This article is by Robbie Griggs, associate professor of theology at Covenant Seminary:

Did you know that Jimmy Buffet owns several Margaritaville-themed retirement communities along the Atlantic coast? Yes. The fantasy of that perpetual search for the lost salt-shaker is real. Strange as it may seem, Mr. Buffett’s brand shift from escapist music to escapist real estate venture slunk to the front of my brain as I listened to Arcade Fire’s latest album We. When they cash-in in twenty years, what kind of retirement community might Arcade Fire produce? To suggest that We is a return to Arcade Fire’s basic formula is not quite the same thing as calling the album formulaic. There are flashes of lightning breaking through the religious studies grad school clichés. The music is, of course, transcendent. And yet, the bolts have a lot of work to do.

The chief trouble is that half-hearted swipes at Christian theology distract from a series of illuminating meditations on and responses to today’s American plight.

The opening couplet of songs illustrate the issue, so I’ll concentrate on those. The first track “Age of Anxiety I” shines precisely because of its focus on exposing our problem with doubt. The vivid Alice in Wonderland journey of its twin, “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” is by contrast muddled by lazy gestures toward banal anti-theodicy. Track one (the best song on the album) suggests that our problem is not so much the uncertainty we face but the funhouse mirror of personal branding that isolates us from those who might help us face our doubts. If all I see is “what you want me to” and all you see is “what I want you to see,” then the burden of our anxieties can be neither shared nor reframed. (Palliatives like TV and drugs are summarily dismissed in verse 2.) The result is the domination of doubt. Régine Chassagne’s vocals in the refrain wed lyrics and music so that we feel the desperation of the demon-possessed — “Gotta get the spirit out of me/This anxiety that’s inside of me.” Win Butler’s bridge gives in to exasperation, as being trapped in anxiety renders him “another lost alien living on my own spaceship.” Moreover, we’re all stuck in our trap house of the self, “lost soul[s] just trying to feel something.” The feedback loop of the inward-curved human continues in the outro.

For a society of insecure influencers, everything is either “all about you” or “not about you.” This opening track is like a fluorescent strobe light, pulsing flashes of insight on early-days pandemic exhibition and isolation.

Butler’s verses in the second track, “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” evoke the disillusioning journey through the “plastic soul” of 80s and 90s American consumer culture. A good chunk of 80s life was like a bad joke: “Hardy-har-har/Chinese throwing star/Lamborghini Countach/Maserati sports car.” And the junior high cycle of video games and girls does, in retrospect, seem vapid. One minute boys were “Blowing on the cartridge/Of Kid Icarus.” The next it’s “New phone, who’s this?/A silver thread, a French kiss.” Butler concludes this is all an “abyss” — an “apocalypse.” The song suggests that there is a way to break out of the malaise. The apocalypse is only truly seen in light of “Arcadia,” and a “sleepyhead” might “wake up” if he reflected on the image of the “Acropolis” burning “In the poster hanging over [his] bed.” Likewise, Butler and Chassagne sing in the refrain of a memory of paradise lost: “Nothing every can replace it/When it’s gone you can still taste it/Going on this trip together/Rabbit hole goes on forever…” The quandary the song sets out is perennial and universal: in order to spot the fake, I have to know the real, but how do I know the real?

It’s this kind of insight that gets blunted by the Christ-distracted songwriting littered throughout We. Verses 1 and 2 of the second track assign ultimate responsibility for the rabbit hole to a deity resembling the Christian God. If the problem is that “Father in heaven’s sleeping” or that “Dad built the labyrinth/we were born it,” then whence the real we remember but cannot reach? A quick dismissal of Christian theism as deism suggests that available answers won’t do. Instead, the bridge asserts that the rabbit hole of vacillation between “plastic soul” and memories of the real endures “’Til the world is made whole/One body, one soul.” But what does that mean?

The suggestion that God mapped this cursed road trip, that a memory of the good nonetheless persists, and that there is somehow the possibility of cosmic reintegration in the end — these are incongruities even the Cheshire Cat would have trouble explaining.

This vacillation between penetrating reflection and sophomoric fixation on Christian theology continues throughout the album. “End of the Empire I – III” imagines a future where the human toll of climate catastrophe represents not just the loss of coastal poles like LA and New York but of hope in human relationship itself. This poses a vital question: what will decades of climate despair do to us? In “End of Empire IV,” we get a throwaway line dubbing black hole Sagittarius A* a “Christ child” in the midst of an otherwise perceptive critique of influencer culture. Perhaps more perplexing, Butler adopts an almost Christ-like position in “The Lightning II,” but to no clear end. Just as “Jesus Christ was an only son,” Butler is (somehow) likewise alone in hearing “thunder” on a clear day, a sound he takes for an answer to the wrong question. He’s heard the thunder, but he’s waiting on the lightning, the illumination necessary to resolve his confusion. It is not exactly clear what a reference to the only begotten has to do with that.

The trio of songs that end the album are sonically beautiful, but by this point the songwriting muse has fled the scene altogether. “Unconditional I” reminds me of the ending monologue for an episode of the Wonder Years. “Lookout kid” there’s all this stuff you’re gonna face, I can’t do it for you, but I’ll always love you. Touching. Good to know. But in the absence of any possibility of transcendent meaning — no religion in which we might worship something beyond ourselves, and no race to which we might belong — “Unconditional II (Race and Religion)” posits that two lovers (“united body and soul”) can be race and religion to each other.

Love, it seems, is the panacea of lightening for which Butler waits. But given all the pictures of relational isolation, hiding, and manipulation drawn so starkly in the first third of the album, it is difficult to have the same confidence in this “New vision” for the human race. The title track “WE” — well, apparently it was inspired by an eponymous 1920s sci-fi novel Butler’s grandmother used to read to him. The irony here is doubled. The novel ends not with a new vision but a structural tension between authoritarians and revolutionaries. Arcade Fire’s “WE” ends waiting for a kind of apocalypse that will probably never come — one where “we” somehow let go of everything between us and escape the tensions of our ego-driven encumbered selves.

In the end, We reminds us of what Arcade Fire can do so well. Their music celebrates life and joy against the hucksters and ad men who would commodify and steal good things from us. It seems, though, that they might be giving up on searching for answers to the excellent questions they raise. For the kids of all those lost souls in Margaritaville, I hope I’m wrong.

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