock…

Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl. Living in the sprawl, the dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains and there’s no end in sight.

Yeesh. I’m all like, guys, can’t we listen to Ke$ha instead?

Secondborn informed me, with the precision of the newly hatched hipster, that the reason why the lyrics depress me is because “I’m not in their demographic.”

Rilly? Okay, possibly lines like this are meant for moody 13-year-olds:

Maybe when you’re older you will understand, why you don’t feel right, why you can’t sleep at night now. In line for a number like a modern man, but you don’t understand, like a modern man.

But this? This, my son, is for me:

We watched the end of the century, compressed on a tiny screen. A dead star collapsing and we could see that something was ending.

I would have pointed out to Secondborn that, at 31, band leader Win Butler is exactly halfway between my age and his, but it’s already so painful having your mom listen to your music that I let the matter drop out of simple compassion.

Nevertheless, the anxious, pounding piano on “We Used to Wait” has become the soundtrack to my life this early summer. [Check out this wildly cool interactive music video/Google street view project thingy, The Wilderness Downtown, that uses the song.]

The other morning, frantically late for some stupid thing or another, sleep-deprived and unable to think straight from the insane ringing in my ears that’s been there since January, I actually got tears in my eyes when they got to the line, I used to sleep at night before the flashing light settled deep in my brain.

But that was just a bad moment. Mostly I go through my day singing this over and over,

Now our lives are changing fast.
Now our lives are changing fast.
Hope that something pure can last.
Hope that something pure can last.