For the Record: "Funeral"

Last month, with little fanfare, Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” turned 10.

I didn’t know about it when it came out. I was 10 years old and had never listened to any music recorded after 1992, the year after Talking Heads broke up. It’s just as well. 2004 was a bad year for music. The 2005 Grammy nominees, with few exceptions, were washed up boomers (Bruce Springsteen, U2), overrated teeny-bopper sugar punks (Green Day), or Alicia Keys (Alicia Keys). “Funeral” wasn’t even nominated in the alternative rock category.

By the time I first heard it, people had all but forgotten the songs “Code of Silence” and “Vertigo,” and the kids who still listened to “American Idiot” were manifesting the first signs of arrested development. “Funeral,” on the other hand, had already been showered with praise as one of the best, if not the best, album of the 2000s. I was in high school, and we were settling into musical tribes: the jocks listened to go-go and rap; the STEM kids listened to electronica and metal. These had no particular appeal for me. I knew nothing about hip-hop, and I disliked the cheap emotion of a lot of the techno at the time. My attempt to like metal was more involved but came to an equally unpleasant end.

It was around the time that I abandoned metal to the trash-heap of childhood phases that I discovered “Funeral.” I don’t remember how I heard the name, but I remember very vividly seeing the album cover for the first time: peach background, a hand, and, in the hand, a quill sprouting a huge, fanciful explosion of ornament.

The 14-year-old Jude took one look at that and said, “Man, do I want a part of this.”

Of course, I had been fooled by album art before—Motörhead also had some great album covers—so I harbored skepticism. The name also gave me pause. “Funeral” could easily be another cheerfully dark metal-style name or emo self-indulgence. When I put it on, I was ready to be disappointed.

I was not disappointed.

Of course, the name “Funeral” wasn’t just a cheap emotional grab. Four out of six Arcade Fire band members had seen the deaths of loved ones during the album’s production. This was an album with grief—real grief, not cheap melodrama. Even I could recognize the real thing at the age of 14.

This was Arcade Fire’s great genius: conveying real sorrow and alienation without becoming ridiculous. If Big Star conveyed the ideal of American adolescence—who doesn’t want to be the singer-protagonist of “Thirteen”?—Arcade Fire conveyed its real experience. In the album’s first song, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” the fantastic world of a snowy apocalypse is presented to the listener, but what is highlighted is the peculiar ennobling loneliness of every high school romance: “You climb out the chimney / And meet me in the middle / The middle of the town / And since there's no one else around / We let our hair grow long / And forget all we used to know... You change all the lead / Sleeping in my head to gold / As the day grows dim / I hear you sing a golden hymn / It’s the song I’ve been trying to sing.”

This counterpoint between suburban images and personal fantasy runs through all the songs. “Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)” imagines the loneliness of the suburban child through the lens of the Soviet space-dog. “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” returns to the icy wasteland of “Neighborhood #1,” with a darker, more sinister touch: “I woke up with the power out / Not really something to shout about / Ice has covered up my parents' hands / Don't have any dreams, don't have any plans.” One of the album’s great strengths is this consistent shared image and metaphor; indeed, for some years, I thought that “Funeral” was intended to be a concept album about a snowstorm apocalypse. This thematic unity is strengthened by the musical arrangements, which, although coherent and similar, never become monotonous, and themselves are well-suited to the lyrical content: xylophones and pianos dance over driving bass and rhythm guitars, allowing a song’s tone to jump from sweet to wistful to impassioned at the drop of a hat. I had never found that sort of subtlety in a rock band before.

Yet Arcade Fire isn’t a one-trick pony; they aren’t restricted by their musical conceits. The B-side opens with the rocking, hollow piano of “Crown of Love.” They use a very different musical setting to convey the familiar theme of loneliness, here in the context of a break-up: “They say it fades if you let it / Love was made to forget it / I carved your name across my eyelids / You pray for rain; I pray for blindness.” “Wake Up,” probably the most widely known song from the album, brings guitars to the front of the orchestration, weaving a hard-driving line that would have made Jimmy Page proud and matching the frustration of the verses: “Something filled up / My heart with nothing / 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.” If the A-side proves that the band can do anything with one sort of arrangement, the B-side proves that they can do anything with any other arrangement, too, while never departing from the essential recognizability of the album and its central thematic tenets.

It was a lot to take in for a 14-year-old who had never listened to much of anything besides classical music and Talking Heads. The first time I heard it, I played the album three times in a row. I’ve listened to it at nearly every important juncture in my life since, and in a lot of the times in between.

So maybe I find it a little sad that the 10-year anniversary of “Funeral” passed with little notice. Even so, it seems somehow appropriate that an album based on alienation and subtlety should escape wider notice. It will continue to do what it always does: inspire the individual who hears it, regardless of who else is listening or paying attention.

—Staff writer Jude D. Russo can be reached at russo@college.harvard.edu.