City in Song - Revised

    Cities are often connoted as bustling sleepless metropoles. Depictions of Manhattan and Paris are vibrant, invoking romantic thoughts, images of glittering skyscrapers. But these images fail to recognize the notion that every glistening metropolis is not only full of elegant skylines but contains musty undergrounds, subways, and sewers. Two songs, “Modern Man” (Arcade Fire) and “Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)” (Sufjan Stevens), analyze some of the imperfections and downfalls that are found in cities. In their contemplations the two songs examine a flaw and look to resolve the said limitation.

    Arcade Fire’s, “Modern Man” begins its narrative gradually, like novel painting a paysage (setting the scene). The introduction, “So I wait my turn I’m a modern man” presents a character whom the audience follows throughout the song. This man is depicted as city dweller in the constant state of waiting in seemingly endless lines. The song contradicts the perception that city life is a dream, “Oh I had a dream I was dreaming”. This line implies that the man was searching for his dreams in a city, looking for the dreamlike reality that he supposed he would find living in a city. Instead it appears that the “modern man” realizes that city life is not what he assumed it would be. Further, the “modern man” grasps at meaning in an attempt to understand what is wrong with the circumstances of his life in a big city, “makes me feel like, Something don't feel right”. He notices that his expectations were not met and begins to question why he lives in the city where he spends his time waiting in lines and projecting the image of the “modern man” which becomes synonymous with the dreary repetition of ordinary life.  The song continues to explore the nature of the “modern man’s” life in the city essentially concluding that the life he has chosen in a city is not the dream he had hoped.

    Sufjan Stevens acknowledges in his song, “Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)” the deprived condition of a once great city, Detroit. Stevens constructs the accepted image of Detroit by including the phrase “Now a prison” protecting the stereotype of crime and debauchery. Through these phrases the audience sees Detroit as it is now, a decaying metropolis. Despite the repetition of such phrases as “Now a prison” which denote the current state of the once important economic and cultural center,  he chooses to focuses on the past greatness, “Once a great place”. The song attempts to reconcile and understand the collapse of Detroit while also attempting to visualize a new beginning. Through the song Stevens actually paints a history of the rise, fall, and rebirth of the city.

    Despite the vast differences between the two songs they both represent the decline of cities and their inhabitants. Overall attempting to understand the progression towards demise while projecting a sense of hope that people will notice and make a definitive change to make city life as vibrant and wonderful as literature often makes it seem.