Music and Inspiration for a Modern Person - Essay Example

Creative and Critical Application While some of us grew up with a musicians ear, others have no choice but to lend the musicians their ears. Whatever perspective we choose to look at, it remains that music is an inspiration to our lives. Some of the things music has brought are a smile on our faces, unity, tears, among other things. We cannot deny the feelings that wash over us as we listen to music, be it beats, natural sounds, a tune or notes. The motivation that comes from music has helped many people at their lowest point in their lives. However, most of the music made today is not as inspiring. The meaning of the lyrics fails to cultivate reactions in our hearts as the music produced is only based on the most popular beats. Music is sounds placed together to form a tune. Human beings have been able to be motivated by sounds surrounding us in the world from the beginning of time. The start was hitting of rocks, wooing and clapping. Evolution has brought about technology that is very crucial for the formation of music today. Technology has been able to summon the different sounds surrounding us into one tune, beat or note. Music creates an expression of emotional feelings, a language that connects all human races. Music is now the way of life, without which life would be very silent. Everyone would agree that communication is our way of life, therefore, music is a way for us to communicate our deepest, most intimate feelings. Some people choose to listen to music without lyrics while others choose to combine the two. Music brings out the inspiration to be true to ourselves, illustrate ideas to other people and our emotions and encourage others. The Suburban War is a song by a Canadian Indies rock band named Arcade Fire. The song speaks of a grown man with the suburbs representing his childhood. The song is about following a different path in life leaving the past behind you. The individual being talked about in the song goes back to the suburbs and finds a different town with unfamiliar faces. The feeling is like visiting a very strange place. In the suburbs, the children grew up together until there came a time when each one had to choose his own path. It led to the separation. When a person in the song goes back to his suburban home, no one can recognize him due to the time that has passed apart. The song interprets to mean one person who is completely different from the person he was during his childhood. The choices he made as a child determined what he is now. The two persons meet up when he goes back to the suburbs, his persona when he was a child that he seems to have left behind, and the changed persona. I am in my 20s and grew up in the suburbs. The suburbs are the most efficient and effective machines to manufacture the ideal childhood memories. Today, kids prefer to be smug with derision of a hipster behavior and dismiss intelligence. Win Butler, Arcade Fire, says “with my old friends, it was different then, before your war against the suburbs began.” Growing up in the suburbs was time well served that we never noticed how fast it flew by. The suburbs conceived as a child rearing for a Utopian template, an Eden for breeding and were robbed from us as we were forced to adapt to progress. The evolution prospect is confronted by the suburbs with only one option. The overall replacement of one thing with something completely different. We need to take an extended and hard expression at our past, where we come from, and acknowledge where our culture is headed. We need to get our options right this time. We need to create ways of living together eliminating dreams of impossible perfections that are beyond our reach. The lyrics in the song is mentioning how the city had transformed so much from the time when the person was a little child and how he prayed to God not to live to see the death of everything that was wild in the city poses a confrontation with the reality of the person in the song mourning his loss. However, the mourning is not in a nostalgic way that denies his ultimate failures but in a manner that honors his initial goal of making a place people could live, excel and be happy. In the light of changes defining the next suburb era, the task means taking a good and hard look at how far we have all come from while acknowledging where our culture is heading. In short, it all means getting things right this time. Meaning we have to find better ways of living together and not dreaming and fantasizing of a perfect world that is unreachable. About half of Americans reside in the suburbs with the majority of the county’s future development taking place there. Visionary leaders in the suburbs are creating ways to redeem their communities through adding new pedestrians, bike and transit connections. In addition, they are also improving the ability to live and walk in the suburban streets. Also, they are making an effort of encouraging new and attractive mixed-use projects and compact, easy to walk in neighborhoods close to transit and jobs. In essence, there will be an introduction of urban structure to control the chaos in the suburbs while creating a lasting and framework for incremental evolution. Through the hard way, we have learned that change must happen whether we want it or not. Maybe the places we adore will not have to go away only if we get it right and encourage a mature growth. Through all the provide possibilities and learning from our past mistakes in an attempt to pursue things that are more resilient and permanent, it will require approaching a national emotional bloodletting. National emotional bloodletting is a collection of all the gathering on the psychiatrist’s couch that helps acknowledge conflicts, memories and a sense of abandonment that we all carry. However, as we ultimately proceed from our past regret and sadness, a place we shall never retrieve, we are all faced with the undeniable want and need to clean up from the past. Following that endeavor, Arcade Fire’s song, ‘Suburban War’, gives the perfect soundtrack to begin this agenda. Indeed the sounds from the song are as compelling and vibrant today as it did when it was first released. The song is still filled with energy and the themes remain to open an interpretation and debate. So the song might raise more questions than give answers, though that might be the reason for someone to go over the album over and again. So we, the listeners are left to wonder if the song condemns Middle America or if it is a sympathetic account of Middle America that tinges nostalgia and mixed feelings. Is the created world in the song a sustained criticism of our own kind of a cautionary tale in the allegorical sense or only a figment of Arcade Fire’s overactive imagination? Moreover, exactly what the fight is Arcade Fire trying to prevent or cause? Win Butler, lead singer of the band, explains the album is neither an indictment of the suburbs or a love letter to the suburbs. Instead, the song is a love letter from the suburbs. Therefore, it is up to every listener to make a decision on what the uptake is depends on where you may be coming from. Taking that to mind, the original ‘Suburbs’ version seems to be so complete within itself that it does not require tinkering even if it is difficult to begrudge the collective art-rock from Montreal for taking a victory lap that is well deserved. The song ends up being a case of addition and subtraction when it provides a new context and more material into what was already a successful formula. The main problem with the scenes from ‘the Suburban war’ and its relationship as to how one might interpret the more complex and much richer album is that it tends to dwell on qualities of the band that critics engage with. In short, Arcade Fire takes itself too seriously, to the point sincerity verges on sanctimony. All in all, the film in the song reveals Arcade Fire’s fundamental irony that a band sounding so musically uplifting and joyful can be so down-in the-dumps- gloomy in its outlook on society and life in general. You cannot help but wonder if the inspiration anthems of the song are bitter creeds. The song inspired me to think of my childhood and how simple it was. I learned so much growing in the suburbs. Using music as an inspiration, suburban war especially, I desired for persons to study the importance of urban planning, environmental issues, advocating for public health and community activism. Living in the urban settings does not teach you these things unless learnt in schools. A child’s paradise is the only word that comes to mind. Playing so care free and knowing everyone in the community you live in was simply amazing. People took care of each other then, unlike in the urban areas where people do not even know their neighbors. Work Cited Harvey, Jonathan, and Michael Downes. Music and Inspiration. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Print. The Suburbs. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Merge Records, 2010. Sound recording. Morgan, Sally, and Pauline Laler. Music. Chicago, Ill: Heinemann Library, 2001. Print. Rose, F C. Neurology of Music. London: Imperial College Press, 2010. Internet resource. Read More