#409: Modest Mouse, "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w

My Mom wouldn't have liked Modest Mouse, I feel sure. I don't mean the music, necessarily; once I introduced her to rock music, she developed some pretty interesting taste. Most of it was gushingly melodic, to be sure -- XTC and They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies; sugar-rush bands like the Primitives and Stretch Princess; modern folkies like Dar Williams and Christine Lavin and Kate Jacobs; some punk-pop (she enjoyed her little moments as the white-haired woman in glasses carrying used Bad Religion and Vandals cd's to the puzzled young men at the counter). But she loved the jangle and the textural haze of the Church, and the sultry bass and sinister dance pulse of Shriekback, and you can triangulate to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" from that. That lithe exercise-friendly bass line, the Ennio Morricone guitar and violin stabs, the alarmed-rattlesnake-racing-through-cookware percussion, and the way Isaac Brock doubles every word he sings by simultaneously speaking it as close to the lowest audible frequency as he can manage: she might have found it perversely sexy, as she did Shriekback's Barry Andrews. It's conceivable.

Besides, there were other unpredictable cases where she became a fan of alternative guitar rock bands who didn't approach Broadway or hootenanny singing standards: Died Pretty, Immaculate Fools, An Emotional Fish, Love Spit Love. Modest Mouse, instrumentally, could have appealed to her like those. Their ambitious 2000 album the Moon and Antarctica, where the then-useful Best New Albums section of Pitchfork brought them to my attention, has spaciousness and rock energy and bowed strings and superb, varied pacing, not to mention occasional moments of Beatles-y psychedelic gorgeousness. Any of those might have appealed to her. Or not. I didn't check, because she would have been repelled by their singer/ lyricist, Isaac Brock.

The Moon and Antarctica begins with the lines "Everything that keeps me together is falling apart/ I've got this thing that I consider my only art/ of fucking people over". Two songs later Brock brags "It took a lot of work to be the ass I am/ and I'm pretty damn sure that anyone can/ equally easily fuck you over". "Paper Thin Walls", later on, says "It's been agreed that the world stinks" and thus "I can't be blamed for nothin' anymore". Most of the album is more philosophical and less actively hostile, but it tends to a dark-hued defeatism: "It takes a long time, but God dies too/ but not before he sticks it to you". "Everyone's life ends but no one ever completes it/ wet and dry ice both melt and you're equally cheated". The touching love song is called "Life Like Weeds" ("like" as in "resembling"). "Wild Pack of Family Dogs", a back porch folk song, blandly recounts a human family being eaten, and pictures the predator dogs, who did only what predators do, eventually dying and going to heaven.

My mom, although also a carnivore, wouldn't have liked "Wild Pack of Family Dogs", or the other bits I've quoted. She was an extraordinarily nice person. True, as a strong feminist, she was no pushover when confronted by bigots, plus she did need reading and coffee before she went into the world. But otherwise she was an instinctive ray of sunshine who befriended all the store clerks and waitresses, gave my school friends a home away from home, donated to charity despite not being much above the poverty line, and devoted her life to teaching, informing, and creating. She was passionately honest; if a store clerk gave her too much change, for a simple but common example, she'd immediately point it out. Her politics were liberal but conventional, based on a belief in the system, and she didn't try to minimize her taxes because taxes benefit all of us. She couldn't enjoy a story if she didn't genuinely like the protagonists, and she wouldn't like the protagonists if they weren't, in fact, good people.

Modest Mouse tell us "No one really knows the ones they love/ If you knew everything they thought, I bet you'd wish that they'd just shut up". I knew my mom, as a son and then a friend, for 40 years, and I'm actually pretty certain that almost none of her goodness was forced or fake. Sometimes I would bring home philosophical sentiments *like* Isaac Brock's, and she'd react with concern if I did it too much (i.e. my middle years of college), and otherwise with the purest, most adorable puzzlement. And a slight, automatic recoil.

I also know me, and, well, I guess I'm pretty nice: I spent years being shown how. My friends (of whom I have a reasonable number) and my cats (of whom I have an unreasonable number) would testify that I am. Restaurant wait staff would; I still enjoy the memory of a first date in 2015 where I came back from a bathroom break to find the waitress had spent my absence testifying to my date in my favor. (I still didn't get a second date, which doesn't harm the memory because I found much better dates later.) Perhaps the unmet animals I refuse to eat would agree, all opposed only by the occasional random highly politicized friend-of-friend on Facebook. I guess I'm pretty honest, too, in that I usually go out of my way not to lie to people, even my kids, which can be inconvenient sometimes.

I also know that it's a choice, an effort, a daily affirmation of who I've decided is my best self, and that it lapses when I don't pay attention. In periods of exhaustion or unhappiness (most notably after my mom died), I've retreated quickly into imaginary worlds, and had way too much fun there.  I can't play my favorite, most immersive computer games -- the Civilization series or Out of the Park Baseball (which becomes immersive if you create your own cities, and naming algorithms for fictional players, and league structures, and ... ahem ... ) -- because if life has put me in the mood to be immersed in the first place, I know I won't want to come out.

I love my friends and children and some of my students dearly, and attain most of my happiness from them. Yet a part of me would have voted, if allowed, to never even meet (or create) them. A part of me would have voted to shut out human reality -- with its slow, erratic pace, its confusing and non-playtested rules, its weak correlation between player decisions and game results, and its unwillingness to eject other players for oafish behavior -- as much as the desire to live indoors with paid-up electricity permitted.

I believe Isaac Brock has that part too (which would help account for the 9-year gap between the two most recent Modest Mouse albums). My Mom and I both consider(ed) Stephen King's the Stand one of the greatest novels ever, but to her the greatest richness obviously came once the world-destroying plague was over and the struggle for the recovery began; when I re-read it a couple years ago, the parts I remembered in vivid detail from adolescence were the parts where everything was getting torn to pieces. "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes", Moon and Antarctica's very darkest song, implies instead a nuclear war in progress and a nuclear winter impending, but I watched a lot of World War Three movies while growing up during the Reagan years, too. "Does anybody know a way that/ a body can get away?", Isaac screeches, distortion emphasizing the narrator's panic; hell, I've felt like that at sufficiently noisy parties. I suffer sonic overload in public too easily. At least if the bomb falls, the sounds I'll make coughing my shredded lungs out will have some empty room in which to reverberate.

For all that, I don't (as best I can tell) relate to the Coke(TM)-addled narrator's unmotivated threat "I'm gonna punch you in the face, I'm gonna hit you in the glasses". If anything, Brock and I should find that episode of the Twilight Zone personally horrifying. I don't think I'm instinctively nice, but I'm not instinctively cruel; even when I was 6 and Garfield was my favorite comic strip, I felt bad when Garfield was mean to the dog Odie. But I sing it anyway.

It's possible Isaac Brock is as awful a person as some of his lyrics claim. If he is, don't tell me, because I like having my doubts. On Moon's follow-up album, there's a song about Charles Bukowski that accurately asks "Yeah, I know he's a pretty good read, but God, who'd want to be such an asshole?". Singing horrible things can be a sign of a horrible person, but it could also be a substitute for being a horrible person, a way to let one's demons cavort on an isolated playground. If I needed to all the time, it might be an unnerving sign. I don't; I'm just happy that I can.