Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight

from Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) Lyrics on Rap Genius

From the Kreyol proverb Dye mon, gen mon (“Beyond mountains, there are more mountains,” or “beyond mountains we make more mountains”)

Arcade Fire frontwoman Regine Chassagne took this expression from Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure The World by Tracy Kidder (Farmer is a infectious diseases specialist based at Harvard Medical School whose life’s work has been describing the ethnography and epidemiology of the AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis epidemics in Haiti)

• As for ‘dead shopping malls’, this is more of the sprawl; like the mountains they are obstacles, black holes that suck in suburbanites ad infinitum, bringing nothing in return.

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