After nearly two months of not having my mp3 collection on my computer, thanks to a ceaseless sojourn from hard drive to hard drive, OS to OS, window manager to window manager, I have managed to summon my tunes from the ether. Read as: I got them from the zip disks and CDs where they were backed up.
The other day, I posted a long, rambling essay-thing about a Ben Folds Five song. Now, in the spirit of repetition, I’m going to talk about another song. There’s a band called Modest Mouse, and they write weird, funky pseudo-progressive songs about the most intriguing stuff. Their lyricist and lead singer, Isaac Brock, has a very unique voice, and it turns many people off, as do his rather loopy and pattern-based melodies. I find the music about as wonderful as the medium can get, and I am consistently shocked and amazed at the man’s lyrics.
I opened XMMS, added the Modest Mouse directory, and got a song off of their album, Building Nothing Out of Something. It’s called “Neverending Math Equation.” Brock has a very strange and curious logic about his philosophy, and he picks away at his lyrics until they’re just this far from the reach of someone listening in. You don’t get the full view into the man’s mind, but you get enough to wonder… and perhaps, worry.
I’m the same as I was when I was 6 years old,
And oh my God I feel so damn old;
I don’t really feel anything.
On a plane, I can see the tiny lights below,
And oh my God, they look so alone;
Do they really feel anything?
Oh my God, I’ve gotta gotta gotta gotta move on.
Where do you move when what you’re moving from
Is yourself?
Pretty straightforward stuff. And then, there’s a verse that brings me back. I’m in my bed, probably eight or nine years old. I sleep on the bottom bunk, so I’m staring up at the top. The underside of the mattress above me is coated in this thin linen material, and I have pulled it away. It hangs like spider webs.
I think about the time before I was alive, when my parents were only dating. Then my thoughts move on, to ponder the circumstances of my birth. I see myself, smaller but still a little boy, residing within my mother’s womb. If I had never left her belly, if I had died in birth, these thoughts would never have taken place. I could have never pondered my own existence, or created any thought, period.
Pretty advanced philosophy for a nine year-old, I’d say. So, I was an old hand with the next lyric:
The universe works on a math equation
that never even ever really even ends in the end.
Infinity spirals out creation.
We’re on the tip of its tongue, and it is saying,
“Well, we ain’t sure where you stand;
You ain’t machines and you ain’t land.
And the plants and the animals, they are linked,
And the plants and the animals eat each other.
I don’t know if things end. I mean, sure, high school had a terminus. And in six minutes, the hour will be up. But a new hour will come about. A new day happens in nine hours and six minutes. It’s the same thing, again, except different stuff will happen. Time is not linear as much as it is cyclical. The stars move in elliptoids. Atoms revolve around nuclei. And human beings think that they are so much more important than they actually are.
You should listen to Modest Mouse, at least once. Brock likes to noodle around with his guitar, but if you can comprehend what he’s saying through that lisp of his, I think you will be rewarded.
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