Doomsday Preppers: Grace McLeod

The episode (and the mini-season??) concludes with Grace McLeod, of North Carolina.

She and her husband Craig claim to be preparing for an “economic collapse, resulting in food shortages and unwelcome visitors.”
Grace is a former police who left Florida for NC, which—let’s face it—is really a no-brainer.
However, it seems that Grace is so special that she has a one-on-one direct line to ‘The Lord’, who apparently directs her every move and decision. Yeesh.  Of course, that kind of talk is pretty much required when you run your own ‘ministry’.

Anyway, it’s revealed that she and her husband have a unique, custon-designed survival fortress. While our narrator informs us that they “didn’t choose a typical retreat”, its location (on top of a 3,000-foot mountain, miles away from the nearest road) sure sounds like an ideal prepper hillfort to me.
The house is 3,500 square feet, and while the parts we see look like concrete, it’s not entirely unattractive—clearly it was designed and built all together, not piecemeal over a long period. Additionally, it includes a one-ton welded steel raise-able staircase (‘drawbridge’), and second-floor-only windows, meaning it could potentially function a lot like an actual castle—are you taking notes, Brent Doomsday ‘Castle’ Senior?

For additional storage, the couple have two shipping containers buried in a nearby hillside. Unfortunately, they haven’t exactly been camouflaged yet, so they’re pretty obvious.
To help them with their defensive measures, Grace invites some PMC ‘security consultant’ guys to take a look around and give some tips. They suggest using trail cameras for the outer perimeter, adding additional locks to interior doors, and a neat trick to buy more time should the house be breached: In the room most likely to be an intruder’s route into the house, they rig up a big-ass spotlight with a motion sensor directly opposite the door; when the door is opened, the intruder gets hit with about a million candlepower beam, which is quite enough to blind you for a good while, especially if it’s in a dark room. Nice to see practical applications like that.

The experts give Grace 69 points, for a year’s initial survival time. Now they just need to start up a raised-bed garden, and not rely on a shipping container’s worth of hoarded foodbuckets.

Honestly, aside from Grace’s annoying habit of chalking everything up to The Lord (where’s your sense of personal agency, woman?!) and lack of gardening, I’d say they have a pretty good setup.

Doomsday Preppers: Cheree

The episode concludes with a literally ten-minute look at Cheree of California’s Sierra mountains.
Since they live in Cali, it’s only understandable that their preparations focus on a ‘mega earthquake’.
With such a ridiculously short segment, there’s really not much material here to discuss. But don’t worry, I’ll find something!

With her parents, Cheree runs some kind of religiously-minded camp. While they seem pretty strongly ‘Christian’, I also caught the slightest hint of a New Age-y vibe off their descriptions.
In the event of the Big Quake (or, conceivably any other disaster), Chree’s main objective will be “to follow Christ.” Ohboy.

I generally try to stay away from conspicuously ragging on hot-button issues; they say you’re not supposed to bring up religion or politics, but without those, everything else is superficial small-talk (and I don’t mess around with that stuff)!

Okay, I can understand how the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth could be a good person to seek to emulate in your relations to others: stand up for the meek, champion gender equality, fight the powers that be, all that (Jesus was a lot like the John Lennon of Imperial Roman times).
So, why do I cringe when I hear that someone’s chief post-disaster strategy is to “follow Christ”? For starters, Christianity is—like the Judaism it grew out of—fundamentally a Younger Culture religion of civilization: at its core is the message that Humanity is flawed and unable to be fixed. The founders of these religions believed this because they looked around and saw only cities and miserable people living in them; having abandoned (or destroyed) their tribal histories, leaving their earliest records to date from post-city-dwelling times, they incorrectly assumed that humanity was born to build and reside (and be miserable) in cities, and if that was the case, and humanity had never been any other way, then human nature is simply to be depressed, violent, selfish, abusive, ignorant, and generally wicked.
Of course, anthropology has proved all that to be completely wrong, and so we should, for the good of Everyone, abandon such fallacious thinking as soon as possible.
Secondly, Christianity’s focus on post-death reunion with their creator in ‘heaven’ has been simply disastrous for the planet (and the rest of we heathens who have to share it with them). Y’see, when Being With God In Heaven is your life’s main goal, you tend to not put much priority on the actual being-alive-here-on-Earth part of life. As a result, you’re not going to care about keeping the place nice for the rest of us, because you’re ‘just passing through’ (those ‘be fruitful and multiply’ and ‘have dominion over the earth’ clauses didn’t help matters either), so you’d best ‘get what you can while the gettin’s good’.
In conclusion, anytime I meet an otherwise rational and intelligent person who self-identifies as a follower of one of the Humanity-is-Flawed religions (Christianity especially), I have to ask myself if they don’t have a loose wire somewhere upstairs.
Really, just be a decent person and leave the labels out of it.

Anyway, in order to practice living through a disaster, Cheree gets together a few like-minded folks to do a weekend full-immersion scenario. Kudos to them for that! They turn off the Juice and spend a few days living without all the modern conveniences we’ve become reliant upon and/or take for granted. Some of the guys install a few 250-watt pv-solar panels on the roof, while others build and install a DIY PVC hand pump for drawing water. And I think I saw someone do a tiny bit of gardening??
However, that’s about all the good stuff, because the remaining five minutes are concerned with a contentious debate among the group over whether or not to allow a member, Garry, to remain in the group, since he advocates armed self-defense. After some waste-of-time scenes, they agree to remain unarmed and excommunicate him from their little network. I guess when a disaster goes down, they’ll defend against hungry marauders with harsh language, man!

Experts give them 58 points for 8 months. They tell them to learn food-canning; Cheree admits that she has already has all the stuff to do it, she just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. She concludes by reiterating her strategy for surviving—to maintain her mantra that “God is on our side!” Okay, kid, keep telling yourself that.

And just for fun:

Harhar.

The Suburbs: ‘Speaking in Tongues’

One of two tracks added to the deluxe edition of The Suburbs, Speaking in Tongues may have even less analyzable material than the mostly-empty Empty Room.

Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother
Your daddy really took it outta you
Until you’re speaking in tongues

That first line isn’t just something that sounds cool to sing, it’s also just about the only link this song makes to the larger vision of The Suburbs. Because, you see, Butler has lifted this originally-French lyric (“You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frere!”) from Mr. T.S. Eliot’s masterwork The Waste Land (line 76).
It’s for that reason that I place this track here after Wasted Hours, with its apt description of “endless suburbs stretched out thin and dead”—which sure sounds like a wasteland to me. Sadly, that’s about all there is to say about this song. With the title phrase’s religious connotations, I would almost think this song to be a better fit on Neon Bible, but sadly there’s still not enough material to link it to that album either.

Sneaking out the windows now
You got the spirit now!

If I had to make a stretch, I could equate sneaking out the window in this song with the oppressed youth of Half Light I, torn from their safe beds by the call of the Wild Night (“We are not asleep, we are on the streets”).

Hypocrite reader my double, my brother
Where did we lose our way?
It’s like we’re speaking in tongues

Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother
Now I can’t understand the words
Now you’re speaking in tongues

Come out of your head and into my world now

Speaking in tongues…

In the song’s last section, we hear from everybody’s favorite floorlamp-dancer, David Byrne:

On the tracklist, this song is “Speaking in Tongues (featuring David Byrne)”, but Featuring is a rather strong word, as he seems to contribute little more than a few “ahh-hhaa’s”. I think his appearance here functions mostly as some serious meta-referencing (Speaking in Tongues being Byrne’s band Talking Heads’ breakthrough 1983 album). Generally speaking in the last thirty years or so, the term ‘Art Rock’ has been synonymous in most people’s minds with Talking Heads.  With his involvement in this song, however, I think Byrne has passed the mantle of Preeminent Art Rock Group to worthy recipients Arcade Fire.

The Suburbs: ‘City With No Children’

Thankfully, Empty Room fades out into hand-claps and an ever-so-catchy guitar riff that heralds the opening of the rollicking City With No Children.

The summer that I broke my arm I waited for your letter
I have no feeling for you now, now that I know you better

While I can’t say for sure that it’s an intentional connection, Butler only refers to Summer twice on this album, each in a context of passing time. Together, he paints a complete vignette of a young man who breaks his arm, and spends the season staring out the window, waiting for snail-mail correspondence.

I wish that I could have loved you then, before our age was through
And before a world war does with us whatever it will do

This verse seems to refer back to the Neon Bible closing track My Body is a Cage, in which our singer bemoans that he is “…living in an age whose name I don’t know”. Well, in this song, that age has ostensibly ended; in interviews Butler has referred to “the current information age”, but is that what he’s referencing here? Given the band’s apparent socio-political slant, if we’re talking about an age whose name no one seems to be able to agree on, I’d like to submit the Holocene or Anthropocene for consideration, although Derrick Jensen’s Age of the Sociopath is more accurate.
And once again, there’s mention of a world war looming on the horizon (compare to Neon Bible’s Windowsill: “World War Three, when are you coming for me?”).

Dreamed I drove home to Houston on a highway that was underground
There was no light that we could see as we listened to the sound of the engine failing

Aside from references to one’s home, and driving—possibly as a result of being called back West by one’s parents (Half Light II)—I’m not sure if this vignette is meant to mesh into the larger mosaic of this album, or if it’s just a testament to Butler’s great skill at composing tight verses. If you really want to get analytic and force a match with the album’s themes, that second line could be interpreted as “we had no hope while we watched the machinery that drives our system begin to break down and collapse”.

I feel like I’ve been living in a city with no children in it
A garden left for ruin by a billionaire inside of a private prison

Butler has explained how he was inspired to write this song when he received a picture “of an old school friend… standing with his daughter sitting on his shoulders “at the mall around the corner from where we lived”. He adds: “The combination of seeing this familiar place and seeing my friend with his child brought back a lot of feeling from that time. I found myself trying to remember the town that we grew up in and trying to retrace as much as I could remember.”
This also reminds us of the request for a child heard in The Suburbs; one can almost hear the singer’s biological clock ticking against a countdown to destruction. (As a cross-media connection, the only child-free city I can think of is London, circa 2027).

You never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount
I used to think I was not like them but I’m beginning to have my doubts about it

A Neon Bible-esque religious reference paired with a veiled fear of becoming a ‘sellout’; perhaps Win seems to be afraid that as he and the band become more well-known, the messages they spread in their songs might sound hollow and hypocritical. However, the very-down-to-earth Butler brothers have reassuringly tackled this topic in interviews:

Will: Maybe at some point we’ll get to the level where we have to really deal with the devil or decide to stay small, but so far we’ve been pretty much able to do what we want to do.
Win: I think you also have to want to be really famous. It’s a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage [laughs].

When you’re hiding underground, the rain can’t get you wet
But do you think your righteousness could pay
The interest on your debt? I have my doubts about it

I’m really not sure what this verse refers to, but this isn’t the first time the band has sung about debt, although the last two occurrences (“I know no matter what you say/There are some debts you’ll never pay” (Intervention); “I don’t want to live with my father’s debt/You can’t forgive what you can’t forget” (Windowsill)) came from Neon Bible.

‘The Suburbs’: Context & Composition

The Suburbs is (the) Arcade Fire’s third full-length album, and it continues to build on the themes of their EP and previous albums, especially 2007’s Neon Bible—so much so that it really seems a bit like a sequel or side-quel to that record.
In fact, the idea of successive sidequels continuing to explore deeper facets of an original’s theme reminds me of the life’s work of another Houstonite, Daniel Quinn, whose writings could (from a certain point of view) be interpreted to deal with the same issues as Arcade Fire (such as calls for change in how we relate to our communities; escape from the world in its present form; and imminent environmental destruction). I wonder if the Brothers Butler have read any Quinn?

But where Neon Bible seemed to focus on a cultural and environmental collapse/apocalypse brought on by the potent overlap of politics, overconsumption, religion, and television (which is to say, it’s an album about Right Now), The Suburbs dials down the doom to zoom in a bit.
While it’s entirely possible that both albums occupy the same universe, this time around, the story—while set against a backdrop of suburban war—is more intimate, focusing on a Millennial generation of nostalgic, dissatisfied Young People—alienated by technology and the sterile uniformity of their modern surroundings—yearning for a rewarding way of life outside the Sprawl.
Hopefully I haven’t scared anyone off with that serious description, but it’s just as deathly topical as its predecessor.

To provide comparisons as we start our examination of this album, I’m going to be relating examples from my previous favorite concept album (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), partially because they’re surprisingly similar in presentation, and partially because I’ve invested so much time studying that double-LP monster over the years it would seem like a waste if I didn’t.

So, for starters, both albums begin with an atypical-sounding first track or two. I have to wonder what the first ’Pumpkins fans to hear MCIS in 1995—expecting something similar to the swirling guitar layers of Siamese Dream—thought upon hearing the piano/synth and orchestral strings of those first two tracks (the ’Pumpkins’ signature sound would return in spades by MCIS’s third track); similarly, the splash of cymbals and the deceptively cheerful piano line that opens The Suburbs might’ve surprised Arcade Fire fans, although I suspect they’re smart enough to understand the band’s penchant for making songs in a wide variety of styles.

Since we’re talking about arrangement, I feel I should—even though I promise I’ll discuss it later as part of this series—draw attention to Scenes from The Suburbs at this point, specifically how Spike Jonze rearranges the album’s tracks to great effect to open his film.
As exciting an opening as those splashy cymbals on The Suburbs are, they sound way better when preceded by sorrowful narration and the melancholy strings of an extended version of The Suburbs Continued (the album’s coda track).
Hey kids!, just for fun, next time you listen to the album, try playing that reprise as the first track. Pretty cool, huh?
So, compositionally-speaking, this opening title track functions as an overture or prologue, containing concentrated versions of the album’s themes. The next song will open the programme proper (MCIS’s first ‘scene’, jellybelly, begins with the words, “Welcome to nowhere fast”; while after its prologue, The Suburbs launches with Ready to Start, a song that would be a perfect album-opener by nature of its musical composition, title, and lyrics).
The songs that follow will explore the themes first broached in the prologue, reaching an emotional climax about halfway through the album (Muzzle for MCIS; Suburban War for The ‘burbs), and ending the album with a Reprise of the main theme, which acts as ‘end titles’ for the listening experience.

Said title track (or in the case of MCIS, the second track, since the title track is instrumental) contains concentrated versions of most of the key themes examined in the course of the album (and in a larger sense, in all of Arcade Fire’s works). While there is some significant overlap for several of them (due to exploration of dichotomies, for instance—all coins having two sides, to be able to discuss something like the Wild without being aware at least on some level of its opposite would be an impressive feat of Orwellian thought), in their distilled forms the album’s themes may be classified thusly (in no particular order):

• children/childhood/youth/adolescence
• nostalgia for said carefree times ^ (the “wasted hours”)
• Millennial Young People of today (“the Kids”)
• music/singing/screaming
• modernity/recent history
• Place: Cities/Downtown/the Sprawl/Towns/the Suburbs/Home
• one’s connection to said locales^, (especially issues that arise when said locales^ change)
• roads and driving (inherent in our relationship to said modern locales^)
• Destruction (either in the form of War, or another nonspecific source, and often of said locales^)
• Technology (and its effect on the speed of life), and waiting (as metaphor for a slower-paced life)
• alienation (often as a result of said technology)
• authority figures with ‘power’ (emperors, kings, soldiers, police, &c.)
• tribalism
• insomnia/sleeping/dreaming
• Escape
• the “Wild” (often represented by “the Night”, used as a catch-all term for the natural/organic/uncivilized)

In fact, if someone asked me to further hyper-refine The Suburbs in 25 words, I’d say it is about ‘the dichotomy between Civilization/The Wild (and all that go along with both), explored from the vantage point of Young People in the early 21^st century.’
But of course, that’s coming from someone with an anthropology/anarcho-primitivist background. Hell, as Win sings on Culture War, “You see what you want to see.”

Pretty heavy stuff, huh?