For their part, Arcade Fire are not merely sentimental toward the suburbs, critically evaluating such landscapes while never considering themselves apart from it. “You never trust a millionaire quoting the Sermon on the Mount,” Butler sings, “I used to think I was not like them / but I’m beginning to have my doubts, my doubts about it.” The genius of the album rests in Butler and frontwoman Régine Chassagne’s ability to question their nostalgia while never fully escaping its melancholic grip.

Still, neither Arcade Fire nor Eidelstein express any sort of rage towards the insularity of wealthy white suburbs, but rather are content to critique them from a nostalgic distance, acknowledging the shortcomings while never seemingly affected by them. A type of reflective sadness colors the album and subsequent book, rendering each a bit less sharp than they might have been. In Eidelstein’s final chapter, he considers his own suburbs outside of Miami, largely made up of a conservative Jewish population, where a bank robbery near his school resulted in a dramatic campus lockdown because the town was otherwise free from crime. As a result, Eidelstein “mourned” his suburbs that day, realizing they were not as safe as he had been led to believe.

Nostalgia is a form of mourning, and Eidelstein misses an opportunity here to reflect on the suburbs as a place reaching at safety but failing to grasp an insidious reality: that such illusions of safety are often constructed around terrorizing, excluding, and expelling minoritized populations. Eidelstein might consider the nuances of his Jewish community’s own marginalization and subsequent development of a protected suburb, but he settles for reflection at the individual level, forgoing an expansive view for a narrow one.

Where Eidelstein’s perspective falters, Daphne Carr’s examination of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, which in 2019 celebrated its 30th anniversary, seeks to deepen the critical viewpoint of suburbia. The book is her self-proclaimed attempt to observe the “deep tissue of one kind of American despair.” Theorizing Trent Reznor as a product of the post-Industrial landscape of Mercer, Pennsylvania, where he grew up before fleeing to Cleveland, Ohio, Carr maps the birth of industrial music as a “poetic response” to the end of the Industrial Era, when the decline of manufacturing economies thrust the Midwest into financial crises that the area never fully recovered from. Carr grew up between Mercer and Cleveland, in Youngstown, Ohio, where this desolation made the city’s population the “poorest urban people in the country.”

Nearly opposite Arcade Fire’s Woodlands, then, Carr and Reznor’s suburbs—while also overwhelmingly white—were studies in extreme poverty, prompting an emotive reflection much starker than nostalgia. Carr posits that the birth of Nine Inch Nails in postindustrial America was “a stunning revelation: dissent from the complacence of suburbia was possible, and it could sound so strange.” Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor’s debut as Nine Inch Nails in 1989, is a surprisingly danceable electro-industrial album that expresses rage at forms of power, from religion to repressive relationships. “I’d rather die than give you control,” Reznor seethes on album opener “Head Like a Hole,” a fitting thesis for the album’s raw anger.

Illuminating this particular form of anger at the powers that be, Carr spoke with ten Nine Inch Nails fans, all born after Trent Reznor but before the release of Pretty Hate Machine, all located on the map connecting Carr and Reznor, and all white males. The latter fact was coincidence, but allowed Carr “to tell the story of lower-middle-class white men in the Rust Belt… as a mirror of American transition from Industrial to Information Age labor.” Resisting the urge to universalize the experiences of Nine Inch Nails’ fans, Carr allows the specifics of each person’s story to illuminate a variety of perspectives that converge and deviate at different turns.

Notably, Carr’s book was released in 2011, five years before lower-middle-class white male disillusionment was one of the key factors in electing Donald Trump to office. In interviewing white men disaffected with power in various ways, Carr does not attempt to sanitize some of their more objectionable views. Gus, a 19 year old, argues Cleveland has become “very urban, ghetto,” and if effort was made, people “could start to restore order in the world.” Gus blames rap music for the increase of crime and violence in Cleveland, and believes that an injection of rock ‘n’ roll would serve as an antidote. This abhorrent perspective lives uncomfortably alongside Gus’s NIN fandom, despite Reznor’s own outspoken political pronouncements against such conservatism and racism (several fans included in the book take issue with Reznor’s stances). What Carr accomplishes here, then, is not to argue for rage as inherently morally superior to nostalgia, but rather one justifiable reaction to economic despair with sometimes groundless, repulsive assertions.

In her final evaluation, Carr links Nine Inch Nails to Hot Topic, the chain of stores in malls across the United States that became popular concurrently with NIN, selling alternative subculture while enduring critiques of corporate commodification exploiting that same subculture. Hot Topic revolutionized artist merchandising, making t-shirts previously only available at shows in the city available to teens in the suburbs. Similarly, Reznor was accused of making industrial music mainstream and far too available for larger audiences.

Yet Carr takes a different view of both: “Making difference accessible to those who need it is a key value for punk, and by that logic Hot Topic and Nine Inch Nails fulfill a needed role.” Nine Inch Nails, and later artists like Marilyn Manson, Green Day, and My Chemical Romance, are “not messiahs, only critically conscious older friends,” whose merchandise—sold at Hot Topic—came to “signify that something is working itself out in this young mind and body.”

Before I regularly attended concerts, I frequently bought band tees from the Hot Topic at the Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas, a suburb adjacent to my smaller suburb, Kennedale, where my sister’s friend burned me a copy of Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth when I was a freshman in high school. It would be college before Arcade Fire articulated another shade of suburbia for me. At that age, emo—and later indie rock—were my genres of choice, with bands like Taking Back Sunday, Bright Eyes, and Brand New dominating my iPod Mini. But I would try anything, and something in Nine Inch Nails’ music spoke to me just as much as Modest Mouse, as Underoath, as Kanye West. Yet I was more willing to own my love of such artists than I was of Nine Inch Nails, feeling at once embarrassment for listening to something more “goth” than my personality indicated to others, as well as embarrassment that I could not live up to that same aesthetic if confronted by a “real” NIN fan.

On “Suburban War,” Arcade Fire’s track about how commonalities between friends eventually crumble over sharpening lines, Win Butler sings,

But you started a war that we can’t win

We keep erasing all the streets we grew up in

Now the music divides us into tribes

Choose your side, I’ll choose my side

Genres, like suburbs, can lead audiences to create imaginary distances between ourselves and those we deem other. A Nine Inch Nails fan may be labeled a latent criminal, as Carr notes, while an Arcade Fire fan may be labeled sentimental, as Eidelstein notes, or worse, a hipster, signifying shallow vanity. But when fanbases articulate their own identities, a type of community forms. As Carr articulates, “fandom can be a deep, complex, lifelong way to shape one’s value and sense of self.” The NIN community developed around a type of marginalization, outcasts of the mainstream who were demonized by the very religious groups they felt repressed by, initially leading them to Reznor’s music.

Conversely, Eidelstein’s book perhaps revolves around his own feelings primarily because something in Arcade Fire’s music does not reach out to another person. Instead, it mourns the loss of a time period in a certain type of person’s life, an interior state of being that we grieve while coming to recognize its limits. Wealthy white suburbs certainly encourage such individualistic responses to the world: the American dream of representing only the self, which both allows ownership of one’s accomplishments and disallows any sense of collective responsibility as a unit.

But on The Suburbs, like on Pretty Hate Machine, something is still working itself out in the mind and body, and a community may yet form from the sincere feelings that Arcade Fire prioritize. While both are critical of their locales, Arcade Fire’s suburbs granted them the privilege to look back with nostalgia, and Reznor’s suburbs gave him the perspective to look back in anger—both emotions valid responses, yet both needing further reflection to work toward productive ends. Carr notes that while Hot Topic is not inherently radical, the “successful shopper at the store grows too wise for it and learns to reject it, as that person either becomes more enmeshed in the politics of counterculture or ages out of rebellion.” Thus, the music and the merchandise, the melancholy and the misery, cannot save us, but only aid us for a time: ultimately, we will have to work salvation out on our own.