The suburbs confront the prospect of evolution with just one option: The wholesale replacement of one thing with something new. And that’s why we’re still driving around and around. The very fact that they were so specifically conceived as Eden for breeders, a Utopian template for child-rearing, robbed them of the one thing most necessary for survival: the capacity for progressive adaptation.įirst we built the road, then we built the town. What the hell happened?Īs singer Win Butler laments on The Suburbs, the latest offering from his indie collective Arcade Fire, “With my old friends, it was so different then, before your war against the suburbs began.”įrom there, this new Merge Records release is a curvilinear ride of mixed and conflicting emotions, as the band dissects one of history’s most notorious broken promises and, in the process, reveals a subtext typically ignored in discussions about our patterns of growth and development: Sadness.Īs we grew, especially those of us in and around Generation X, the suburbs that served us so well for a small window of time just couldn’t keep up. They draw the ire of urban planners, public health advocates, environmentalists, and community activists.

Anything closer to perfect would have required the hand of the Divine.īut now they’re the object of smug, hipster derision, and snooty intellectual dismissal. The suburbs of the 60s and 70s, maybe even the 80s, were like some sort of paradise. Never before and, perhaps, never again will there be as efficient and reliable a machine for manufacturing idealized childhood memories.

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