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‘Moving past the feeling’: emotion in Arcade Fire's Funeral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2017

Michael Spitzer
Michael Spitzer*
Affiliation:
Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool
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Abstract

This article focuses on Arcade Fire's 2004 first album, Funeral. It is analytical in orientation, offering close (analytical) readings of Funeral's 10 tracks from the standpoint of reception of the album as particularly ‘emotional’. In order to explain Funeral's generation of extreme emotion, the article applies tools from current formal theory, particularly the theory of sentence phrase-structure. It connects sentence form with Spicer's notion of (ac)cumulative processes. With a nod to Osborn's article on ‘terminal climax’, it shows how Arcade Fire's sentential forms are unusually directed towards anthemic climaxes, associated with emotional breakthrough. The article also explores the tension in the music, grounded in the indie ethos in general, between ‘spectacular’ stasis and forward motion.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 252 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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