Is the dystopian fallout from Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” finally upon us?

“Never trust a millionaire, quoting the sermon on the mount”

From Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” directed by Spike Jonze

Watching our public discourse spiral downward over recent months,

toward the absurd reality of “this is actually a U.S. presidential election circa 2016,” I’ve cycled alongside my peers through states of wry snark, indignation, and fatalistic indifference. I’ve also been listening more and more to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs — really listening to the woe-begone lyrics of their Grammy award winning masterpiece.

Half nostalgic ode to a disappearing, perhaps-never-existent innocence, half doom-prophecy tapping deep into our collective unconscious, The Suburbs plays at the fears that continue to gnaw at the veneer of our stable, democratic society.

Sure, we may revel online in picking apart the day-to-day silliness that is the 2016 election circus, but all this triviality belies a set of very real existential dilemmas. Unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, the fears that haunt our dreams in the 21st century are elusive. Climate change, systemic injustice and staggering economic inequality are statistical enigmas to most of our brains. We can gloss over the headlines, but fail utterly to grasp these new realities in any concrete terms, let alone agree on any solutions. Our nation seems more divided than ever, the inevitable result of media which exist only to affirm our biases.

It’s the source of the same desperate, hollowed-out angst found in Suburbs, presaged six years ago in the wake of the great recession and the flickering outlash against our financial institutions that was Occupy Wall Street. In 2010, Arcade Fire captivated our cultural imagination, haunting us with images of deserted cul-de-sacs and expansive highways littered with abandoned cars. The lyrics are at once both post-script and prophecy, beginning with the first, eponymous track:

You always seemed so sure that one day we’d be fighting in a suburban war

Your part of town against mine, I saw you standing on the opposite shore

But by the time the first bombs fell, we were already bored

We we already, already bored.

From Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” directed by Spike Jonze

Wrapped in our TV-addled insulation, it would be difficult to imagine open violence raging along lines of class or some other gaping social fault-line in 21st century America. But it’s been argued the stories that have most captivated us in recent years, from Hunger Games to Game of Thrones, are a form of catharsis allowing these subconscious phantoms to play out safely on-screen in some faraway land. Examined more closely, we begin to see how plausible the backdrops of these dystopian misfortunes really appear.

Now that we can do little more than gawk at our political system’s failings in a mix of bewilderment and apathy, I hear the haunting sound of Win Butler’s voice echoing the lyrics from “Ready to Start:”

All the kids have always known

That the emperor wears no clothes

But they bow down to him anyway

Cuz It’s better than being alone

What cataclysmic event will bring these simmering tensions to a boil?

Here the alt-rock band has been less precise, but there are clues.

From Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” directed by Spike Jonze

In the song “The Suburbs,” we hear that “all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall.” In “Half Light II,” the narrators “watched the markets crash,” and “see that something’s gotta give.” We’re left to guess what chain of events will cause these ominous portents, but we witness it finally unravel in “Suburban War:”

You started a war that you can’t win

They keep erasing all the streets, we grew up in

Now the music divides us into tribes

You choose your side, I’ll choose my side

So far in 2016, the fearful on one side of our national divide stockpile assault rifles and form anti-Federalist militias, while those on the other declare it time for unprecedented redistribution of wealth and reform. Crumbling infrastructure, economic uncertainty, side-choosing. Check, check, check-plus.

But what will become of all this strife? On that, the prophetic album is equally vague. In “Half Light II,” after San Francisco ominously disappears, the band prays to God they won’t “live to see the death of everything that’s wild.” But on “Culture War,” a track reserved for die-hard devotees who bought the Deluxe Version, the band get’s a bit more elaborate:

The dominos they never fell

but bodies they still burn.

Throw my hand into the fire

but still I never learn, We’re soldiers now in the culture war.

We’re soldiers now, but we don’t know what it’s for.

For all the album’s lamentation, there’s little which might clue us in

as to how to actually avert the coming destruction. The album leaves us paralyzed, like it’s “Modern Man,” “in line for a number though we don’t understand.”

Amid the rubble and the ruin, there is perhaps only one line of advice we could heed, if we haven’t already gone too far down the path to our own destruction:

“Never trust a millionaire, quoting the sermon on the mount.”

No matter how you slice it, there’s no sugar-coating The Suburbs’ grim outlook for society. But I for one take solace in how the foreshadowed purge could ultimately redeem civilization from our worst transgressions:

Some people say, we’re already lost

But they’re afraid to pay the cost

For what we lost.

Pay the cost for what we’ve lost.