Arcade Fire's the suburbs and cover

In Arcade Fire’s “The suburbs”, the lyrics reflect the life of someone who is witnessing society crumble around them. The intent of the lyrics to carry this meaning is reflected by lines like “So can you understand? Why I want a daughter while I’m still young, I want to hold her hand and show her some of the beauty before the damage is done.” The line shows that the protagonist of the song’s story sees a bleak future for the world and wants to share the beauty currently in it with someone because he believes it will soon be gone. The other side of this song’s story is that by the time society falls people will have already seen it coming and accepted it. This is demonstrated by the line, “By the time the first bombs fell we were already bored.” This line reflects a kind of irreverent notion that by the time the worst happens it won’t be a surprise or an impactful event, because people were already condoning the societal paradigms that caused it and chose to not care. The cover manages to effectively convey the ominous nature of the first element of the song’s story through distorted tones and a slower beat, but it leaves out something important that the original doesn’t. The more upbeat and happy nature of the original’s music contributes to the grimly light-hearted attitude of society towards the problems that cause its downfall and in doing so retains the juxtaposition that the lyrics indicate the song was trying to present. So although the cover does effectively convey some of the message of the lyrics, the original does a superior job of exploring all the important elements of the song and is more rhetorically effective because of it.