Arcade Fire - Everything now

Arcade Fire has shown, album after album, that they are the best social commentators in contemporary music. His lyrics have stripped modern society and portrayed our common faults and dreams. The themes that they tackle in Everything Now are nothing new in their dissertations, they have talked about mass consumption in Sprawl II, about immediate gratification in We Used to Wait, and about alienation in Reflektor, but again they seem to have way much more about all this topics, specially because the world has speed their immediacy from the last time that we heard from this band.

In 2010 (The Suburbs) we were facing the instant existential world of Twitter, by 2013 (Reflektor) we erased the words and just went for the quick glances of perfect lives in Instagram, but right now in 2017, we became ephemeral seconds of something that won't be available tomorrow in the Snapchat stories. If to that idea, we add a world that has been thrown out of balance because of the "fake news" post-truth era, it's no wonder that Arcade Fire needed to annotate their thoughts on the evolution(?) of our media consumption trends.

And here we are, in the moment of the "Everything Now", with its pros (all the information is available for everyone and everywhere), and its cons (our online persona has become much more important than our real self). It's a moment where reality and fiction have crossed boundaries and we are no more happy or successful of what people believe that we are. Who cares if my partner and I are the most unstable couple? Here's a pic of #RelationshipGoals. Who cares if I feel alone and depressed? Here's a story of #PartyAnimal. Who cares if I really have no political preparation? Here's a tweet to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

But Everything Now is not just brilliant in its lyrics. They get social irony in the construction of the song too, they borrow a pan flute from a Cameroonian song from the 70s, emphasizing the point that now you can have access to all the history of music from anywhere in the world (and yet the same songs are the ones that get played again and again in the media, even the "democratic" ones like Spotify and YouTube). And then it comes a joyous part where we hear backing vocals singing "La la la's" at the unison; well, that was recorded in one of the band performances where they asked the audience to sang together that melody, as if it was a meta-comment on how much they are able to command a multitude to do whatever they want thanks to their celebrity status.

In general terms, is a song that has analogy over analogy to contemporary society. A track that is coated with the uplifting strings of ABBA's Dancing Queen and glides to a peak euphoric moment in order to make much more attractive the real misery that it is exposing. Everything Now keeps showing that Butler, Chassange and their team are an unstoppable art troupe able to make important statements through their work.