The Suburbs has two core themes feeding on one another which drive the album's unique emotional tension. First you have the very common and universal human pain of losing the purity of vision and experience that comes with childhood and youth. The album is just saturated with both a wistful and desperate nostalgia, the bittersweet limbo of fondly, yet futilely looking back for something which exists as nothing more than a ghost of memory, something with fading colors and a vital feeling in danger of extinction.
But what makes this album truly great is its expression of this sense of loss in the context of a world undergoing an unprecedented rate of change, as it is bulldozed forward by technological advances and an underlying structure of corporate promoted materialism deeply entrenched in nearly every facet of our existence. This has pushed the psychological stakes for reclaiming the simple, honest, untainted mind-space of childhood to such heights that the need for it takes on an almost frantic hue.
This is where we find Modern Man. He exists right on the fault line of the past and the future and is having a hard time coping and finding a sense of hope watching the onrush of an alien landscape erode so much of what he loved under the unforgiving crunch of accelerated time and cold tectonics. Adding to this is the societal push to "become something" to "get somewhere". Yet, how can anyone go anywhere when all the points on the map are in constant flux? Under these circumstances a person cannot help but to be nowhere...all the time.
The Suburbs is so brilliant at capturing these ideas. 1000 years from now I imagine it being studied as an important psycho-textural analysis of what it meant to be alive in 2010. Modern Man is right where I am, where so many of us fear we are, on the verge of losing everything pure, spontaneous, and vital to an incomprehensible future descending upon us like a rushing flood and in whose wake we see so much of the new world forming around such rank and polluted waters.
Progress was once the darling of futurism. But now this optimism can, at best, only exist saddled under weary apprehension. The direction is highly uncertain so there is still hope, but all the signs point to an existential strain so great it will rip us to shreds.
The Suburbs has two core themes feeding on one another which drive the album's unique emotional tension. First you have the very common and universal human pain of losing the purity of vision and experience that comes with childhood and youth. The album is just saturated with both a wistful and desperate nostalgia, the bittersweet limbo of fondly, yet futilely looking back for something which exists as nothing more than a ghost of memory, something with fading colors and a vital feeling in danger of extinction.
But what makes this album truly great is its expression of this sense of loss in the context of a world undergoing an unprecedented rate of change, as it is bulldozed forward by technological advances and an underlying structure of corporate promoted materialism deeply entrenched in nearly every facet of our existence. This has pushed the psychological stakes for reclaiming the simple, honest, untainted mind-space of childhood to such heights that the need for it takes on an almost frantic hue.
This is where we find Modern Man. He exists right on the fault line of the past and the future and is having a hard time coping and finding a sense of hope watching the onrush of an alien landscape erode so much of what he loved under the unforgiving crunch of accelerated time and cold tectonics. Adding to this is the societal push to "become something" to "get somewhere". Yet, how can anyone go anywhere when all the points on the map are in constant flux? Under these circumstances a person cannot help but to be nowhere...all the time.
The Suburbs is so brilliant at capturing these ideas. 1000 years from now I imagine it being studied as an important psycho-textural analysis of what it meant to be alive in 2010. Modern Man is right where I am, where so many of us fear we are, on the verge of losing everything pure, spontaneous, and vital to an incomprehensible future descending upon us like a rushing flood and in whose wake we see so much of the new world forming around such rank and polluted waters.
Progress was once the darling of futurism. But now this optimism can, at best, only exist saddled under weary apprehension. The direction is highly uncertain so there is still hope, but all the signs point to an existential strain so great it will rip us to shreds.
Very well said
Very well said