Tiny little laughing at my tiny little self

I like Modest Mouse. Sparklestone doesn't always care for them so much because, as he says, "I just can't handle that manic angriness right this second." But I have listened to Good News for People Who Love Bad News so much that I have started to get the lyrics and to uncover how very smart they are. I couldn't wait for the new album to come out, so when it did, I bought it that day.

Side note: for me to 1) know that a particular album is being released on a particular date, 2) anxiously await that date, and 3) actually purchase the album on that date is all new. It's the result of mine and Sparkle's commitment over a year ago to get back into music. It's very exciting!

I've listened to the new album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank enough to catch a few really good songs and enough to know that I'll keep going back to it to dig deeper and get more out of it. There are songs that just keep getting really stuck in my teeth and I have to go play them just to find out if they're really as good as they taste in my memory. They're usually better than I remember.

My favorite song so far - the one I keep going back to over and over - is "Missed the Boat." The music sounds so sweet and the singer's voice (I'll go look up his name now: ah... Isaac Brock) is so calm and so soothing -almost like a lullabye-, while the lyrics are so damning. I love that juxtaposition - it's like a brick pillow (something I tried to explain to my almost-4-year-old friend, A, last weekend).

For those of you who don't know, I am trained in literary theory. Admittedly, I'm rusty, but I did spent a lot of time working on it. At the very least, I consider myself a feminist post-modernist, if not a deconstructionist. (Yeah, OK, that's how I consider it. But really, I haven't done this in so long that a true post-modern feminist would scorch me for even bringing it up. And a real deconstructionist would just take me apart.) Because of those tendencies, I don't put much stock in trying to figure out the intent of the author or "what the author is really trying to say." The exciting thing about a text is that it's up to the reader to get/apply/bring/create the meaning of the words. So here's what I'm hearing: this song is talking about how our country (you, me, all of us) got into the current war in Iraq.

A few of the lines that get me every time:

Our ideas held no water, but we used 'em like a dam.

and

We built ourselves a pillar, we just used it as a crutch.

and in the same verse:

We were suddenly uncertain, at least I'm pretty sure I am.

In another verse:

We didn't read the invite, we just dance at our wake.
All our favorite songs were playing so we could shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.

And finally, the verse that Mr. Brock (I might remember his name for 5 more minutes!) whispers in the sweetest little rhythmic story telling voice:

Tiny curtains open and we hear the tiny clap of little hands. A tiny man would tell a little joke and get a tiny laugh from all the folks.

Modest Mouse plays and sings the song so sweetly, in such an addictively lovely way, that it's hard to remember that missing the boat is a bad thing. Missing the boat leaves us in a place where we don't want to be. The song is SO good - the sweet music, the sweet voices - it distracts us from the point so that we don't even know we're not getting it. And that's the point.

When a work of art uses its own devices to hide the fact that it's giving you the point... that's good art. In fact, it's poetry.