I am not an Arcade Fire superfan. There are plenty of songs, particularly on the older albums, that grate on me. But their greatest songs are some of most impressive songs I have ever heard. So I am a selective Arcade Fire superfan, because at their best, I cannot do without them.
Enter "Afterlife." I will see it against any Beatles bet you want to make. The brilliance is blinding on level after level.
If I am ever asked by Arcade Fire to drum this song as an emergency replacement, I will glide through that fantastic, compact opening drum fill and set the damn beat down.
Arcade Fire are led by a husband-wife duo, two of the strangest, most interesting people in music. Win Butler is the primary singer, a Texan Mormon by upbringing who moved to Montreal at age 20 to major in religious studies. There he met Régine Chassagne, a Montreal native and jazz singer whose parents emigrated from Haiti. They were married not long after and embarked on a music career together. Régine is a secondary lead vocalist and multi-instrumental contributor. Their co-vocals are a key component of the Arcade Fire sound. Her "ooh-oohs" in this song are a purely iconic touch. This is band of touches.
For their Reflektor album, they wanted to include the sounds of the percussive Haitian music Régine grew up with in her family home. The backbone of "Afterlife" is the Caribbean percussion section. As the many, many nicely orchestrated instruments add and subtract from the song, the percussion holds steady, and it really pays off in the quietest moments, as those shakers and hand drums come through clean, just far enough back in the mix to be a ghostly presence. It is, ironically, a life force.
The instrumentation is elite, layering tremoloed electric guitars, bouncy bass, strings, synthesizers, saxophones, more, and whatever that instrument is chiming out in the quiet third verse. Plenty of bands write songs for many instruments. The choices of instrumentation and their perfect orchestration are what you buy an Arcade Fire album to hear. You can hear everything to the back of the mix, counterpointing, complimenting, compounding. It takes leadership to get all these pieces to fit right.
But with all these musical ideas flaring out left and right, the real fire is in the words and the singer singing them. The first lines give us a rush of the sensations of life: "After all the breath and the dirt and the fires that burn." Besides being great, sober word choices, he is using a technique called synecdoche, using these parts of life to summarize the whole. The voice is Win Butler's warble, one of my favorite singing voices.
There are two ways I can see this song's message. One, it is a plea from Win Butler to Régine Chassagne over some apparently major problem in their marriage. He is trying to see their relationship, their stupid decisions and banal daily challenges, from the vantage point of the afterlife, trying to see if any challenge in life sizes up to the perspective of death and the greater, spiritual meaning of their love and marriage. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this was covertly inspiring the song.
Two, I think it is about experiencing the death of a loved one, a spouse or anyone else. Butler is literally asking "When love is gone, where does it go?" He means this on a metaphysical level: Where does the energy of love GO after the transcendent event of death? If there is an afterlife, does love remain on the other side; will the lost loved one be waiting there with the same love that bound them in the experiences of life?
It definitely seems like there has been an emergency. The "ambulances" have gone. There are "hangers-on" who seem to watch the ambulance lights recede out of sight, then hang on to the "dead lights of the afterglow." Those of us who have experienced death know of this afterglow of the lost that we will continually hang onto for the rest of our lives.
These are not "burrito fixings" lyrics. These are high-level, stand-alone lyrics with designed ambiguity, not simplistic vaguery. You can slip down a rabbit hole with them. In this case, they are themselves slipping down their own rabbit hole. And those very thoughts are about slipping down an unknown rabbit hole and what awaits. They do this duty while also being sonically great to sing.
Music videos are weird. Some are only promotional tools. Some are interesting exercises where the music is incidental. Some are Kanye videos. And some fuse themselves almost integrally to the song. There is only one freaking music video that has made me cry. It is the video for "Afterlife." The humanity of the situation in this video is making me type the rest of this sentence through tears. That's why I'm attaching it to this post.
Be well.