On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
—Virginia Woolf

Working for the Church while your life falls apart.
Singin' hallelujah with the fear in your heart.
—Arcade Fire, "Intervention," Neon Bible

I have friends with whom I share a perfectly silly, carefully cultivated, pop music snobbery. I say "silly," but we're true believers. And we're completely serious when we speak of Tom Waits or U2 shaping the way we view the world, informing our decisions, and generally revolutionizing our imaginations. So it was a very big deal when three of them (Gar, Todd, and Geoff) agreed behind my back that a band called Arcade Fire had accomplished—with their first full-length album, Funeral (2004)—something on par with OK Computer, Blonde on Blonde, and Joshua Tree; something comparably culturally crucial. I hadn't heard it yet, but I'd heard it touted by folks unduly swayed (to my mind) by whatever Pitchfork christens (not that Pitchforkmedia isn't often wonderful), and I was prepared mentally to take them all on by way of a one-versus-three intervention if they'd lost their minds and there was nothing but hype-driven, bandwagonesque folly behind their very bold talk. As a ministry unto the as-yet-ungospelled me, Gar was kind enough to leave a copy of Funeral on my front porch.

And Arcade Fire had me at Hello. The music felt somehow medieval and fresh and urgent all at once, with strings and electric guitar, marching band, minstrel/gypsy/ troubadour fare coming out of a tavern full of clear-eyed, optimistic, coed worker priests. It felt wise and young and in unself-conscious continuity with some long forgotten, undeniably authoritative, ancient broadcast, a dusty, old, strong-as-an-oak culture. They're very much a communal activity (sometimes with as many as 10 people on stage), but they appear to be led by a married couple, Texas-born Win Butler and Regine Chassagne of Montreal, coming at us like a good-news, deadpan circus.

There was a moment in the late Eighties when pop music took on an earnestness, a sort of seamless social justice concern, that later came to feel (for no good reason) somehow embarrassing. Some might say that only U2 and REM survived it, but I happen to think it's aged wonderfully. Human interest pop, we might call it. I'm thinking of the following vagabond voices: Hothouse Flowers, Lone Justice, 10,000 Maniacs, the Cure, Ocean Blue, Suzanne Vega, the Water Boys, Midnight Oil, Big Country, and (if I may be indulged) Tears for Fears. And in a very moving way, Arcade Fire's Funeral felt like a vindication of and a majestic return to all of this.

Imagine a 59-year-old David Bowie (or Youtube it) joining the band on stage to sing the following lines from Funeral's slow rocking, Springsteen-leading-an-orchestra-and-children's-choir anthem, "Wake Up":

Somethin' filled up
my heart with nothin',
someone told me not to cry.

But now that I'm older,
my heart's colder,
and I can see that it's a lie.

Throughout the album, there's a sense of generations having been handed a very bad blueprint concerning life, love, and meaning, up to their necks in false covenants; generations now trying fitfully to grieve the loss of wisdom, lament lost time, and gather together what goodness remains amid the risk of losing each other to vampires and a sleep epidemic. Think "Rock Album as Exorcism." The driving conceit of Funeral is "the Neighborhood," subjected to futility and yet stubbornly awaiting better days, even in its ongoing death-dealing dysfunction ("The power's out in the heart of man … nobody's cold, nobody's warm"). "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" records the disconnect whereby one generation has grown so deaf to the voices of its own history that it can't come up with names for its infants. The line of associations culminates in the sudden recollection of parents, sung by Butler like a caterwaul: "Then we think of our parents, / Well what ever happened to them?!?"

The ethical heft of Funeral assaults the listener like a summons to memory and vigilance. While observing the Bowie footage over my shoulder (followed by the sight of David Byrne joining them for a Talking Heads cover), my wife casually observed, "They're helping them save Rock and Roll." I think she's on to something.

And now we have Neon Bible. More of the same, in the best possible sense. More broken dreams, more mass hallucination, and a full-scale poetic assault on what Win Butler refers to as "the American Idol world." The music speaks of, to, and for a culture in the throes of a vast meaning problem, and within the comprehensiveness of Arcade Fire's vision, any attempt to draw lines of separation between religion, entertainment, advertising, and politics will always fail to signify. The categories aren't functional. It's all ideology all the time.

Inserted parenthetically within the second half of Neon Bible sits a song called "(Antichrist Television Blues)," which some observant fan at a live performance found on a setlist under the title of "Joe Simpson," a figure known on reality television (and in reality) as a former Baptist youth minster and the father/manager of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. It's a hard-driving, toe-tapping, disarmingly catchy song that doesn't come off as a send-up or a lampoon at all. In fact, it's an impassioned plea for justice and revelation, for a righteous world that recognizes the purposes of a loving God. The protagonist within the song wants desperately to make a difference and prays fervently that God might see fit to let each of his daughters serve as lanterns of divine illumination: "Lord, will you make her a star, / So the world can see who you really are?"

The lyrics give voice to the impulse (native, we might say, to any of us who try our hand at show business) that imagines a redeeming, ministerial vocation at work in the quest for celebrity status and maximum air time (which would then be an acceptable, effective means to a healthily evangelical end). But the figure who prays his prayer in "(Antichrist Television Blues)" senses something amiss in his heart the more he keeps his eyes on the prize ("I just gotta know if I'm wasting my time / … How come nothing tastes good?"). And he finds himself delivering one of the most devastatingly disturbing double entendres of recent memory: "Wanna hold a mirror up to the world, / So that they can see themselves inside my little girl!"

"O tell me, Lord, am I the Antichrist?" asks the ostensibly successful and concerned parent as the song comes to an abrupt end. And with that question, a good number of demons are powerfully unmasked. Butler has spoken in interviews of the whole of audiovisual culture moving in a "violent-porn direction," as far as the law will allow, with no aspect of human life left uncommodified. And Neon Bible sits alongside Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, and David Lynch's doubleshot, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, as a response to an age of everything-all-of-the-time, escalating anxiety.

How do we live and love well? How to we discern the human other at all (family, stranger, televised image) amid an ocean of noise, an ocean of violence? How do we think and see truthfully and freely? These are among the questions generated by Arcade Fire, never without mirth and joy and passion. The Jesuit, poet, draft-file-burning Daniel Berrigan once observed that brainwash is "that species of untruth which lies so near to the truth as to be able to wear its clothing." And in the theater of Arcade Fire, there's the sense that brainwash, the name of the global con game, is never far away, always broadcasting in a fine frenzy rolling through our heads.

So what is the Neon Bible of the title? I wonder if it might be our death-dealing interpretations of religious texts ("religious" in the broadest sense imaginable), the siren songs that say emphatically (without saying it directly), "Insert Soul Here," only to swallow us whole. In an attempt to speak to this sort of thing, I like to write the following William Blake lines on the board for my students: "The vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my vision's greatest Enemy."

Once they've pieced it together in their own heads, they're amazed by the nerve of somebody saying something like "What you worship as the holy one is actually the anti-holy. You are exactly backwards. The God you fearfully try to love is actually no God at all, a false god or, in Blake's naming of the false fear god, Nobodaddy." Arcade Fire are dealing out this very brand of boldness. Win Butler has remarked that "this idea that Christianity and consumerism are completely compatible" is "the great insanity of our times." And the music speaks to it. The music bears witness.

You can hear this supremely on "No Cars Go," a signature Arcade Fire anthem from their first EP, majestically reconfigured on Neon Bible. I wouldn't want to bear false witness by comparing it to U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name," because it's its own creation, but that's the only other popular song I can think of that accomplishes anything similar in the way of new-world-on-the-way, kingdom-coming, let's-live-in-hope-together-and-let-the-chips-fall ecstasy. "Between the click of the light and the start of the dream," they sing, is a place "where we know … us kids know … let's go!" And all of this is shouted amid the heavy drums, brass, and flutes of an orchestral wall only outvolumed by collective human voice: "Don't know where we're going! … Let's go!" If you can listen to it closely without feeling an otherworldy and simultaneously this-worldly chill, it might be time to double your daily devotionals or consult an exorcist. Be moved. Be very moved.

David Dark is the author most recently of The Gospel According to America (Westminster John Knox).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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