I love Arcade Fire, and found this a fascinating read.

I wanted to love this - the concept of this series is so interesting to me, and I've been following Arcade Fire since Funeral dropped in my late teens, but the writing just fell flat ... especially after reading another in the series (Bjork's Homogenic). The chapters felt too disjointed from one another, and the level of critique centred more around lyric interpretation than the band itself and the making of the album. For example - there's a whole chapter dedicated to other pop culture works (movies, TV shows, etc) that just seem to remind the author of the suburbs as a concept, and I found it a real stretch trying to see how these things even related to Arcade Fire. 

I was expecting more information about the band itself, the process behind the making of the album, or even a more musical theory inspired critique of the songs themselves. There was so much potential, and so many good interviews from around this album's release that the author could have pulled into this book - alas!

I'd recommend this book for three things. 

First, the fact it encourages you to revisit one of the best albums of the 21st century. So much of the emphasis in pop culture writing is on the here and now and the immediate future--the latest controversy, what are you working on next, the best of the year, top ten most anticipated, and so on--that it's refreshing to read something that looks at something that came out almost a decade ago, and encourages you to re-experience it, and remember what it was like to listen to it then, and see what it is like to listen to it now.

Second, Eidelstein's general survey of representations of suburbia in film and television, from classic melodramas to Mad Men and The Americans. As someone who, like the author, is also culturally omnivorous and also likes to find connections between different works of art and media--I'll just say, it's nice to recognise a kindred mind. 

Third, the author's more personal reflections and recollections on his own suburban upbringing, particularly at the beginning and at the end of the book. Eidelstein's experiences are both unique and eminently relatable. 

The book's weakness? I wish it were a different book. I wish it were a memoir or autobiographical fiction about Eidelstein's experience of suburbia--since those was by far the most engaging sections in the book--or that it were a general survey of representations of suburbia in popular culture--since Eidelstein clearly knows the subject well, but I feel that those sections weren't as in-depth as they could have been due to the constraints of the 33 1/2 series (the book has to be short, and it has be mainly about an album). Also--don't walk in expecting a particularly complex or mind-blowing analysis of Arcade Fire's album. Not that I think that's what Eidelstein was aiming for. Read this book if you want to think about connections--between The Suburbs and other works of art, and between The Suburbs and your own childhood and adolescence.

I used to know a guy who, when asked where he was from, would answer 'suburbia', on the grounds that he had more in common with other suburban kids than anyone who'd grown up in the centre of the city his happened to be near. It was a fair point. Similarly, this book uses Arcade Fire's breakthrough album - and definitely not my favourite - as much as anything for a peg on which to hang an essay about the questioning of the idea of the suburbs in American art since the War. And it should be noted that this is a US definition which seems also to include small towns - Blue Velvet's Lumberton, for instance - in a way which felt alien to this British reader. The recurring idea is that paradox of feeling at least partly nostalgic for somewhere which, at the time, one couldn't wait to escape. And on that much, I certainly know what Edelstein means. Indeed, I think it's more common than he dreams; there's a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing aside on nostalgia as a function of privilege, which I don't buy at all. What about all those rappers who drop tracks expressing nostalgia for their early days in the hood? They may well lose their innocence younger than suburban kids, but the trajectory and principle are the same. Hell, The Wire's fourth season, often considered its finest, had that same arc as its spine. Sure, they're still in the US, but what about JG Ballard? He does get a passing mention here, but without reference to the way that he clearly felt at least glimmers of nostalgia for a Japanese prison camp, because that was where he was young. I don't think there's a spot on Earth so forlorn that someone who grew up there doesn't feel the odd moment of missing it.

Still, one can forgive such earnestness in the young, and Edelstein was only 16 when The Suburbs came out in 2010, which is now seven years ago, and isn't that terrifying? So one can also let him off the slightly clunky references to Sontag and Baudrillard, even when paired with the idea that the song title Rococo is pretentious, or the OS romance plot of Spike Jonze's Her sounds absurd rather than passé. His reading of Mad Men as Betty's story rather than Don's shows definite promise, and more than anything he's made me want to go back with fresh ears to an album I never rated all that highly - which is surely exactly the sort of impact a 33 1/3 should have.