Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures and continuities in the music of Modest Mouse

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Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures andcontinuities in the music of Modest Mouse

Kenneth M. Smith

Popular Music / Volume 33 / Issue 03 / October 2014, pp 428 - 454DOI: 10.1017/S0261143014000385, Published online: 28 August 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143014000385

How to cite this article:Kenneth M. Smith (2014). Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures and continuities in themusic of Modest Mouse. Popular Music, 33, pp 428-454 doi:10.1017/S0261143014000385

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Formal negativities,breakthroughs, ruptures andcontinuities in the music ofModest Mouse

K ENNE TH M . SM I THSchool of Music, University of LiverpoolE-mail: [email protected]

AbstractIndie-rock band Modest Mouse’s earliest music connects aphoristic fragments into uniquely dis-jointed narratives that resist standard formal categorisation. The band’s homespun narrativesmake us process dramatic interactions between drastically opposed musical paradigms as we searchfor new formal schema by which to classify them. This, I argue, is one answer to the ‘negative dia-lectic’ that Adorno thought was missing in popular music. In this paper I analyse three songs in par-ticular depth, extending a methodology borrowed from the ‘classical tradition’ that extends EdwardT. Cone’s ‘stratification’ analyses of Igor Stravinsky. In Modest Mouse’s later work, which seeminglysignals a return to simpler strophic song forms, this dialectic is spread across entire albums such asGood News for People Who Love Bad News; but even in individual songs, despite a simplisticfaçade, my ‘stratification graphs’ reveal deep dialectical negativities.

Negative Dialectics: A Relevant Analytical Tool?

For every positive thing that we accomplish, something negativecomes out of it, and vice versa. (Isaac Brock1)

Isaac Brock, frontman of Seattle-based indie-rock act Modest Mouse, has always beenfascinated by irreconcilable contradictions. More than any other band on the 21st cen-tury indie circuit, Modest Mouse’s songs, textures, forms, timbres and dynamics arepermeated by paradoxes. The layers of meaning in Brock’s poetic lyrics suggest thatthis stems from his profound and complex worldview. No single solution suffices forhim; his musical problems are too numerous and his existential field too vast. Thedialogues he stages are, I claim, dialectical in ways that approach the dense negativ-ity that Theodor Adorno thought impossible in popular music.

Why Adorno again? From his 1941 diatribe, it is clear that the philosopherwould baulk at a marriage between ‘serious’ categories of reason and ‘standardised’popular music, but the aisle has since been prepared by many theorists. RichardMiddleton (1990) blew open Adorno’s stereotype of bourgeois middle-class listening,making way for a more nuanced understanding of youth subcultures (mods androckers in particular); Adam Krims carved a Marxist path into urban geographythrough the ruins of Adornian theory (Krims 2001, 2003, leading ultimately to his

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work on rap); Giles Hooper (2007) used Habermas and Honneth with Kurt Cobain(Nirvana’s ‘Tourettes’ from In Utero) to sweep more debris aside. Such studies attestto a general feeling that Adorno’s denigration of ‘popular’ music against ‘serious’music (Adorno 1941, p. 437) should not bar his other, more open concepts fromthe sociopolitical study of Western popular music.

Martin Morris has reconceptualised heavy metal, asserting that ‘Adorno’s nega-tive dialectics can continue to illuminate the analysis of contemporary popularmusic’ (Morris 2014, p. 4), and it is to negative dialectics that this study turns.Morris’s justification historicises Adorno’s account of pop, tacitly realising the pro-mised hope of Max Paddison, that Adorno’s castigation resulted from a blinkeredview of Paul Whiteman’s dance-band arrangements of the 1930s (Paddison 1982),suggesting that certain strains of what we now call ‘popular music’ would not neces-sarily be categorised thus by Adorno (what Morris 2014, p. 3 calls ‘mass culturemusic’).2 Adorno despised musics that simply accepted their fate as commoditiesand appealed to mass culture, and lionised those that played out the social contradic-tions that brought them into being. These latter (‘serious musics’) participated in anegative dialectic; they laid bare the tensions behind their conception (tensionsimmanent in the object itself), but refused reconciliation as positive syntheses: ‘thenegation of the negation does not result in a positive’ (Adorno 2008a, p. 17). This spe-cies of negativity celebrates the newly revealed, suppressed, hidden factors thatwould have been neglected by a positive Hegelian synthesis.

Examining certain ‘popular’ acts that combined radical protest with self-reflective critique, Paddison breaks open Adorno’s argument contra pop music but,in a truly negatively dialectical fashion, reinstates his original point of view, whilerecognising the smaller fragments of the argument that could not be swept away.Paddison (1982) uses Frank Zappa to exemplify Adorno’s ‘authentic music’, asdoes Ben Watson in his Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1996). But 30 years on,we can update the criteria for selecting the acts that Paddison proposed, valid thoughthese undeniably were in 1982–1996. Morris goes as far as heavy metal, but Paddisonalready isolated artists with ‘experimental’ leanings, such as John Cale, Carla Bley,Henry Cow and the Art Bears (Paddison 1982, p. 215). It strikes me that recentindie artists, even by mere virtue of their aspirations to independence from major rec-ord labels, make an ideal research field as they attempt to resist the mass approvalthat it behoves serious popular music to critique.

Why Modest Mouse?

Judging by the many oblique literary riddles in Modest Mouse’s abstruse lyrics,3 IsaacBrock is widely read, but he confesses to no direct philosophical influence. The readermay now question the value of taking a fresh new band in a new century for a walkdown the well-trodden lane of Adornian dialectics. But in fact the tactics that ModestMouse offer listeners to negotiate oppositions, swing between poles, connect the discon-nected and disconnect the connected prove Brock to be among the most adroit dialec-ticians in the business, notwithstanding his stylised posturing of suburban trailer-parkignorance. But rather than simply examine a sample of Modest Mouse’s most intriguingsongs, and take stock of Brock’s lyrics and performance mannerisms, I develop amusico-analytical technology bespoke to this group, and in particular to the contradic-tions that bombard us when listening to Modest Mouse’s songs. The technology is

The Music of Modest Mouse 429



inspired by Edward T. Cone’s now legendary article, ‘Stravinsky, Progress of a Method’(1962), which details an approach to musical form that was influential to composerssuch as Birtwistle and theorists such as Kofi Agawu and Jean-Jacques Nattiez.

The application of ‘classical’ analytical techniques onto ‘pop’ is a contentiousone, and this study thus takes a double risk. In ‘The High Analysis of Low Music’,Dai Griffiths bemoans the fact that textbooks on analysis woefully ignored rigorousinnovations in popular music theory and this, more than 10 years on, still rings true(Griffiths 1999).4 While he demonstrates that many theoretical advances in the ana-lytical ‘canon’ were pre-empted by popular music studies (Philip Tagg and semioticsfor example, Griffiths 1999, p. 408), he also demonstrates the common sense logic that‘Pop music is tonal music; and so there is no need not to apply Schenkerian models topop music’ (Griffiths 1999, p. 409). I would entirely concur: an opera-goer’s top hatcan still keep a hippy’s long hair dry; it may even ‘catch on’. But the classical analyt-ical method I wish to revisit is not so ipso facto applicable to pop as Schenkerian the-ory. Cone’s tools were specifically designed to unearth the links that connectedStravinsky’s blocks of contrasting material; hidden beneath Cone’s ‘positivistic’ ana-lytically hermetic façade is a vital dialectic that counters the critique of Stravinsky’swork in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. Cone’s technique, in tacitly challengingAdorno’s reading of Stravinskian dialectics, can fruitfully challenge his claimsabout ‘standardisation’ – if not of all pop repertoires, then at least those types of con-struction that resemble Stravinskian ‘block’ forms. The spirit of this enquiry does notnaively make Adorno deconstruct Adorno, however: Negative Dialectics refutes thescientific maxim that a negative multiplied by a negative yields a positive (Adorno2008a, p. 14), and though not producing a Hegelian ‘positive’ here, I attempt toposit new insights into the dialectical heart of an exciting band.

Yet we cannot maintain Cone’s 1962 hermeticism and be truly negatively dia-lectical. The object under study must be allowed to connect to its social function;we cannot be phenomenologically reductive for Adorno:

Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As aconstellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it mayfly open like the lock of a wellguarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or asingle number, but to a combination of numbers. (Adorno 1973 [1966], p. 163)

Lambert Zuidervaart (1991, p. 49) cites Adorno’s two main negatively dialecticalantimonies as (1) the particular vs. the universal, and (2) culture vs. society. Andyet Adorno claims that tensions are immanent in the works of art themselves: ‘weare compelled from the vantage point of objective reality to apply the concept ofcontradiction, not simply between two unrelated objects, but as an immanent contra-diction, a contradiction in the object itself’ (Adorno 2008a, p. 9). This examination of‘the object’ was the justification for Morris’ analysis of heavy metal (Morris 2014,p. 5), but he rightly allows his dialectic to spiral out of the artwork: ‘historically man-ifested “tension of dialectical contradictions” must be found in the music itself, thepractices of participants in the music and in relation to the significantly different his-torical context of popular music today.’ (Morris 2014, p. 4)

Analysis of the work itself must also dialectically engage with and antagonisethe world outside. It is in this spirit that I trace tensions played out between opposi-tions immanent in the individual songs, albums and recurring themes of ModestMouse, finding either resonance or productive dissonance with cultural readings.

430 Kenneth Smith



My hope is that, rather than point the way forward, my particular ‘one off’ approachmay allow others to reappropriate, reinvent, reconceptualise analytical technologiesfor releasing the philosophical, cultural, political from the music itself, and that thesetechnologies should fully complement (or contradict in the spirit of dialectical neg-ation) rather than replace other, more culturally oriented approaches that can yieldentirely different readings.

First, I explore Brock’s earliest recordings – some averaging only 30 seconds –that become narrativised critiques of formal structure, that harbour themes of socialdifference and otherness. Second, after examining Modest Mouse’s ‘road music’,I consider these fragments as traumatic reactions to the suburbanisation ofAmerican landscapes, played out through innovative formal constructs. Givingvoice to these forms, I adopt Cone’s graphical techniques, employing also his theoriesof stratification, interlock and synthesis (this latter being a problematised category).Third, following Adorno’s work on Mahler, I find in Modest Mouse a recurringDurchbruch (‘breakthrough’) by which a repressed piece of ‘the real’ breaks throughthe ego’s constituent barriers; ruptures in formal construction often become peripet-eia that disrupt and critique to produce new forms. Fourth, I consider the band’s big-gest commercial success, Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004), whose hitsingle ‘Float On’ is a pathologically optimistic message of ‘fetishitic disavowal’;5 itssuccess based on the public’s ignorance of its self-critical subtext. The ironies atplay, and the brutal theatrical staging of trauma beneath these songs, render the per-fect negative dialectic. But a pseudo-positive dialectic is enacted in a song that I ana-lyse in significant depth: ‘March into the Sea’, from We Were Dead Before the Ship EvenSank (2007), Brock’s magnificent denial of the suburbs and coastal erosion. This songcomes closest to a Hegelian dialectic, and yet its abrupt termination at the verymoment of synthesis nihilistically sabotages a false reconciliation that threatened tothrow us into a sea of unbounded, uncritical, positive ‘pseudo-individualisation’(Adorno 2002, p. 445). Modest Mouse, like Adorno, are not so frivolous.

The split subject (or Sad Sappy Sucker), suburbanised shopping that‘sparkles, shimmers and shines’

Raised in communes until he settled into a trailer park in Issaquah, Washington at theage of 11, Isaac Brock made his earliest recordings at home, released as the album SadSappy Sucker (2001): pure lo-fi bricolage, fragments of which are simply sketches insong. Two underlying themes emerge from this collection of aphoristic gems: (1) aninability to connect opposites, and (2) an immediate sense of travel and driving.Disconnectedness is our first experience in ‘Worms vs Birds’, but ‘Classy PlasticLumber’ equally offers no bridge between the 37 seconds of ultra-lo-fi monodicmumbling of ‘ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba’ (culminating in the line ‘You’ve got a voice so talkto yourself’) and the jubilant, fully orchestrated, strophic pop-anthem that follows.

The next song on Sad Sappy Sucker is even more negative in its dialectics of(mis-)communication: ‘From Point A to Point B’ similarly has two simple halves.The first is a power-chord driven, riff-based strophe that accompanies Brock’s inabil-ity to move out of the circularity of concepts, as he performs their inability to fix withobjects. As Adorno (2008a, p. 7) reminds us, ‘the concept enters into contradictionwith the thing to which it refers’, and Brock sings of being ‘so lonely but neveralone’6 and ‘I’m at my house, but I wish that I was at home’ – each instance actively




creating a self-critiquing gulf between two near-synonyms. Whether or not the secondhalf of the song represents ‘Point B’, it is certainly the diametric opposite of the firsthalf: a funereal adagio, interrupted by an ad libitum bandoneón playing independentlyfrom Brock’s lethargic double-tracked, barely synchronised drawl of ‘only you knowhow’, with further laments about ‘working on the railroad’ – an elegy to his inabilityto connect Point A with Point B. This railway metaphor opens up references to thesprawling urbanisation of Brock’s beloved landscape. However, we are told that nopoints exist between A and B, justifying the cyclical nature of the mesmeric chord pro-gression of Point A, and the drone of Point B – a road stretching nowhere.

Yet other Modest Mouse songs resist both teleological and fragmented narra-tive forms, usually celebrating the ‘drifting’ escapism of life on the road. For me,these ‘road songs’, while not the most formally inspired, lie at the heart of theband’s oeuvre. Long-winded and meandering, the interest of these songs lies intheir complex chugging grooves, rather than their teleology.7 Despite formal aimless-ness (what Goldsher [2006, p. 66] calls ‘aimless instrumental drifting’), Brock contex-tualises these songs as self-performing negations (see also ‘The Fruit that Ate Itself’,or the joke that laughs at itself in ‘Steam Engenius’). ‘Interstate 8’ from Interstate 8(1996) sets the scene: ‘I’m driving ‘round here like a figure 8; I’m going nowherebut I’m guaranteed to be late.’ Strophic, but only subtly so, its angrier chorus barelyinterrupts the monotonous (although distinctively novel) groove (see Example 1).The line, ‘I drove around for hours / I drove around for days / I drove around formonths and years and never went no place’, is hardly inspiring; nor is the rap-likemelody that merely circles the pitch ‘axially’ (Meyer 1973, pp. 183–91; Moore 2012,p. 97); nor are the rhythm guitarist’s chugging palm-mutes. But the words andmusic fully reflect each other as in the 1996 single, ‘A Life of Arctic Sounds’,which parodies itself with the ludicrously tedious lyric:

100 miles is a long drive inside a car200 miles is a long drive inside a car300 miles is a long drive inside a car[. . .]900 miles is a long, long, long, long ways in a car1000 miles is a long drive inside a car

Example 1. ‘Interstate 8’ from Interstate 8.

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The ‘narrative’ ends with comic appeal: ‘1100 miles is too far inside a car’.8Self-reflexive negation is terminal.9 These songs are distilled moments, with onlyoccasional jolts to the simplistic surface. Fragments as minimal as the 30-secondphone messages of Sad Sappy Sucker expand to 12 minutes in Interstate 8 withoutobvious development, but in the broader context of Modest Mouse’s oeuvre theyare a springboard for the band to say what they really want to say.10

Brock seems to trap himself in a double-bind in which the road symbolises theescape from the suburbs, but according to recent urban geographers, construction ofthe interstate highway in the 1940s was the main catalyst for the suburbanisation thatso offended the band. The road is Modest Mouse’s home but it leaves behind the‘Frankenstein’ suburb it created;11 the subject and object become inverted. Tensionis inherent within the object itself, but changes place with the subject outside.Their obsession with the interstate highway partly explains the elasticated sense oftime in the road songs: because of flexibility and denial of public transport timeta-bles, highways ‘constrain the “users” of cars to live their lives in particular spatiallystretched and time-compressed ways’ (Sheller and Urry 2000, p. 744). Brock soonbecame quite specific about the embodiment of both road-time and suburb-time inhis more developed music on both This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing toThink About (1996) and The Lonesome Crowded West.

If it was not obvious from Brock’s lyrics of the late 1990s, a 2012 Pitchfork docu-mentary on Lonesome Crowded West proved the entire band to be virulently opposedto the urban sprawl that was strangling the life out of their beloved country. The pav-ing of the American landscape that led to the erection of shopping malls (Jackson1987) particularly offended Brock, who describes Issaquah as being ‘mall-fucked. . . Front row seat to watching forests disappear and the urban sprawl begin’(Pitchfork 2013). Drummer Jeremiah Green similarly recalls, ‘I lived in the middleof a shopping mall basically with my mom and my brother’ (Pitchfork 2013).Brock sardonically calls for moderation: ‘I like buying shit, but when it gets to thepoint when you’re crippling and fucking up this amazing chunk of property thatwe’re living in – I mean, it’s a nice property; rent should be higher’ (Goldsher2006, p. 74).

As monuments to capitalism, shopping malls have featured in many of Brock’ssongs; two in particular, ‘Novocain Stain’ and ‘Classy Plastic Lumber’ from This Is aLong Drive, overtly bemoan suburbanisation, a complaint with even deeper signifi-cance for the songs’ formal construction. ‘Novocain Stain’ is a triptych, similar to‘Classy Plastic Lumber’ in its drift from monodic rambling to anthemic jubilance,but a synthetic transitional stage now bridges the polarities with careful channellingof energy towards the third section. With a reflective vocal monody, accompanied byclean, sparse power chords and subtle tom-toms, Brock wistfully tries to recollect theland before media corruption and urban sprawl: ‘If I can work out how it was before,then I’ll tell you.’ The entrance of the drums and bass signals the shift to section Bwith a key change from D to G major. Brock now leaves the symbolic order,attempting to regain his memory by appealing only to physical senses: ‘Rememberthrough sounds; Remember through smells; Remember through colours.Remember through towns.’ As the song becomes euphoric, some awkwardly directlyrics break through: ‘Interchange causes a mall, and crowded chain rest’rants. Morehousing developments go up, named after the things they replace. So welcome tominnow brook, and welcome to shady space. No I don’t like this change of pace.’Ironically, the symbolic world of urban construction (names of spaces) is the key




to remembering the destroyed natural environment, creating another negativedouble-bind.

The jubilant melody of ‘Novocain Stain’ is ‘parodied’ in a song released the fol-lowing year, ‘Sunspots in the House of the Late Scapegoat’ (1997) – a song thatGoldsher (2006, p. 67) calls ‘a throwaway muse on one of Isaac’s favourite subjects,the mallisation of the Northeast and/or America’. It similarly loops a G major guitarriff, while Brock lists his woes, sharing ‘Novocain Stain’s’ ‘verbal space’ (Griffiths1992) (see Example 2). Here, the teleology missing from the road songs is builtinto the lyrics, with an anaphora that could have opened a Dickens novel:

It was on the rotating eyes; It was all on the same postcard;It was all on the same damn shirt, said to sleep in the same Sear’s camp house;It was all in the great state parks; It was all on the same Greyhound.

Only at the anaphora’s end does Brock reveal the definition of ‘It’. Typically, the rootof this section of intensified rhetoric is a crude shopping mall: ‘It was all so manymiles beneath the dirty brown dirt, twenty miles down the islands: the biggestmall on earth.’ But the unusual aspect of ‘Novocain Stain’ is that a trite form of rap-turous music repeats the classic Modest Mouse ‘lament bass’ (which Goldsher [2006]terms IDP – ‘Isaac’s Drop Progression’) now an upbeat passacaglia with improvisedguitar solo (Goldsher’s ‘wankage’) for almost three minutes, without any particulartelos – it becomes a road song.12

Both the words and music may be hackneyed and unsophisticated in construc-tion, but their simplicities are different and their contradictory relationship invitesdeep introspection. Simplicity in Modest Mouse is always itself drawn into an antag-onism with a complex framing. Why jubilant music to accompany the lamentation ofurban sprawl? Why a joyous anthem when Brock explicitly objects to the tempochange? Does the music then represent past wholeness? Or is this the eternal repeti-tion of the clichéd Freudian ‘death drive’ (where the mind gets stuck in a groove,focusing on negative thoughts in a futile attempt to synthesise them)? Is this thenanother Freud–Adorno correspondence?13 Is the euphoria the contentment of a‘pseudo-individualised’ public duped by capitalism, a joy that the lyrics scorn?The negative dialectic here is that the blocks of musical negativity and the wordsdo not coincide in any conclusive way; they antagonise rather than synthesise. Anactively synthesising listening subject is driven into a corner without any hope ofmediated truth.

A more subtle problem is posed in ‘Beachside Property’: a song about coastalerosion on one level, it becomes an indictment of moral erosion on another – the

Example 2. Comparison of verbal space of ‘Novocain Stain’ and ‘House of the Late Scapegoat’.

434 Kenneth Smith



ocean starts to swallow the towns because the earth is tired of mistreatment undercapitalism – but with mixed messages that resist easy interpretation. The song’sform follows the words closely, and inherits its ambiguous dialectic, with three stark-ly disjointed sections (see Figure 1).

1. Bars 1–44: a two-bar riff alternating E♭ with B♭ chords, bound by a descending pattern (seeExample 3).

2. Bars 45–85: a bass-driven sequence of ambiguous G major/E minor tonality, whose initialEm7 bass riff clashes with the preceding E♭ pattern, marking a new beginning. This coin-cides with the drift of the coastal erosion from the particular (the beach) to more generalphysical erosion (‘I got wood legs and bow legs and no legs at all . . . I got poor eyesand sore eyes and no eyes at all’).

3. Bars 97–198, the gently rockingmise en scène, the focal point: begins in C major, punctuated onits repeat by heavy guitar and meandering pentatonic guitar improvisation. This fizzles out.

Only Brock’s unassailable rage connects the disparate sections; his menacing roar onthe first beat of each is always either explicitly vocal or carefully woven into the instru-mental fabric. In section A, gigantic screams enunciate ‘wow’, ‘town’, ‘ground’ and‘plan’. Brock loosely hits the upper fifth of this E♭ triad here, but interrupts themore lyrical section B twice with shouts of ‘damn’. In turn this is replaced by adistorted guitar proxy, the rage introjecting from verbal to non-verbal. Section Cframes themis-en-scène – the words pinned on the forehead of God, ‘signed and sealedby the saints who sang this song’ – that is projected purposefully through a risingwhole-tone triadic progression, remembering Ringo’s introduction as ‘Billy Shears’leading into ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ (C-D-E in Sgt. Pepper; F-G-A here).

Emerging from the expectant hush, the song-within-a-song celebrates objectsthat cause their own destruction. The idea is Adornian and dialectical, of course,his object containing already its antithesis, its own undoing. ‘We’re going unionlike they say. We’ll buy the congregation then one day you’ll find us sitting inyour chair with big ideas of stocks and shares.’ The message is alien to God (pinnedto his forehead and sealed) but contains warning of God’s own destruction throughhis creation of capitalism. In section C, rage is twofold. First, the guitar’s stackedfourths are non-desiring, non-teleological, with Hendrixesque ‘bite’, reminiscent of‘Foxy Lady’ in rhythmic articulation (see Example 4, bar 2). Second, guitar pitch-bends follow the melodic line but distort the frequency at metrically equivalentmoments to the earlier shouts. The guitar thus translates Brock’s trademark double-track with ‘Pavementesque’ wobbly intonation. Pitch-bending increases dramatically

Figure 1. Plan of ‘Beach Side Property’

Example 3. Riff from ‘Beach Side Property’ from Long Drive.




upon repeat, utterly destabilising the whole scenario. The familiar is defamiliarised;the song has undone itself – classic symptoms of the Adornian dialectic.

A particular technology is needed to help us scrutinise such unique song forms,one both microscopic and telescopic, to highlight the disjunctures at all levels of songconstruction. My solution reincarnates Cone’s stratification analysis whose method-ology, developed to understand better Stravinsky’s kaleidoscopic formal juxtaposi-tions, has maintained influence upon music theory up to the recent ‘orderedsuccession’ of Gretchen Horlacher (2001, 2011).14 Cone claims that ‘Stravinsky’s tex-tures have been subject to sudden breaks affecting almost every musical dimension:instrumental and registral, rhythmic and dynamic, harmonic and modal, linear andmotivic’ (Cone 1962, p. 18). Theorising these contrasting units as interacting ‘strata’,he describes three primary processes: stratification (violent contrasts between units),interlock (the ‘horizontal counterpoint’ created by the development or extension ofinterpolated strata, producing an effect akin to cinematic montage) and synthesis(as strata merge together, typically in phrase liquidation). He replicates the variousbridges (the connections between strata) and divergences (when a single stratumdiverges), on his graphs in this example from Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Theconnector between strata A and B demonstrates that, notwithstanding the radicallyaltered harmony, texture, and instrumentation, the bass’ f/b♭ pedal remains, andbridges the strata (effecting ‘gentler stratification’: Cone 1962, p. 20) (see Figure 2).

Example 4. ‘Biting’ Guitar Chords from ‘Beach Side Property’.

Figure 2. Edward’s Cone’s stratification graph of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Coneindicates Bridges (the connections between strata) [1] and Divergences (when a single stratum diverges)[9] with dashed lines.

436 Kenneth Smith



Now, adapting Cone’s technology to suit one of Modest Mouse’s most disrup-tive structures, we can model ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’ from Lonesome CrowdedWest. Alan Goldsher (2006, p. 73) dubs the song ‘a lo-fi symphony in three or how-ever many movements’, and Brock himself claimed, ‘I’m a lot more satisfied whenit’s got a few different songs in the same song. Let’s say “Teeth Like God’sShoeshine” for instance – it goes from one thing into the other and whatnot, but itkind of flows into them, I think’ (Goldsher 2006, p. 72). The 6‘53” chain of fragments(A, B, C, C1, D) eventually settles to alternate two particular segments: C and D. Aprovisional chart labels the areas chronologically (with time moving from left toright; see Figure 3): strata A and D here share heavy-rock rage with distorted thrash-ing, hard drumming, and the band’s most ‘metalised’ vocals. The vocal rhythmicinflections of area D imitate those of C1 though, and to model these connections,my new graph (Figure 4) reforms the strata outlined above, with bounded boxes con-taining notation, words and pictures (the emoticons describe Brock’s vocals; they willsoon be replaced with more precise technology). Connections between discrete ele-ments can now be rendered with some precision (which is lost in Cone’s versionof Stravinsky, whose complexities are often reduced to a single sonority).

Stratum A is fairly heavy: an aggressive guitar riff opens with a dissonant sev-enth; the stepwise bass moves upwards (f♯-g-a); a parlando melody draws from adescending f♯-e-d-c♯ collection. An exchange of harmonic fourths abruptly, but tem-porarily, arrests development; I call this wedge A1 because it is tightly nestledbetween presentations of A. The second stanza is graphically represented by the rect-angle with a serrated edge to indicate that the section is broadly speaking a repeat.However, the guitar harmonics are now subject to pitch-bending (with tremolo-arm)throughout. This addition reduplicates precisely Cone’s ‘interlock’: the ‘horizontalcounterpoint’ that brings a ‘synthesis’ of A and A1. Stratum B uses a clean channel;sevenths dissonantly unite melody with bass; the same bass-line is augmented, asshown by the connecting bridge; the vocals are now calm; the fourths (a/e) at the mel-ody’s ending bridge the guitar’s former fourth harmonics. Out of the haze appearsstratum C, now in a lullabyesque 6/8. The bass now descends b-a-g (an inversionof the former f♯-g-a rise); the pitch-bends and harmonics refer to A1 (these harmonicsand fourths occur towards the ends of sections, and usually act as an intensification

Figure 3. Stratification outline of ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’ from The Lonesome Crowded West.




device, such as the raging harmonic/tremolo riffs at the piece’s close, as shown by thelong dashed line). This morphs into C1, and this anthemic section (which equallyrevels in sevenths and ninths) merges in turn into stratum D, with distorted guitars.While Brock borrows the melody from C1 initially, the heavy guitars unite with themelody of stratum A in their f♯-e-d-c♯ descent. Thus the paradigms A and D not onlyshare the same heavy rage, but also the vocal skeleton, passed from stratum A’s mel-ody to the heavy guitar octave riff.

The ‘emotions’ in Brock’s voice(s) begin with rage in stratum A, a kind of sup-pressed passive-aggression in B and C, while sections D and C register the progres-sion from one to the other. From this graph we can see that Modest Mouse digressmore readily than they synthesise: A becomes B, becomes C, becomes D. C mergesinto D by becoming C1: a stream of consciousness perhaps, or Brock’s ‘flowingfrom one into the other’. Towards the song’s terminus, however, C and D arereprised in interlocking alternation as total contrasts, with their connecting link(C1) removed. Stratum C reaches a natural cadence before a reprise of D violentlyerupts, lasting for two further minutes: the song ends with a resistance towards syn-thesis. In fact Modest Mouse’s chain of largely dissimilar elements generally eschewsany synthetic procedure, and the connections found through ex post facto analysis,powerfully generative though they may be, are certainly less ‘on display’ than themore ostentatiously performing kaleidoscopic differences that mark the failure ofthe synthesis stage – a negative dialectic.

The lyrics may comprise broken images, but Brock reveals some clues to thesong’s ‘meaning’. The most obvious theme from the outset is his claustrophobia ashe traps himself between ‘the top of the ocean’ and ‘the bottom of the sky’:‘Goddamn, well I get claustrophobic, Goddamn.’ But the main clue to the song’sideology are the lines:

Figure 4. Stratification graph of ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’ from The Lonesome Crowded West.

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Here’s the man with the teeth like God’s shoeshine, he sparkles, shimmers, shines.Let’s all have another Orange Julius – thick syrup, standing in line.The malls are the soon to be ghost towns;So long, farewell, Goodbye.

Brock’s hatred of ‘the man’ and ‘the malls’ – synecdochical of consumer culture, as isOrange Julius (a particularly sugary drink served in malls) – comes across with hispassive-aggressive vocal tone as well as the gravitas of growing instrumental inten-sity in C1’s debut. The relaxation in its second appearance has an opposite effect,however. The accumulation of energy had offered hope of synthesis between theraged voice-guitar and the sensibilities of the calm and clean guitar – between theindividual free subject and his regulated place within capitalist society. However,we soon become resigned to the fragmented sentiments of the lyrics and the dis-jointed music, leading to pure rage at the failed dialectic in section D, without theguiding force of the voice. The dialectic may be a negative one but at least it flagsup the correspondences between ‘the music’ and ‘the society’ that it is putatively rail-ing against. Like Adorno’s negative dialectics, the process and result (which aresynonymous) are worth the effort.

Durchbruch from Outer Space

Apropos of the band’s formal structures, one of Adorno’s most fertile notions is that ofDurchbruch, emerging from his study of Gustav Mahler. Translated as ‘breakthrough’,Adorno describes a passage in the scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony as a violent‘influx of reality’ (Adorno 1992, p. 10); Michael Spitzer draws attention to the visceralfollow up, ‘of blood’ (Spitzer 2006, pp. 21). Although doubtless an opportunistic open-ing gambit, we might well use the simplistic song from This Is a Long Drive, entitled sim-ply ‘Breakthrough’, which opens with nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll:

I got one, two, three, four, five, six, six, six, running round the neighbourhood pejorative ‘jinx’.I said, ‘the groom’s down on me ‘cause he ate the rice’; it was well intentioned but bad advice.Hell yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The guitar accompaniment is a simple, palm-muted, power-chord riff, and on theinjunction ‘Let it breakthrough’ there is a forceful influx of Pixiesesque loudness(see Example 5). Of course, this breakthrough is obviously cruder than Mahler’s

Example 5. ‘Breakthrough’ from Long Drive.




carefully constructed eruptions, which for Adorno occur mainly at the climacticpoints of the First and Fifth Symphonies (Adorno 1992, p. 41). Interestingly,Adorno also cites the finale of the First, whose brass chorale ruptures the sonataform: ‘the fanfare of the breakthrough takes on the musical form of a chorale, nolonger as alien territory but as thematically mediated to the whole’ (Adorno 1992,p. 11), but James Buhler (1996) finds two ‘interlocking’ sonata forms here: there isthe sonata-form proper in F minor vs. the D major ‘breakthrough’ with its ownsonata-form agenda. Buhler’s analysis intersects our reading of Modest Mouse intwo ways. First, it shows that reality’s breakthrough is not necessarily a purely vis-ceral one (i.e. of blood), but is fully symbolic (a brass chorale engages extroversivemeanings and contains its own carefully regulated form). Adorno drew on Freud’snotion of hysteria and ‘the return of the repressed’, where a moment of hidden realitypermeates the symbolic construction of day-to-day existence, but this reality itself isalways condemned to symbolic articulation. We become a paradox that Lacan calls a‘split subject’ – split between the Real and its Symbolic articulation. Modest Mouse’sbreakthrough may well enact this, their paradox being that the Durchbruch is a fullyconstituted song rather than a shocking, sublime Augenblick. The song insists that wereturn to basic sensory experience: ‘open the curtains and let in some atmosphere.’Upon this command, the band become more focused and attempt to break througheven the initial level of reality into some deeper form of reality, as verse after verse(Figure 5 strata A/A1), and chorus after chorus (stratum B) become more intense (thecontrapuntal interlock denoted by arrows). The intensification process found byexamining stratification and interlock elevates the form to something suppler thana simple verse-chorus alternation. Second, that breakthrough presents a persistentantagonism to an otherwise teleologically narrativised form, and acts dialecticallyto critique that form from beneath.

According to Buhler, Mahler offers no solution to the problem, refusing to drawantinomies into reconciliation. So too do Modest Mouse. After the A section, the A1reinvention (bars 25–40) uses full drum kit and heavy guitars as if the breakthrough‘chorus’ (B) has now flooded the ‘verse’ (A). B itself is palm-muted like A with thesame power-chord progression (b� a� d� g that runs throughout the song).On the second chorus, guitar improvisations complete what the vocals temporarilyleave unfinished. This significant gesture affirms that the breakthrough is lessabout the vocals that say ‘breakthrough’ than the guitar that does break through.The third chorus clinches this, when the voice disappears altogether and leads to aguitar solo that extends the accompanimental patterns by small increments into aminimalist solo. Modest Mouse give us the fundamentally Lacanian message thatlanguage castrates us, and that the dream of the breakthrough is to return to theplace before linguistic pollution (as in ‘a language is the liquid that we’re all dis-solved in; good for solving problems, after it creates a problem’ from ‘Blame It onthe Tetons’).15 The particular guitar melody that crystallises this semi-improvised(pentatonic) pattern will serve 10 years later as the ‘breakthrough’ outro of

Figure 5. Stratification outline of ‘Breakthrough’ from Long Drive.

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‘Parting of the Sensory’ (We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, 2007). After thesong’s lyrical tone has failed to persuade, the folk violin supports a new vocalDurchbruch with words of harsh reality: ‘someday you will die somehow and some-thing’s gonna steal your carbon.’ This, if not the Lacanian real itself, issues a starkreminder of it (see Figure 5). And yet the message of ‘Breakthrough’ is that, oncewe have invited this influx of the real, the signifier is forever changed; the subjectis forever split.

Casting our gaze slightly adrift, we might focus on The Moon and Antarctica(2001), Modest Mouse’s 20th-century answer to Schubert’s Winterreise, the ‘conceptalbum’ (Thompsen 2000) of the alienated individual searching for a home in the uni-verse, setting out on a journey away from ‘this cold, cold part of the world’. The pro-tagonist of ‘Different City’, like that of Schubert’s ‘Rückblick’, is desperate to leavetown and looks back only through fantasy: ‘I want to live in a different city, withno friends or family; I want to look out the window of my colour TV.’ He wantseveryday reality to remain outside, allowing the actual material real to erupt within,and is prepared to indulge in fantasy until it does. The diagram in Figure 6 shows thesong’s three divergences. Its whole structure repeats verbatim, intensified only bydistorted guitar power-chord tremolandi that force their way through the upper tex-ture to close on a tritone (g♯/d). The relatively simple song brings two points home:(1) Brock’s array of voices needs integrating into our analysis, and (2) outer space andthe unknown are now the album’s principal ‘breakthroughs’, making ModestMouse’s ruptures characteristic and stylistic – if perhaps more commercialised – atthe turn of the millennium.

Recent research on the human voice is broad in scope (Žižek & Dolar 2002;Lacasse 2010; Jarman-Ivens 2011; Zuccarini 2014), and particularly relevant isSteven Rings’work on Bob Dylan (Rings 2013a, 2013b), a singer who famously devel-oped a range of voices throughout his career, and whose ‘real’ voice is found some-where in a ‘dialectic of vocal identity’ (Rings 2013b) between personae. Brock hasalways employed different voices, often simultaneously in the stereo-field throughdouble-tracking (or doubling).16 Figure 4’s emoticons served the relatively

Figure 6. Stratification graph of ‘Different City’ from The Moon & Antarctica.




uncontentious voices that followed the sentiment of the text of ‘Teeth Like God’sShoeshine’, but it is tricky to justify the inclusion of simplistic emotions on anyempirical level, especially with the complex emotions that Moon and Antarctica(2001) invokes. A relatively neutral classification scheme would be the simple alpha-betisation by voice-type, as in Figure 7.

A primitive vocal ‘soundbox’ registers the three voices that simultaneously fillthe stereo field of strata B and C in ‘Different City’.17 These are graphically positionedfrom the left channel to the right in black boxes below the relevant stratum. In area B,voice c (thrice duplicated) is lazily synchronised, with reverb in the higher register(left and right) to create delay. Fully commensurate with the guitar effects through-out the album, this presents an acoustic analogy to the lonely, paranoid planet (‘thethird planet is sure they’re being watched, by an eye in the sky that can’t be stopped’)

Figure 7. Legend of alphabetised voice-types of Isaac Brock.

Figure 8. Stratification graph of ‘3rd Planet’ from The Moon & Antarctica.

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with imagined voices and awe at the vastness of space (hence the album’s lavishreverbs). These voices are relatively similar. However, shouts burst through the‘cracks in the walls’ (right speaker: voice a) whenever the lyrics articulate the noth-ingness that enters his sealed world (‘Someone smart said nothing at all’; ‘Theygave me a receipt that said I didn’t buy nothing’; ‘talking out of his pants’). Thesong ends abruptly, revealing a snapshot of the outside world much like the holepunched through the wall in Stravinsky’s Petrushka that invited an influx of banalstreet sounds. We hear a recorded military cadence of ‘I don’t know but I’ve beentold, you’ll never die and you’ll never grow old’ – a critique of a militant religionthat lies outside.

This distorted recording-of-recording contrasts the intimately visceral sounds ofthe guitar throughout, whose touch of modulation and overdrive are probably pro-duced by some sort of vibe pedal that also adds chorus with slight phase.18 The effectis similar to that created by the Manic Street Preachers at their most nihilistically real-istic in The Holy Bible, particularly in ‘Of Walking Abortion’, ‘4st 7lb’, ‘ifwhiteamer-icatoldthetruthforadayitsworldwouldfallapart’ or ‘Archives of Pain’.19 The vocalshere mimic this ‘real’ guitar sound, copying its riff. But a new intrusion occurs;space suddenly expands; the guitar riff stops; the tempo decreases from the fevered150 to 140 bpm; quavers yield semibreves; a softly muted rhythm guitar prevails.Listeners familiar with Debussy’s Jeux may here recall the flexing of time andspace that Jann Pasler (2004) heard from a Bergsonian–Deleuzian perspective. Asfar as Modest Mouse are concerned, however, the expansion/contraction of spaceand time appeared much earlier in the closing song of Long Drive, ‘Space Travel IsBoring’. The drastic changes in all parameters in bar 5 of this song give the sensationof a space rocket leaving the atmosphere (replete with screams from a ‘cannedcrowd’). In Deleuzian terms, we take a ‘line of flight’ by leaving behind the ‘striatedspace’ of everyday life, to opt for a ‘smooth space’20 where we form new, ‘nomadic’relationships with surrounding processes (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). In earlieralbums this relationship may have mapped onto the American plains as ‘smoothspace’ vs. the suburb as ‘striated’; the rapid alternation of loud and soft is crystallisedin Moon and Antarctica, but with more subtle tweaks to musical ‘space-time’(see Example 6). One such example is the opening track, ‘3rd Planet’ (Figure 8).A rich tapestry of beautifully crafted guitar reverb gently eases in the drum kitand vocals (‘Everything that keeps me together is falling apart; I got this thing thatI consider my only art, it’s . . .’) but abruptly halts to near silence (on the words‘. . . fucking people over’). After several attempts to match this antecedent with a con-sequent phrase, a treble-heavy guitar sharply strikes jangling chords, producing ameta-interlock of stratified blocks. These razor-sharp stabbing guitar chords laterannounce another song, ‘Life Like Weeds’. In bar 3 of ‘Life Like Weeds’, the bandsuddenly breaks out into smooth space (see Figure 9). Obviously the repeated, stut-tering, guitar-driven antecedent represents the tangle of weeds, and the more pro-foundly relaxed consequent becomes an emotional release (‘In this life like weedsyou’re just a rock to me’). This ‘space-time’ music develops through the song, grow-ing into a new riff that in time leads to the reverberated descending line so charac-teristic of the album that Michael Spitzer likens to a baroque lament bass in ‘DarkCenter of the Universe’ (Spitzer 2013). This lament bass, turned melody, becomesthe song’s anthem (see Example 7).

However, although the album tells the story of wrestling antinomies (themacrocosm vs. the microcosm; the individual’s freedom beneath the controlling




eye [qua Lacanian gaze]; religion vs. spirituality; city vs. the road) it does not positanything as truth until its final line is screamed at full pelt: ‘the only thing you taughtme about human beings was this: they ain’t made of nothing but water and shit.’Paradoxically this utterly nihilistic climax is Modest Mouse’s positive outcome.

Continuing the loose Winterreise comparison, we remember the mysteriousbarrel-organ of ‘Der Leiermann’, the song from another plane of existence, anotherman’s story: Death’s. ‘What People Are Made Of’ likewise stands apart from thework’s ‘concept’. It follows the conceptual construct of Sgt. Pepper, whose ‘A Dayin the Life’ follows the opening number’s reprise (see Moore 2012, pp. 143–4).Moon and Antarctica’s emotional nadir is its penultimate ‘Life Like Weeds’; thefinal song’s heavy thrashing begins with incidental studio banter, sending us outside

Figure 9. Stratification graph of ‘Life Like Weeds’ from The Moon & Antarctica.

Example 6. ‘Space Travel is Boring’ from Long Drive.

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the concept. The song then hammers out its top-speed two-minute message. Like‘Der Leiermann’ it undermines the aesthetic crafting of every other song with the bla-tant banality of its Affekt, creating a false conclusion with universalising soundbites,but making no attempt to synthesise antinomies except through ‘death’ (their onlytrue positive). And in ending thus, rather than synthesising, Modest Mouse, likeSchubert, found an alternative route through the antinomic deadlock: give up.

The full soundbox posits this as the album’s final breakthrough; its biggest dis-junctive intrusion, compressed into the final moments. After the penultimate song’sdelicate contrasts, ‘What People Are Made Of’ is a colossal eruption of raw sound;the violent influx of voice c, combined with extremely visceral imagery, is the realbreakthrough. Its images remind us of our brutal materiality: ‘on the first page ofthe book of blue you read, “if you read this page then that’ll be your death.” Butby then it was too late and you wound up on an island of shells and bones that bod-ies had left.’ In this, the final stanza, the symbolic is underwritten by an appeal to thereal, stripping back texturally and timbrally. We now have a cleaner (but still pro-cessed and slightly distorted) voice a, accompanied by a more prominent bass thatsuddenly contains the same kind of deep, ‘fat’ sound as ‘Different City’ with similarphasing distortion affect. The album’s final summation (‘The one thing you taughtme about human beings was this: . . .’) leads to the highly pressurised shout of theformer voice c (‘They ain’t made of nothing but water and shit’). This line and itsintrusive distorted guitar effects mark this moment as the most impressive stratifiedshift of the album’s sound-world. The song also bleeds perfectly into the subject ofthe next album, which begins by musing upon the nature of floating, in dialectically

Example 7. ‘Life Like Weeds’ from The Moon & Antarctica.




positive and negative ways, declaring ‘At the battle at the bottom of the ocean wellthe dead do rise. You want proof? I got proof, on the surface you can watch’ em floatby.’ The proof Brock offers is nothing less than the ‘real’ that has been eruptingthroughout this album and becomes the focused subject of introspection in thenext. We broke open a critique of consumer culture and urban environment in theprevious album; we burnt society into ‘tiny cities made of ashes’ in this one thatnegotiated our position in space and time, smooth and striated space; and the nextalbum returns us to the dialectical starting point – the liminal boundary betweenthe sea and sky from the opening lines of ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’.

Positivity deconstructed? A truly negative indictment: Good News/BadNews?

‘Float On’ was Modest Mouse’s biggest hit: its jangling guitar defied any suggestionthat Brock couldn’t write a hook. He excused his burst of optimism thus:

It was a completely conscious thing. I was just kind of fed up with how bad shit had beengoing, and how dark everything was, with bad news coming from everywhere. Ourpresident is just a fucking daily dose of bad news! Then you’ve got the well-intentionedscientists telling us that everything is fucked. I just want to feel good for a day. I’d hadsome friends die, and with Jeremy [Green, drummer] kind of losing it . . . After we got outof that dark spot with everything melting down with the band, I just wanted to make apositive record. (Modell 2004)

This partly explains the deconstructive title, Good News for People Who Love Bad News(2004); but beneath the album’s beguilingly optimistic façade of communal euphorialies Lacan’s ‘real’ with images of death, sewage and decay. By way of example wecould select the double-edged theme of ‘drifting’. In the first song, ‘The World atLarge’, the protagonist is a drifter, resigned to whatever life throws at him (‘Iceage, heat wave, can’t complain’). Obvious compositional techniques replicate thissentiment: (1) the ground bass cycle; (2) the repetitive rising anapest accent (ᴗᴗ–but not always obvious from the score) so characteristic of Modest Mouse;21 (3)the musically indiscriminate itemisation of the lyric’s positives and negatives, show-ing acceptance of fate (see Example 8). The remarkable segue into ‘Float On’ reinter-prets the same chord progression as an upbeat, pop classic. ‘Float On’ was conceivedduring a session in which the band ‘as a joke . . . did a funny, dance-orientated ver-sion’ of ‘The World at Large’ (Goldsher 2006, p. 167). The negative dialectics at playhere should be fairly self-explanatory (see Example 9).

But after this ode to the mindlessly optimistic comes an elegy for the hopelesslypessimistic in ‘The Ocean Breathes Salty’, the unaccompanied hookline becoming a

Example 8. ‘The World at Large’ from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.

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passage to the underworld: ‘You wasted life why wouldn’t you waste death?’ Wecross a Rubicon into the left-hand column of the graph in Figure 10 that positionseach song on the everyday positivity/negativity spectrum. We take our lead fromBrock:

Example 9. ‘Float On’ from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.

Figure 10. Graph of ‘Outlooks’ of Songs from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.




I think we managed to make a quarter of the record positive, and the rest is either kind of darkor more just relaxing into things being how they are, resigned . . . It’s got yelling songs and softsongs within the same album because it’s more dimensional that way, but they still make sensetogether.22

Figure 10 suggests that optimistic songs are always tinged with resignation, and areless common than hard-edged songs of despair. These latter are characterised by thesharply plucked banjo, the minor key, and the aggressive voice types. The lyrics pos-ition Brock as the spectator/persona of death – a figure that relishes the macabre: ‘Areyou dead or are you sleeping? God I sure hope you are dead’ (‘Satin in a Coffin’).This particular song revels in the image of floating, as in Example 10. Brock’slower register (voice b) affords him a sinister, sneering, Mephistophelian persona.Of course the song becomes the grotesque underbelly of ‘Float On’; life’s driftersare just pieces of dead flotsam.

These songs radically shift all parameters, utterly disrupting the flow. Earthyassociations with the acoustic folk instrumentation (a harsh, percussive violin in add-ition to the banjo), and Brock’s fury-filled gravelly tone try to cast (through symboland association of course) an atmosphere that renders a Lacanian real, retroactivelypositing ‘Float On’ as a fantasy – something fully imaginary. And these song typesare Brock’s antinomies, elevated now to macro-level. Intra-song antagonisms becomeinter-song antagonisms. The ‘horn intro’ by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, for example,serves for ‘The World at Large’ as well as its antithesis ‘The Devil’s Work Day’ (thusconnected by the arrow on Figure 10). The two-sided image of the floater is trans-formed once more. If river flotsam puts us once again on the liminal border betweensea and sky (see ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’, or ‘The Ocean Breathes Salty’: ‘whenthe ocean met the sky’), this boundary is crossed later in the album when the symbolis vaporised as clouds. Clouds first arrive as the beautiful, lyrical optimists that point‘the way out’ at the postlude of ‘Blame It on the Tetons’ (see Example 11). Here, theline ‘they might get a little better air if they turned themselves into a cloud’ provideshope to we who are ‘all in an ocean drowning’: our despair is located beneath thewater’s surface; Brock is in the sky. The violin soars through these clouds in the high-est register (obvious word-painting), but then comes the crunch; the high registerdive-bombs in the guitar’s opening to the following song that tells us that ‘the cloudsjust hung around like Black Cadillacs outside a funeral’ (Example 12). There is now adramatic stratification shift, with distorted guitars in the key of A minor (contrastingwith the previous B minor) plodding the crotchet pulse to shouts of ‘we were done,done, done with all the fuck, fuck, fucking around; we were done with all the circ,circ, circling round.’ Something has been missed between the songs – the optimisticrhapsody to freedom becomes a grotesque rage of unrealised hope.

There is no synthesis between these elements, no mediation. The next songappears as a summary of the failed dialectic. The main line in ‘One Chance’ appearsto be the megaphoned lo-fi shout/rap of ‘I’m just a box in a cage’. This may appear tobe the positive (i.e. to posit) conclusion to the album, but I find the final line to be

Example 10. ‘Satin in a Coffin’ from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.

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more epigrammatic: ‘I’ve seen so many ships sail, and go off sinking.’Without a traceof anger in the musical backing, and with voice a (rather than the angry voice c thatclosed the previous album), the resignation here is profound. The final song, ‘TheGood Times Are Killing Me’, opens with a diegetic moment with the band warmingup with banal chatter before the song. The whole song in fact stands apart from thealbum, as a conclusion interposed from outside: eat, drink and be merry. Their dis-cussion about smoking, upon which we are invited to eavesdrop, makes the songinto a drunken celebration of the dialectical choice they decide not to take. Thesong makes clear that the band need to live between poles. As a parody ofNietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Brock is ‘Beyond Good and Bad News’.

A Positive? Marching into the Sea

On the surface, Modest Mouse’s later work presents a more positive dialectic: theyorganise a situation, like those of several songs by the Pixies, in which contrastsare placed in a dialectical framework in which A alternates with B (almost like a‘verse-chorus paradigm’ but without either A or B acting as a clear refrain; seeOsborn 2013, p. 23), but gains enough energy to expand into a moment of synthesisthat transcends the paradigm. Take, for example, the opening track from the earlierWe Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. In ‘March into the Sea’ and other songs onthis album, the sea represents freedom through death, now pitched as a ‘positive’aspect of life.23 But in ‘March into the Sea’, the lyrics repeatedly entreat a formerlover to masochistically injure the protagonist: ‘Well treat me like the fleas, like therats, the disease.’ This is full of aggression, as is the stilted bass on B minor (seeFigure 11) that bursts into a more melodic underlay to chords ii and V in D major.Area B contrasts with its easy-going lyrics, sea-shanty mannerisms in D major,with vibraphone and violin now creating a flowing counterpoint with the bass.Strand B showcases the more sugary tone of voice a against the fractious voice bof the opening. Area B runs back into Area A whose interrupting voice elides thecadence point (making the song impossible for a single singer to sing). These are

Example 11. ‘Blame It on the Tetons’ from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.

Example 12. ‘Black Cadillacs’ from Good News for People Who Love Bad News.




our dialectical antinomies, with stratum A being the aggressive minor-key rant, andstratum B being the lyrical optimistic door through which ‘we just turnedand marched into the sea’. These two, although doubtless inspired by the‘loud-soft-loud-soft’ gimmick of the Pixies or Nirvana (what in Baroque would becalled ‘terraced dynamics’), are far from the ‘verse-chorus paradigms’ (Osborn2013) of songs like ‘Where Is My Mind?’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The charactersand proportions of the typical verse-chorus paradigm are lost in this song, in favourof the intensification process: which is the verse? Which is the chorus? Both units Aand B have elements of refrain, but we would call neither a ‘chorus’.

Strands A and B are not entirely contrasting. The song opens with a seeminglyaryhthmic mechanised bandoneón,24 peeking through occasionally to emphasise itssea-shanty mannerisms. But it holds a more significant structural role. While theinnocuous bandoneón sounds like an exterior ‘object’ heard before the track begins,close listening confirms its repeated presence throughout, unchanged except whenit breaks down completely, two-thirds in. Perhaps it is like Gretchen’s spinning-wheel or Der Leiermann’s barrel-organ. Either way, as in Adorno’s NegativeDialectics, antinomies are always already present in objects themselves. Because ofthe silent first beat, the second and third quaver-beats of the triple metre arevagrants, slotting into place only as the song’s later metric template unfolds, butthe right hand of the bandoneón also never seems to know what the left is doing(this is true in Modest Mouse in general; listen to songs such as ‘Think Long’ and‘Point A to Point B’). This mismatch engages us, foregrounding the conflict of thetwo metrically contrapuntal lines. And this conflict is generative. Figure 11 showsthe many connections between strands A and B with connective lines running back-wards, always to the third strand, X: the bandoneón. We hear:

• the repeated bass pitch b that connects X with A.• the bandoneón’s upper pedal d that becomes the opening lines 3^ of B minor (‘If food needed

pleasing you’d suck all the seasoning off, suck it off!’). The twist to D major transforms thisto 1^ (‘If you think you know enough to know you know you’ve had enough . . .’), where thebandoneón peaks through to show that its pedal point slots into both dark and light keys.

• the b/d minor third in X that connects to both A and B.• the chord progression E�A that in both A and B was implied in the e� c♯ bass of X. This

now fits the chord progressions, but was dissonant to the bandoneón’s repeated D itself. Atension exists between the prison of the pitch d and the escape towards the cycle of fifths.(The same is found in ‘Gretchen’ of course).

• occasional references to the semiquaver flourish at the end of the bandoneón’s phrase. Iterupts for example in the guitar line later in A as further testament to the generativepower of X.

• a melodic bridge between B minor and D in the pentatonic scale running from d to b, onlyoccasionally stretching to C♯ to cadentially swing us to D as needed. Brock only singspitches that are common to both keys, avoiding the A♯ leading note in B minor. In factthe angst-filled B minor sections swing to chords IV and V of D rather than B, so thatthe jolly D major drinking-song should not be such a harmonic surprise.

Stratum B releases the pent-up anger of the B minor section, becoming the perfectaccompaniment to the bandoneón that now ascends to prominence in the mix. Notethe flowing counterpoint between the guitar and the bass here. The contrapuntalDurchbruch is the release of the energy that the bass attempted in stratum A. The vio-lin now enters as a rising counter-melody, but where its lyrical upwards contourshould turn towards f♯ as it closes, it becomes an avatar of the barrel-organ’s d/b

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Figure 11. Stratification graph of ‘March into the Sea’ from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.

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ostinato instead as stratum A interrupts. It thereby adds intensity to A’s return. Brockthus realises the interlocking counterpoint that Cone found in Stravinsky, thatnudges the verse-chorus symbiosis towards what Mark Spicer (2004) calls ‘cumula-tive form’. Upon A’s second return, the melodic and percussive fuse; the rise fromg to b in the melody (continuing where its original counter-melody left off) is con-tained in the violin’s passionately disjointed playing. This manoeuvre towards syn-thesis precipitates ‘the breakdown’ section, heralded also by the failing bandoneónthat can now only stutter. In the following ‘culmination’ section, the bandoneónrepeats only a new riff of e-c♯-d-c♯, while Brock carefully transforms us from thesmooth, contented voice a into the angry voice c, via voice b. All behind him fusestrands together: the bouncy bass line and voice type-a from B underpins materialfrom A; the violin continues its climactic rise from B (b-c♯-d) to realise its melodicpotential (in fact the violin is the main intensification technique, deftly shiftingguise between A and B).

This is the recipe for the perfect ‘young Hegelian’ dialectic: thesis + antithesis =synthesis, the basic formula that Eisenstein manipulated into his ‘dialectical montage’(Eisenstein 1949) – a cinematic technique that Kofi Agawu likens to Cone’s analysis ofStravinsky (Agawu 284). But note how, at the very point when the climactic waverises towards what would usually be a repeat of a jingly chorus or what BradOsborn calls a ‘terminal climax’, Brock simply shouts an unpitched ‘march on’ andthe drums announce an immediate termination. Thus the antinomies have failed tosynthesise. The only answer, according to Brock, is to learn from their differences,never allowing one to disappear into the other; after the best attempts to synthesisewe find more truth in the debris.

For me, while the fully negative dialectic is heard more precisely after close ana-lysis of the kind proposed in this article, contextualised listening can offer furtherproductive (however negative) dialectical relationships that open up new spacesfor arguments about Adorno and popular music theory. Fittingly, Brock claimedof this album that it was based on a contradiction, explaining the tattoo on hisarm: ‘It’s basically a hot air balloon with an anchor. Stasis. You’ve got two contradict-ing things going on’ (Rodriguez 2008). He even incorporated this into the albumsleeve: two objects that fulfil their function by antagonising each other – theApollo and the Dionysius. And it seems to me that, far from lapsing to the formalsafety net of ABABABA, Brock kept alive his contradictions, constantly rejuvenatingthem throughout his work, in a way that, while sometimes appearing to slide intoformal-cliché, actually provides ever new and invigorating critiques of those sameclichés, as well as the social contradictions that they both embody and work through.

Endnotes

1. Modell (2004).2. Morris rightly points out that ‘serious/popular’ do

not simply equate to ‘high art/low art’ in Adorno(Morris 2014, p. 3); thus serious low art andpopular high art are both conceivable. Morristends to use ‘mass culture music’ to describeAdorno’s ‘popular music’.

3. ‘Modest Mouse’ refers to a line in Virginia Woolf’s‘The Mark on the Wall’; the song ‘CustomConcern’ refers to Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

4. Griffiths (1999, p. 408) cites the work of RichardMiddleton, Philip Tagg, John Shepherd, PeterWicke and Dave Laing, among others.

5. (Žižek and Dolar 2002, p. 304) often refers to thisformula as ‘I know very well, but just the same. . .’. He speaks of a subject’s disavowal of (conscious)‘knowledge’ on account of (unconscious) ‘belief’.

6. Listen also to Brett Anderson’s triumphant ‘alonebut not lonely’ at the apotheosis of ‘The Two ofUS’ from Suede’s Dog Man Star.

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7. ‘Ohio’ and ‘Exit Does Not Exist’ from This is a LongDrive for Someone with Nothing to Think About areless inspired certainly than ‘Heart Cooks Brain’,‘Convenient Parking’, ‘Out of Gas’, ‘LongDistance Drunk’, ‘Shit Luck’ and ‘Trucker’sAtlas’, from Lonesome Crowded West, but theyshare a non-teleological obsession with driving.

8. For a structurally analogous comic song, see ‘TooLong Johnny’, from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Series3, Episode 4.

9. See Osborn (2013) for discussion of the ‘TerminalClimax’.

10. One may be reminded of Nietzsche’s (1968[1888], p. 7) claim that Wagner was ‘our greatestminiaturist’.

11. The Frankenstein comparison is made by Shellerand Urry (2000, p. 744).

12. See Goldsher (2006, pp. 38–9) for a discussion ofModest Mouse’s bass progressions, which charac-teristically descend by a fourth or fifth in stepwisemotion, almost as a ground-bass.

13. The discovery of the Freudian unconscious wasa major influence for Adorno. See Adorno(2008b).

14. Cone runs, for me, straight to the core of whatwould become semiotic theory in music underthe watch of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and KofiAgawu. Agawu follows Nattiez, but Nattiez wasin turn following the analytical method inNicolas Ruwet (1972). The beauty of Cone’swork, which is less visually striking in its laterincarnations of Nattiez (1982) and Agawu(2008), who twist the grids into vertical paradig-matic columns, is that a single event can straddletwo camps more obviously, and can be read left toright like a graphic score. See also Rehding (1998).

15. For Lacan, language castrates us by barring us frommeaningwhen thesignifier ‘defiles’us (Lacan1964)

16. See Moore (2013, p. 47) for a discussion of theconfusion between double-tracking and doubling.

17. For an explanation of the ‘soundbox’, seeDockwray and Moore (2010) and Moore (2012).

18. Similar effects can be recreated with ‘Univibe’ or‘Mr. Vibromatic’.

19. These songs concern intimate physical introjec-tions of pain.

20. For Deleuze, smooth space (characteristic ofsteppes, seas, deserts, ice-caps) is made up ofunique, ever-changing constellations of nomads.Striated space (characteristic of the state, cities andgovernments) is imposed upon the smooth space.

21. A similar, earlier example is ‘Jesus Christ Was anOnly Child’.

22. The Onion, interview by Josh Modell, 7 April 2004at http://www.avclub.com/article/modest-mouse-13862; ‘Building something out of nothing’, 9December 2007, interview by J.C Gabel.

23. The concept of the album seems to be a recklessdrive towards the sea, which will drown us.The car is constantly broken (‘Dashboard’, ‘LittleMotel’, etc.), representing a fierce intrusion tothe road music of Interstate 8; machines breakdown, and escape into the ocean is the onlyoption. However, the ocean ‘will not get uswet’. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank: acontinuation of the acquiescence to Freudiandeath-drive found in Good News.

24. The bandoneón is a free reed instrumental hybrid ofconcertina and accordion popular in ArgentinianTango. Thanks to Rajmil Fischman (KeeleUniversity) for sharing his expertise on the instru-mentation here.

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Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures and continuities in the music of Modest Mouse

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