You Dream In English Now

Arcade Fire “Normal Person”

It’s funny that Win Butler is self-deprecating about playing rock music at the start of this song because it’s not as though Arcade Fire have ever been a typical rock band. Their “let’s play every instrument at once!!!” aesthetic has a way of burying or de-emphasizing their guitars, to the point that this song is one of the very few in their catalog in which a lead guitar hook is central to the composition. This is certainly the most “normal” rock song they’ve ever done, so I get why he felt the need to be preemptively apologetic about it, and make the lyrics all about being freaked out by conformity. (Never mind that being afraid that playing a straight ahead rock song in 2013 is totally uncool is a very conformist fear.) I can see how the lyrics of this song could really bug someone, but I kinda like them – I think I actually sorta needed a song about the idea of “normal people” in my life right now, and while Win’s sense of irony is heavy-handed, it works well enough once you get into the thick of the song.

I wrote a lot more about Reflektor over here.

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