It’s been twenty years since the release of Funeral, Arcade Fire’s debut album. Back in 2004, my life was just beginning, but also already in shambles, and it seems almost too obvious in retrospect that an album like this would resonate with me; an album about the innocence of youth, the loss of it, and the wild search for meaning that follows.

Funeral effectively changed music, and the internet, forever. I don’t know how much hyperbole I can truly spew for an album that seems so ubiquitous to the music history of people my age, it is like singing the praises of water, of air. Funeral composes a bit of everyone who has been listening to it for the past two decades. It is woven into the fabric of our lives, even if it was just one step on a long and evolving musical journey.

Arcade Fire would go on a long and evolving musical journey of their own, right out of my zone of interest by their fourth album, and they’d commit a series of faux pas around cultural appropriation in the process of expanding their style (26 years late to “world music”), losing much of their cool points in the process. Thankfully, the nice thing about recorded music is that it persists even long after the artists have stumbled their way out of the spotlight (or just our spotlight).

Unfortunately, a lot of the other things that were great about the internet in 2004 are decaying, abandoned, or simply gone forever. 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, which would hasten the ubiquity of social media in a very unpredictable way. If you want to communicate with others on the internet these days, you didn’t post on a personal blog, you post on social media, shouting into a void of impermanence. We don’t go looking for the pretentious opinions of music critics anymore, we look for opinions of the masses–Pitchfork, which was so influential to the music indie scene, is being “absorbed” into GQ, whatever that means, but it doesn’t sound like something that happens to a still-beloved institution.

I hate to swerve another post into old man complaining about the modern age, but if I revived this blog after more than a decade, it only seems appropriate to reflect on what has changed in that time. And it seems like a lot of things have gone to shit since then, which is impressive because 2004 was not just a depressing year for myself personally, but for many people in America–the Bush administration was really getting us down: Green Day’s American Idiot was released just a week after Funeral, and in the years surrounding we’d get Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Neil Young’s Living with War, and Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, several other albums preoccupied with our pessimistic political moment in the mid-aughts.

And yet, here we are, twenty years later, and it feels like we’ve come full circle. The political landscape is more divisive than ever before, and we barely even have a handful of truly great protest albums to lean on. The internet, which used to be a safe haven for the weirdos and freaks in the world, has now become a battleground for the attention spans of angsty mouth-breathers. The people who are in their 20’s currently aren’t listening to raw, energetic indie rock like Arcade Fire, but (warning: going to shout at clouds now) terrible mass manufactured bedroom pop built a top of mountain of reused samples and borrowed nostalgia. They’re screaming at endless derivatives of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who are singing almost exclusively about their past, present, and future ex-boyfriends; that are thrown onto Saturday Night Live for a live performance before their song stops trending in TikTok posts, and then disappear, never to be heard from again.

I hate it. But, you know, I can listen to Funeral, and I can imagine a time when it seemed like the bright light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming freight train, but a friend’s house, a warm place to spend the night. Maybe we’re on the precipice of this happening again, an age where popular music doesn’t feel so hollow and self-obsessed. But if pop music is a mirror, we’re pretty well fucked, because as far as I can tell our society isn’t veering away from superficiality anytime soon.

Damn! I tried to end on a positive note… but how can I?

Oh well. See you in another twenty years, for the fortieth anniversary.