As I am sure you are aware, music is pretty cool. That is why I would like to introduce this segment where, instead of complaining about the contemporary socio-political landscape, I discuss a band, artist, or album that strikes my fancy. If there is a lot of interest, I would like to even take requests someday in the far-off future! But for now, I begin with Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, a fun and complex album that deserves a critical eye.
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I am a visual person. So the most immediately striking thing about Reflektor is how much is said about the album before even listening. For instance, This is the title:
REFLEKTOR
It’s misspelled. I actually just got finished reading a review (see Rating 81825924) of the album where someone scoffed at the use of a ‘K’ instead of a ‘C’ as a juvenile attempt at highlighting our society’s careless misspellings on the Internet. While I think that is a grounded interpretation, I invite you to consider that, given the body of work here, the band isn’t as brainless as presented in some reviews 1 . Instead, I think the title does a great job of succinctly introducing one of the main themes of the album – that reflections can be construed as a copy or facsimile, one which is often inferior or in some way “off” from the original. In this case, the ‘K’ lends a sense of falsity to the title, invoking the idea that the album is itself an imperfect reflection of something else. What else is there? Let’s move on to…
The Front Cover:
The cover of Reflektor lacks a written title, but is nevertheless quite telling. The monochromatic and speckled coloring is meant to resemble a facsimile, in this case an actual fax or carbon copy. At the same time, the veneer is iridescent, sparkling in rainbow when exposed to light. Without any distinct purpose the cover already conveys the two main themes of the album:
- Reflection as an (inferior) copy
- Reflection as a the redirection and transmission of light
The cover also has a Grecian statue of Orpheus and Eurydice from antiquity. This is a different kind of reflection entirely, as it is a reflection of a history and an experience. Actually, in this case, it is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, since it is a printed image of an artistic rendering of an imagined narrative. The pure experience lies within the mental content of the original Greek creator, copied and replicated and (in some ways) degraded over the years. The statue is also against a round, black backdrop shape with iridescent sparkles – in this case a reflection of a vinyl record, all image and no substance.
The two images, the abstract border and internal statue delineated by faux vinyl represent the literal contents of the album: Vol. 1, dealing with the abstract nature of light and the virtual content of images, a physical medium upon which the album is conveyed, and Vol. 2, dealing with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as more internalized and personal aspects of imagery.
The Middle:
The middle is more abstract, metallic imagery in monochrome, this time emphasizing the nature of the physical album as a double LP. Songs are positioned as if they are flowing; a reflective image of the performance of the album, as discrete songs “flow” into one another. The text of the songs does more than distinguish between the two volumes, it also is reminiscent of old label printer labels, adding to the aesthetic of a manufactured copy.
The Back Cover:
The back cover is surprisingly interesting. It is the mirror-inverse of the front, switching the black of the record to the border and the metallic sheen to the record. This sort of thing happens a lot. The symbol inside the record shape spells out the name of the album (opposite of tradition, where a title goes on the front), and is formed in a pattern of light rays. Just like so:
Volume 1: “The Reflektors”
The insert for Vol. 1 is actually more interesting than the album cover. Done up in the same iridescent style, the picture depicts a fictional band, The Reflektors. The background is poorly rendered, and taken as a whole the image is evocative of a flyer for an amateur band or lounge act from the 70’s or early 80’s. The top half lends to that feeling with the combination of tiger print and a quasi-lava lamp effect, and the bottom half has jungle plants straight out of one of those old claymation dinosaur movies. In the center are six individuals that are obviously not the band, and each has reflective coating instead of a face. When compared to the six members of Arcade Fire, they remind me of a doppelganger – close in broad strokes, but in detail they are clearly not the originals. The reflective faces symbolize the idea of emptiness, which all images possess when compared to their real counterparts. The obvious copying artifacts, cut and paste remnants around the feet, and the dated and poorly matched clothing all add to the feeling that this band is a degraded copy of the original band. This goes along nicely with the degraded album reflecting some ideal original.
The Reflektors are more than the reflection of the band, they are metaphorical representations of glitz and glamor without meaningful content. The image has all the qualities of something that exists, but it is a total fabrication, no matter how much style it exudes. Both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, as shown below, are actually part of a fictional album, presumably either eponymous with the band name The Reflektors, or also of the name Reflektor. There are, simultaneously, two albums present in the physical album, each missing one of two key elements for existence:
Arcade Fire’s Reflector has no image, but all content. It’s content is real, but formless.
The Reflektors’ Reflektor/Eponymous has all visibility but no content. It’s form/image exists in reality, but is devoid of content.
Vol. 2: “Mosaic”
I call this insert the “Mosaic” or “Collage”, but it does not actually have a name. There is a lot of imagery all at once here. For the most part, it seems to be an assortment of pop culture stills, though I admit I am not familiar with most of them. Of particular note is the patchwork style – evoking both television (the insubstantial transmission of images in rapid succession) and Greco-Roman mosaic art. This is in keeping with the idea of modernizing the Greek mythos in the album. There are some images I recognize, for instance there are several stills from the music video for Afterlife 2:
The music video was constructed from scenes of the film Orfeu Negro, which in turn was an adaptation of Orfeu da Conceição, which of course was a retelling of the myth of Orpheus, but set in Brazil during Carnaval. Not surprisingly, this prismatic series of reflections demonstrates the familiar themes already discussed – the reflection as a copy, in this case not necessarily inferior but certainly a different version, as well as reflection as the transmission of light, in this case the flamboyant and unusual costumes, the aforementioned reflective series, and even the inverse nature of the film setting- Black Orpheus being presented in titular distinction from the original Greek, presumably white-ish, Orpheus.
Returning to the cover images, they do seem to conform to three main categories: incomplete human faces, abstract forms of light, and representative artwork. All, of course, are modes of reflection:
- artwork/sculptures as incomplete representations of the real
- the movement of light, captured momentarily
- images as inadequate forms of life/lived experience
Now it seems that I should, at some point, actually discuss the musical content of the album. Unfortunately, my skills as a music critic are sorely lacking – I do not possess the background and terminology to explain or recognize anything particularly interesting about the music as music. I welcome any commentary from readers on the subject; I would love to hear thoughts on something I don’t really understand. That being said, I will do my best to interpret the music as prose, with a couple insights along the way based on what I am hearing. I assure you, this shit is off the hook yo and well worth a listen.
I will only be able to do Vol. 1 in this edition (alas, it is Part 1, after all). I will be going in the order as given on the vinyl LP, as it does have some distinctive differences from the CD version that I actually think contribute to the overall presentation. However, the CD version does have a ~HiDdEn BoNuS tRaCk~ so I will be touching on that at as well.
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1:1 “Reflektor”
The album opens with a track that is a reflection of the album title. This song introduces a musical element that is pervasive through all the tracks – artificial distortion. Sure, it’s the Arcade Fire, but taken in the context of everything else, I think it suits the theme of imperfect reproduction nicely. Instead of simply reproducing the lyrics here wholesale, I strongly suggest looking them up3 and doing a parallel reading. That being said, I will also try to reproduce relevant bits as needed. The track is a commentary on interpersonal relationships in the “reflective age”, which incidentally also seems to be the theme of Side A. The reflective age possesses a double meaning – both a stand-in for the Information Age, (aka the age of the transmission of light and the virtual), and the age of passivity (the age of consumption without action). Thus the reflective age is both an age of reason and ignorance/anti-reason.
“trapped in a prison, in a prism of light./ Alone in the darkness, a darkness of white.” – The singer is inundated by an overflow of senseless, undirected information. The overwhelming stimulus is essentially identical to its inverse, the total absence of stimulus, in that nothing meaningful can be discerned. In other words, trapped in a reflection, for reflections have no real content.
“Entre la nuit, la nuit et l’aurore. /Entre le royaume des vivants et des morts.” – I’ll save you the trouble of googling. Those familiar with Arcade Fire know that the band hails from Montreal, and has a significant Québécois influence that manifests itself in occasional French lyrics 4. These lines translate to, “Between night, night and dawn./ Between the kingdom of the living and the dead.” This is another description of what it would be like to live in a reflection: a state of suspension, nothingness, and passivity. Not quite alive, not quite dead, the forms are there but the meaning is gone – “If this is heaven, I don’t know what it’s for.”
“The signals we send are deflected again./ We’re so connected, but are we even friends?/ We fell in love when I was 19, and now we’re staring at a screen.” – The song begins a more intimate discussion of interpersonal relationships. In the reflective age our emotions, deep thoughts, our content which brings vibrance to our individuality is overwhelmed by the constant influx of new and often needless information. In the darkness of light it can be difficult or even impossible to really consider our relationships. Our lives are so busy that we enter the realm of passivity, of going through the motions, not unlike a television broadcast. Day in and day out we might spend time together in a relationship, but that time is meaningless because what was once youthful love and passion has been so distorted by the noise that it is no longer discernible from that background. What was once the love of individuals becomes passive acceptance, even codependency. An apathy as we sit on the same couch and “stare at screens” together, ostensibly together but in our own, solipsistic worlds where the participation of the other is, really, just an illusion. The line “We all got things to hide.” suggests an explanation for how a couple reaches this point. Is it simply easier to allow ourselves to hide in the noise? When we erect masks to insulate us from our daily interactions, aren’t we just crafting a false image, a reflection of our true selves that is not a genuine representation of our inner world? It certainly feels better when I don’t have to interact with the pizza guy on a deeply personal level, but who are we in an age where an attempt to look deeper is often blocked?
“Our love is plastic, and they break it to bits.” – Love, once unique, active, and personal, becomes cheap and is taken advantage of. Love itself becomes dispensable like plastic, when all things are rendered meaningless in passivity. The notion of an other, the antagonist, is introduced, “They” who destroy the now weakened and indefensible love. Perhaps they are the social-cultural force of the status quo in a reflective society, but the Arcade Fire often uses unclear pronouns in this way.
“I want to break free, but will they break me down, down, down, don’t mess around…/Thought you were praying to the resurrector; turns out it was just a reflector. Just a reflector.” Here there is a lot of repetition, and so I chose to emit a couple lines that described the repeated realization that everything experienced was actually just a reflector, an image instead of something real. Any effort to reintroduce meaning into life and the world incites fear and a sense of failure, as every step is revealed to be nothing transformative but instead just another layer of imagery or an empty idea devoid of action. Interesting is the Christian reference here, because even something seen as spiritual and intimate like religious revelation is nothing more than going through the motions in the Reflective Age. The foundational aspects of ontology/religion are themselves only images of something better – lived values.
1:2 “Flashbulb Eyes”
“Flashbulb Eyes” has a minimalist sound that coincides with the theme – far less complex than “Reflektor”, it plays off the famous (if anecdotal) belief among native Haitians that cameras can steal souls. In other words, fear of reduction of the self into a an empty image, or from another angle, the infection of lifelessness by something lifeless. Here I am reminded of Hegel’s discussion of the Other, wherein we resent our dynamic with the glance of others, for they reduce us to objects and something less than what we as subjects see as constituting ourselves against our will. Our true self cannot survive when we are reduced by the mind of another, in this case as facilitated by technology.
1:3 “Here Comes the Night Time”
The influence of island sounds continues, though this time with more complex subject matter. There is a historical reason for the Haitian influence on the album. Band member Régine Chassagne is a Haitian immigrant to Canada, and they do have references on prior albums, e.g. “Haiti” on Funeral. This particular album was made after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, something which the band stated was a very moving event for them, and to which they devoted time and resources as part of the relief effort. The song plays with the juxtaposition of the Haitians who lived through the earthquake and the outside world who only experienced it through images and narrative. The Haitians possess a weary attitude towards the missionaries and foreigners who come to proselytize and provide aid. On a deeper level, the song also deals with the Nietzschean relationship between someone who emphasizes the afterlife and someone who lives an active life now.
“Cause the lights don’t work, yeah nothing works-they say you don’t mind, but hear comes the night time.” – There is often a fictitious sense for observers that people who suffer grow used to their hardship. While to a certain extent that’s true, it is easy with distance to abstract the relationship between one who suffers and one of many causes of their suffering. In this case, the idea that nothing works, and the people seen don’t seem to be vocally bemoaning it, so therefore they must not mind so much. Of course they mind; it is simply acceptance of a burden they must shoulder to continue living. The outside observer is deceived by a reflection – the idea of having no lights vs. the reality of having no lights.
“And the missionaries, they tell us we will be left behind. Been left behind a thousand times, a thousand times. / If you want to get righteous, if you want to be righteous, get in line.” – The lives of the people are reduced in the eyes of the missionaries, who were not there for a thousand lived experiences of hardship, but are there now. In the wake of a very real catastrophe, all they can say is ‘Well in the face of suffering, you have to accept Christ so your soul is saved.’ Easy to say when your family doesn’t live in a disaster zone. This disconnect between the real help needed and the help the missionaries think they are providing brings the two groups into conflict. ‘You want to be righteous and save our souls? Well get in line behind the other demands we face daily. Be righteous all you want, the night is still coming, and it’s still dark.’
“They say heaven’s a place…and they know where it is./But you know where it is-it’s behind the gate they won’t let you in. And when they hear the beat, coming from the street, they lock the door. But if there’s no music up in heaven, what’s it for?” – Continuing to develop the conflict, there is hypocrisy in the missionaries who tell you to bear suffering now so that you will be rewarded later, when they can choose to leave the suffering behind at will. They deliberately distance themselves as bringers of truth from beyond, unwilling to participate in the dance of the people living on the street. What use do people who celebrate life have for a system of beliefs that teaches life is inferior to what comes after death?
” Now the preachers they talk up on the satellite. /If you’re looking for hell, just try looking inside.” – Televangelists getting called out. Worse than the missionaries, they can’t even be bothered to leave their homes. They preach a sermon of roles within the status quo, of doing penance and giving tithes to save your soul, with no regard for suffering. In a real sense they are not even active participants – just images on a screen – and thus soulless by the point made in “Flashbulb Eyes”. The assertion of the song is now clear: Insofar as life is lived experience, heaven is conceptually just an image produced by the missionaries. Therefore, hell is also just an image they carry within themselves as a justification for evil and suffering in the world. Men make evil; evil is not native to life itself. Night comes, people die, disasters happen: these are things that are part of life, and they suck. But the moral judgments, the preachers of the afterlife, they are solely human products. They come about in the reflection of lived experience through the filter of the mind.
1:4 “We Exist”5
Moving on from the more generic experience of the group in alienation, this song addresses the sense of otherness and isolation from a more intimate, individual perspective.
“They’re walking around, head full of sound, acting like we don’t exist” – Referring again to the noise of the mundane overflow of information, this time from the perspective of one who is aware of the distance being forced between himself and others. If we were never acknowledged by those around us, it would feel like more than alienation – it would cause us to begin questioning if we even exist at all. The subject asserts repeatedly that they exist, but it appears to fall on deaf ears. More than an interpersonal relationship, the lyrics in the second part of the song seem to indicate an intrapersonal relationship – the internal struggle within one who wears a mask and knows it.
“They’re on their knees, begging us please, praying that we don’t exist./ Daddy it’s fine, I’m used to ’em now, but tell me why they treat me like this.” – The suppression of ideas and emotions, with a religious vocabulary. From the perspective of the subject’s emotions/ideas, observing that other subjects do not appear to emote or opine in their external conformity, they question the ‘I’ asking why this is so. The center of consciousness is given a father title, as if by a child, for ideas are like children of the mind. Father as creator is also seen extensively in Christian mythos. Already referenced in the song: “If you turned away, what would I say? Not the first betrayed by a kiss,” this is corresponds to the betrayal of Jesus Christ by a kiss from Judas Iscariot. There are also references to the agony in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus questions his Father on why he was created to be destroyed.
“Let ’em stare, let ’em stare, if that’s all they can do…/But will you watch me drown?/ You know we’re going nowhere, and no shit we’re confused. But will you watch us drown?/ What have you got to lose?” The emotions/ideas, nascent and unformed as they may be, still know that ultimately the only one who can destroy them is their creator, not the others. Will the subject allow her expression to be stifled and drowned by the mask she feels she must wear in order to conform? What does she have to lose in being an authentic, real self? This message closes with an assertion of hope:
“We exist, we exist./ Maybe if you hang together, you can make the changes in our hearts.” – Our emotions and and ideas are part of us, and in their recognition and acceptance we can process them and mold them into expressions and real action.
1:5 ” Normal Person”
The track begins with a short spoken opener, a play on the stereotypical way a rock band would open a show: “Do you guys like rock and roll music?” is very reminiscent of the classic ‘Are you ready to rock?’ Same with the outro of the song. This is to play up the sense that we have heard all this before, that this is just a cheap imitation of songs already heard.
“Normal Person” is really a rephrasing of the same topic presented in “We Exist”. Instead of examining the internal conflict in conformity, it asks what am I to conform to, that is, what is normal? Normative values are those held by the majority and espoused in associated cultural acts. To be totally normal is to conform exclusively to these values. Of course, the paradox of trying to be normal is that no one can be normal, because specific expressions inevitably contradict general trends. Instead the Normal Person is an illusion, a reflection of group expectations never fulfilled. Anyone so fully able to conform to these expectations would actually seem quite weird; they would be unique in their capacity for such a large number of contrary views, styles, values, etc. They would cease to be normal by virtue of this exclusion. Nevertheless, people not only strive to seem normal, but see it in others all the time despite there being no evidence that it corresponds to the subject’s internal states. Worse, they seek to impose normalcy on others as a standard, even at the threat of violence. Conformity or else- a self-perpetuating imposed dormancy of individual values.
“Is there anything as strange as a normal person?/ Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?/ Waiting after school for you, they want to know if you, if you’re normal too.” – The song asserts the strangeness of the truly normal person, while also invoking the type of violence found in the typical schoolyard bully as a means of enforcing the principles of normalcy. It continues with negative imagery, that the masses will work to break down the active subject, and yet the normal are not themselves normal and must try to obscure this fact: “When they get excited, they try to hid it, look at those normals go.” This is the active repression of emotion. There is also a reprise of the emotion/idea subject from “We Exist”, implying a retort from the emotions, an assertion back to the normals that they do exist by repeating their supplication “Maybe if you hang together, you can make changes in our hearts…”.
The song ends on a note of sarcasm: “I’ve never met a normal person like you, how do you do?”
1:6 “You Already Know”
In contrast with the title, the song supposes that the subject knows very little, as the lyrics are mostly a series of questions with ambiguous answers, repeatedly reduced to “How do I know? You already know.” This is a reference to life.
“Sometimes it moves so fast, sometimes it moves so fast./ If you stop to ask, it’s already passed.” If the question is ‘How do I know how to live?” then stopping to consider it when you are already alive and living is akin to missing the point, and so the answer will elude you. Or rather, you already knew the answer, because it was simply Live. An interesting symmetry between this song and the album The Suburbs occurs here. This question has been raised before in “Sprawl I (Flatland)” : “a defender of the sprawl said, ‘Well, where do you kids live?’ Well sir, if you only knew, what the answer is worth.” There the question was unanswered.
1:7 “Joan of Arc”
Vol. 1 closes with yet another type of reflection, the reflection of a life lived through the lens of history. The real Joan of Arc is someone who was first filliped and then canonized by her contemporaries and the Church. Her actual status, as a woman and a revolutionary, transcended her real life into literal sainthood. The statements of the chorus to Joan of Arc initially go unanswered, for they are intended for her image, her name, and not the real person long dead who is no longer relevant to the history she left behind. The repetition of “Tell the boys I’ll follow you” expresses the desire to follow the idealized vision of Joan. Set against the saintly admiration are repeated reminders of the violence committed against Joan and the hatred which informed those acts.
” Now they [the Church] tell you that you’re their muse, yeah, they’re so inspired./ But where were they when they called your name, and they lit the fire.” The song drives this point with the repeated ending of “Love love love you, kill kill kill you”. But what does Joan of Arc actually have to say about her status? Loved or hated, the “real” Joan offers a response in her native French. Here is the line and translation: “Tu dis que tu es mon juge, mais je ne te crois pas./ Alors tu dis que je suis une sainte, mais ce n’est pas moi./ J’entends des voix, mais ce n’est pas moi./ Je ne suis pas Jeanne d’Arc.” and injecting a little of my poor French skills, I think the best translation is: “You say you are my judge, but I do not believe you./ So you say that I am a saint, but that isn’t me./ I hear voices but that’s not me./ I am not Joan of Arc.” Joan rejects the title and image that her name has become. Her true subjectivity is not the Joan of Arc in the song or in the history books – that person is long gone, and about whom we know little besides she was likely someone who heard voices. Vol.1 ends with the subject’s rejection of their image as reflected by society.
(1:8 Hidden Track)
As I said, on the CD version there is a hidden track. It isn’t substantive but it is pretty cool because it is a medley of the melodies of Vol.1 but played in reverse. If you obtain this track and play it in reverse (I suggest the free program Audacity) it is neat to hear how it actually sounds pretty good in both directions.
So ends Part 1. I hope that you found this enlightening or inspiring or something. Also, I would never advertise on here for anything, but I feel like I would be a total dick if I didn’t encourage you to actually buy the album instead of pirating it…so here.
Be free, be responsible, and don’t be a jerk!
Notes
- I think it is a real shame this is their lowest reviewed album on the site.
- There are two versions of this music video, the official version, and this Lyric version. Both were made by the band, though they mysteriously removed the Lyric video from official channels and redid it.
- don’t fret, you’re an indigo child of the digital age!
- though as you’ll see below, this bilingual nature occasionally serves a thematic purpose within the context of the album
- The tracks on the CD album are in a different order. One reason why could be because while Side A (1-3) deals more with images and light transmission, Side B (4-7) is more closely associated with the individual experience of the status of image, living in a world of masks/images. Of course they commingle these themes, but I wouldn’t be here writing this if I wasn’t willing to venture a guess or two.