Why does Arcade Fire's latest album Neon Bible have three--count them, three--separate songs that reference ABBA's disco hit "Dancing Queen"? In each case, it's the same three step melodic refrain--the one that follows the line, "diggin' the dancin' queen."
In Neon Bible, the ABBA flourish first shows up in the album's soaring, religious-themed organ centerpiece, "Intervention," immediately after the line, "working for the church while your family dies." It appears again in "Ocean of Noise," following the repeating final lines, "It's time to work it out." Finally, in "(Antichrist Television Blues)" we hear it again a number of times, beginning after the line, "Now I'm overcome by the light of day."
There's a simple answer, actually: earworm. "Earworm" is an appropriately unpleasant way of describing a song that you want to, but cannot, get out of your head. At the time the songs on Neon Bible were probably written (before and during the release of Funeral) Canadian television and radio were constantly, endlessly flogging a stage production of "Mamma Mia," an ABBA-based musical put on by Toronto theatre and department store mogul Ed Mirvish (R.I.P.). The commercial featured utterly humiliating shots of over-enthusiastic audience members singing and dancing along to their favorite ABBA hits. Its most cringe and earworm-inducing moment coincides with that three step refrain after the line "diggin' the dancin' queen," made even more cringe-inducing (and fried more permanently into Canada's collective soft-tissue) by the image of middle-aged ABBA fans actually air piano-ing that particular bit of the song. The scars were lasting. From then on, when this commercial was not airing on television or radio, even when there was total silence, Canadians everywhere thought they could hear those chiming notes somewhere in the distance.
The Arcade Fire, of course, are a Canadian band, and their neon bible appears to be infested by this particular earworm. Fine, but they're musicians; they should have spotted it. How could they let this snippet of music which, when taken out of its poppy, dancy context and repeated ad nauseum, becomes so trite and obnoxious, find its way into such a lovely, dark, brooding, and passionate album as Neon Bible?
By accident, of course. I imagine that if someone pointed out this repeated ABBA sample to the band, their response would be a self-administered slap of unhappy realization to the forehead. But there are no accidents. Or rather, there are nothing but accidents, so to call something an accident explains nothing. Why this particular accident in this particular album?
This accident is, after all, thematically appropriate. Consider the album's central image: the neon Bible. The neon Bible is an image that conflates the modern and the ancient, the secular and the religions, the profane and the holy, the material and the spiritual. In other words, the "high" and the "low," both artistically and morally understood.
It is perhaps one of the more striking aspects of Arcade Fire's stellar critical success that its most obvious influences are, within the context of independent popular music, often on the "low" end of the cultural scale. The most notable influences in the past two albums are U2, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, rather than the less well-known, higher indie-cred influences that critically acclaimed bands and review-writers usually prefer to throw around.And, let's face it: This band is, at heart, a dance band for people who don't like dance bands. What most of their "hits" (especially"Rebellion/lies", "Power Out," "Keep the Car Running") have in common is an infectious driving rhythm that invites dancing. So who better to perversely incorporate than ABBA? And what better place than in an album laced, literally and figuratively, with the tacky, sexy glow of neon? What better opportunity for the neighbors to "dance in the police disco lights"?
A neon bible is a populist rather than elitist gospel. It doesn't belong to the insider, to those who are hip and in-the-know. It's a street-walking gospel, willing to dirty the pure "word" by selling it with materiality and sensuality--with a rock n' roll swivel of the hips or, if necessary, with a disco ball. Funeral's images of pure light, its lightning bolts ("Wake Up") and candles ("Power Out"), and its earnest appeals to the kids to "wake up," are replaced with buzzing pink neon and a raving evangelist/carnival barker. Funeral's evocation of wordless, almost sacred, acts of communion (lovers meeting on the roofs of snow-buried houses, children meeting in abandoned streets after a power failure, places where no cars go) are replaced by dark alleyways, dirty mirrors, muddy wells, dark shorelines, and two-bit entertainers. And the height of religious communication is portrayed, in "(Antichrist Television Blues)," as a father's perverse, obsessive wish to make his teenage daughter into a star, so that every man in the world will lust after her.
Neon Bible is, in other words, both a "gospel" album--an album with a sermon to deliver (see "Intervention" and "Windowsill," in particular)--and a "worldly" album--an album that uses the world's tools against it, packaging truth and art in neon, rhythm, and sex. It's no accident that the "Antichrist"'s teenage daughter is none other than Jessica Simpson. The neon Bible declares itself to be spiritually on Mr. Simpson's level, and artistically on Jessica's: communicating the high through the low, the light through the darkness. It's literally glory-fied disco. It's a sultry glow instead of daylight. It's ABBA.
