The Sprawl
It’s kind of hard to tell from the lyrics, but I’m pretty sure the message of Arcade Fire’s “Sprawl II” is that we should all collectively abandon the shopping malls that provide us with contemporary-yet-timeless Gap polos (this post potentially sponsored by the Gap) and totally fucking awesome Auntie Anne’s pretzels and get our asses to the Canadian farmlands, where we can get back to the business of really, truly knowing each other without the distractions of stoplights and parking lots. And I say fuck that even if it is a great song, for two reasons:
1) Living in The Sprawl (which I did for eighteen years, and which I am doing again for at least the next two months) makes those tiny, accidental cracks in its Wendy’s-dependent architecture all the more meaningful. A huge open field is cool, but a tiny patch of grass in-between a 7-11 and an apartment complex is, I’d argue, even cooler, and also a great place to get high if you are sixteen years old. There are a thousand little spots like that in my hometown, tiny little testaments to the fact that you can’t fill every square inch of the all-consuming Sprawl with chain pizza places and unhappy families. And for some reason it’s in those spaces—abandoned underground parking lots, beer can-strewn spaces where rain water is drained (does anyone have a word for a place like that? I don’t know what the word for that is)—I feel happiest. Too much open space would ruin open space for me.
2) It’s not even that bad. I mean yes clearly terrible things happen in The Sprawl. On the summer night that me and seven other malformed boys exorcised our last remaining vestiges of teenage angst by, among other things, destroying our mayor’s expensive-looking light fixture, a family of four was murdered down the street from me when a scorned ex-husband shot first his wife and then his mother-in-law and then his daughter, president of my high school’s film society, before finally shooting himself; nobody I know has discussed this incident, the day of or since. Then there’s the girl who’s bullied for not liking boys, the boy who’s bullied for not liking girls, the Wal-Marts that don’t like the local businesses and the fathers that don’t like sons. But first off isn’t that just, like, normal sad inter-personal non-Sprawl-related stuff that would happen anywhere? And also this idea that any self-aware person raised in the suburbs hated their adolescence and upon matriculation from NYU is required to make an indie flick starring John C. Reily about how living where most people fucking live turns you into a dead-eyed soulless alcoholic drone both sounds like bullshit to me and also unsurprisingly has led to some wonderful art, particularly the novels of Richard Yates. So.
