A week ago we drove into Houston on I-10 with Arcade Fire on the stereo and highway ramps zooming around us like tangential plot lines. In aching suitability, Win Butler's opus about Houston sprawl played while we navigated the same roads that, allegedly, were built before the towns. Of course, none of this was about us. We weren't from there, only acting as modern tourists in a pavement still-life, critically-acclaimed album on our stereo and New York City licenses in our wallets. If this was Kipling it would be called the Northeasterners' Burden. We can be insufferable.
But there was something moving about Regine's insistence on the album's last full (and maybe best) track, "Sprawl II." For a minute we were living in the sprawl, waiting at long lights and trying to find parking at a BBQ joint our friend recommended. This American life is confusing and expansive, and it is increasingly paved and far flung, making our connections daily choices between life and death. Thunderlust will bear this out for us in glittering and propulsive fashion, turning the navigation of the sprawl into a head-nodding, wide-eyed journey. We are, for four minutes, all together.
Arcade Fire - Sprawl II (thunderlust remix) by thunderlust
1 comment:
That MGMT record blows. Days away from Columbia running away from that record deal like it's a house on fire.
Post a Comment