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March, 2015

  1. Good News for People Who Love Bad News

    March 5, 2015 by Garren Christopher Stamp

    This week my friend and I traded records. I gave him two Johnny cash albums that I had an extra copy of and he gave me “Good News for People Who Love Bad News” by Modest Mouse. I am a big Modest Mouse fan. I think they are lyrically sophisticated and intricate and that their unique post-grunge/ alternative style is very intriguing. This is probably my favorite Modest Mouse album, the only other one that is close is “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank” and thats mostly because “Spitting Venom” is on it.

    modest_mouse

    Modest Mouse is an interesting band. It consists of singer/guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy. The band themselves lead an interesting life. For while the band was heavily into drugs, especially uppers such as meth and other amphetamines as well as cocaine. They also experimented with legal drugs such as dextromethorphan which is in common in otc cough syrups. This experimentation lead to interesting beginning songs such as “Novacain Stain”(a reference to the Novacain like effects that doing large amounts of coke gives the user) and “Dramamine” (a legal otc drug that when taken in large doses gives an amphetamine like feeling). This heavy drug use led to a feeling of sadness in there music the due to the depressing and tiring comedown from uppers. Also, it led to the experimentation with periods of high frequency playing followed by periods of slow playing representing the feeling of going fast and coming up and then the comedown.

    modest_mouse_cover_dramamine_1_by_dragonspark-d2q3emu

    One amazing song on this album is the world at large. It’s about the need to keep traveling in order to escape emotional pain. The song interestingly displays the mindset of someone who just keeps leaving and changing. As the song progresses you delve deeper into this person who is increasingly afraid of staying in one area. During the last refrain It is revealed that this running is due to the emotional pain dealt to him by a girl he loved and the depression that followed.

    Another great song that is on the album is “Float On”. This is their most known song and it got a lot of airtime on the radio. It’s a good song (a little more happy then a lot of their songs and a little too happy for me personally). It’s about keeping going despite huge and tragic setbacks. I like it, but think the song could have been a little more gloomy like the guys life is destroyed and he’s just gonna “Float On”?

    Another amazing song is Bukowski. This song is titled after Charles Bukowski, a famous alcoholic poet who wrote about the life of a bum and of the daily life of a poor, prostitute loving, alcoholic. One of his most famous poems, and the one that is being referenced in the song is, “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” This song is about the problems with god and with people who believe in god. This song is very thought inducing and brings up a lot of issues with the modern religious system. My favorite lines are

    “If God takes life, he’s an Indian giver.
    So tell me now why, you’ll tell me never.
    Who would want to be?
    Who would want to be such a control freak?”

    My favorite song on the album is called “The View”. It is about how every new change results in positives and negatives on both sides and how the grass is always greener on the other side. While this message is pretty straightforward and nothing miraculous, it is the way in which he creates analogies and smart wordplay to convey this message. The lines that best demonstrate this are “Shouts from both sides,
    Well we’ve got the land but they’ve got the view! Well now here’s the clue.” This song also has elements of sadness about the singer’s life and all the shit that he has gone through. Isaac again uses impressive phrasing when describing his sadness which gives the lines an almost happy feel to them. My favorite lines and one of my favorite lyrics of all time is

    “As life gets longer, awful feels softer.
    Well if feels pretty soft to me.
    And if it takes shit to make bliss,
    Well I feel pretty blissfully.”

    The last song on the album and the one that is the most emotional for me is “The Good Times are Killing Me”. This song is all about the struggles of addiction and the power of the drug to pull you back. Isaac uses his addiction to drugs to perfectly convey the power of this disease. The beginning of the song is a small group of friends at a house party who just went into another room to smoke a cigarette and talk. This song is emotionally sad for any listener, but it hits especially close to home for me. My Best friend back home who went to rehab was a huge modest mouse fan and this was his favorite song. I can’t tell you how many times he would play this song while we were smoking a cigarette and he would promise that he was done with drugs and that he was gonna stay on the straight and narrow. The disappointment of seeing him later that day visibly nodding off or geeking on speed would crush me. Because of that I can barely listen to this song without almost shedding a tear. I’ve included the lyrics below. I will bold the section that I think is the most revealing to the struggle of unintentional drug addiction.

    The good times are killing me.
    Here we go!

    Got dirt, got air, got water and I know you can carry on.
    Shrug off shortsighted false excitement and oh what can I say? 
    Have one, have twenty more “one mores” and oh it does not relent. 

    The good times are killing me.

    Kick butt buzz-cut dickheads
    who didn’t like what I said.
    The good times are killing me.
    Jaws clenched tight we talked all night,
    oh but what the hell did we say?
    The good times are killing me.

    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.

    Fed up with all that LSD.
    Need more sleep than coke or methamphetamines. 
    Late nights with warm, warm whiskey. 
    I guess the good times they were all just killing me.

    Got dirt, got air, got water and I know you can carry on.
    The good times are killing me.
    Enough hair of the dog to make myself an entire rug.
    The good times are killing me.
    Have one, have twenty more “one mores” and oh it does not relent. 
    The good times are killing me.
    Shit-kicker city slickers who all wanted me dead.
    The good times are killing me.

    Get sucked in and stuck in late nights 
    with more folks that I don’t know. 
    The good times are killing me. 

    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.
    The good times are killing me.


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