Modest Mouse, Matthew Arnold, and My Christian Convictions
Modest Mouse, the indie-rock group based in Portland, is a band that I began listening to around 2017, shortly after their Strangers to Ourselves album came out. I was late to the game on this band as their first album came out in 1996 — I was two years old at that time. An older friend really liked the band and so I decided to check them out. Their music was really different from other things I liked but I gave it a shot. At first, I only listened to their popular hits like “Float On” and claimed that their Good News album was my favorite. That same friend challenged me to stretch myself beyond the upbeat pop songs of Modest Mouse.
Over the last few years, I have developed a great enjoyment in listening to them. In surveying their discography I found many other songs that I liked but also dark and provocative songs that I struggle with. I often find myself troubled by particular songs or lyrics. My personal Christian convictions are disturbed by the band’s vain uses of God’s name, such as in “Trailer Trash,” and their antagonistic remarks about religion.
Apart from this Christian approach, as a student of literature and language, I respect frontman Isaac Brock’s lyrics and experimentation. He reminds me of a Romantic or Victorian poet in some regards. The band’s work has been described as “a struggle with God.” Perhaps Brock, like those old poets, is looking for transcendence apart from God and Christianity.
The music that coexists with Brock’s lyrics is phenomenal, as well.
My conundrum is that I enjoy listening to what the ardent Christian may call “soul-degrading music.” I have attempted to justify my disturbance as I have listened to this band over these last few years. I want to be able to listen to Modest Mouse and similar bands without inner convictions telling me I shouldn’t. Perhaps my experiences of literature and Christianity can coincide to find a solution to this dilemma.
To begin with, I must consider what I’m up against.
Modest Mouse has hints of religious sentiments scattered throughout their lyrics. These appear to be satirical or overtly negative criticisms of religion, particularly Christianity.
In one of their most popular albums, The Lonesome Crowded West, songs including “Bankrupt on Selling” appear to be negative interpretations of Christianity and Christian lifestyle. It begins with
“Well all the Apostles, they’re sitting in swings
Saying ‘I’d sell off my Savior for a set of new rings,
And some sandals with the style of straps that cling best to the era’”
These lines are reminiscent of Judas Iscariot conspiring in the arrest of Jesus Christ for a sum of money. The song in its entirety critiques capitalism and its associations with over-ambition and greed. Isaac Brock wrote this song, as he writes most of Modest Mouse’s songs, and uses pinnacles of goodness, apostles and angels, as his example that even the best of people will turn on you if it becomes beneficial to them. This idea is codified in the line, “All the people you knew were the actors.” While I want to disagree for the apostles’ sake, Brock isn’t wrong in these supposed truths that he conveys; he utilizes Christian ideals in explaining it. Is he really satirizing Christianity, or just using it to strengthen his point?
An article by David Sackllah notices that “[The Lonesome Crowded West] culminates with ‘Styrofoam Boots/It’s all Nice on Ice Alright’, in which Brock finds a man in heaven who tells him, ‘You were right, no one’s running this whole thing,’ and comes to the conclusion that ‘God takes care of himself and you of you.’” Furthering Sackllah’s point, Brock also says in the song that atheists like himself are told by “Peter and his monkey” that they will be kept in the back, “Polishing halos, baking manna, and gas.” Brock is clearly satirizing here. Atheists going to heaven, an apathetic perhaps nonexistent God — these don’t represent tenets of Christianity. They are quite the opposite.
When their hit album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, premiered in 2004, Brock was interviewed about the band and his personal life. In one such interview, Brock was asked about his religious beliefs in connection with the Passion of the Christ film that came out that same year. Brock can talk in seemingly contradicting statements, as he seems to do in the interview, but it is clear that he doesn’t believe Christianity is true. He explains that he cannot be completely sure, but he isn’t going to live as though it is. Brock ends his discourse by saying he doesn’t care if others are religious, and “Believe what you want.” But he appears to be “combative,” to use Sackllah’s word, towards religion.
That same album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, features the song, “The Ocean Breathes Salty,” that perhaps hints towards disagreements between the foundation of the earth, the Christian creation story versus the scientific evolution story. The song includes this refrain,
“For your sake I hope heaven and hell
Are really there
But I wouldn’t hold my breath
You wasted life
Why wouldn’t you waste death?”
These lines appear to sum up Brock’s feelings towards Christianity. He won’t waste his life believing and following principles of a religion that might not be true, yet “For your sake”, recalls the statement quoted earlier, “Believe what you want.
I would like to say that these two albums by Modest Mouse are the only ones that include this particular strife but I cannot; This trend is found in songs throughout their albums. This message isn’t in every song but appears often enough to take notice and question their beliefs. I could go on and on evaluating similar lyrics, but I think I’ve made my point. While Brock isn’t a militant atheist, he can be quite provoking to Christians.
With all this in mind, how can I continue to listen to a band that attacks, or at least pokes fun at my religious beliefs? I find myself asking a similar question when reading literature. As I studied English literature at a Baptist liberal arts university, I was immersed in works that, like Modest Mouse, were abrasive to Christian religious ideas.
Matthew Arnold’s Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse was required reading in college. Arnold can no longer believe in Christianity and compares that faith to that of the Greeks that has since dissipated. His famous lines state,
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.”
Arnold finds himself between dead faith and a rejection of those religious values. He wants to embrace Christianity but cannot and conversely, he wants to disavow Christianity but cannot. Arnold is more mournful than militant in his inability to believe. As he surveys these anchorites at Grande Chartreuse, Arnold doesn’t want to deconvert them and even envies them in some respects.
Others like Percy Bysshe Shelley rejected God but wrote of a transcendence that resembles Christian ideas. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley explains that time is the judge of famous poets. He states, “[The imperfections of famous poets] have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins ‘were as scarlet, they are now white as snow’; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time.” The beauty of their poetry outweighed their blemishes. Shelley uses Christ-referential language to describe Time as a transcendent ideal. Shelley is also known for his Necessity of Atheism pamphlet.
Looking at these texts along with similar writings of the period, and as they are clearly combative to Christianity, I have to wonder why they are studied at a Baptist university. There are some obvious answers to this question. The Romantic and Victorian periods, as with any period of literature, contribute to the timeline of ideas that is English literature. Modernist writers cannot be fully understood unless Victorians are studied, and Victorians cannot be fully understood unless Romantics are studied, and so on.
Also, these texts are not taught to lead students astray. Professors dissect these poems to show their contributions to the larger scheme of their period despite their rejection of Christianity. In this Christian light, these works display the beauty of creation including the earth and its inhabitants, mankind. But because man has fallen through the indulging of his flesh, or sensual aspect, he must find renunciation to regain his spiritual aspect. Man rejects his worldly wants in exchange for spiritual gain that comes solely in the propitiation or work of Christ. The fleshly is necessary to point to the need for the spiritual. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market effectively demonstrates this fortunate fall concept.
Returning to Isaac Brock, can I interpret his outcries against religion as a light illuminating the need for religion? Certainly. Apart from his religious satirization, Brock has many songs that reference drug and alcohol abuse, like “Polar Opposites” or “The Good Times are Killing Me.” His overindulgence of desires wants saving grace. The more important question to ask is, should I interpret his lyrics in that way?
Brock feels different from Arnold and Shelley because he continually and blatantly defames Christianity. He doesn’t relent the fact that he’s not a believer. He doesn’t even attempt to create or adhere to an alternative. While the fleshly and provocative lyrics of Modest Mouse can be seen as that “struggle with God,” that directs one back to faith, listening to Isaac Brock repeatedly sing “God” followed by “damn” is painful to my soul in a way that far surpasses the emotional response I receive from reading Matthew Arnold.
But will I continue to listen to Modest Mouse? Definitely. I’d be lying if I said I’ll stop listening to their music, even those egregious songs. In those painful lyrics, I see, as I do in Shelley and Arnold also, a fallen artist that needs God just like I do. I accept that truth while Brock rejects it. He loudly and vocally rejects it. But surely Brock is still crying out against God’s continual prodding against him. It hurts me to witness his beauty directed away from God. I continue to listen and I continue to find a direction towards God.
Coda:
This story has gone unpublished for more than two years now. It started as a paper for a college class but evolved into a contemplation of my own faith and values. Since the initial draft, I have graduated college, grown and matured spiritually, become a husband and father, and witnessed things that have made me cry, as well as cry out to God. Rereading this story, my own writing, has surprised me, reminding me of who I was when I wrote it. I am different now but I am the same.
Modest Mouse is not my first pick when listening to music but some songs remain on my playlist, though I have purged several.
My life now consists mostly of looking at the world and asking, “How could there not be a creator?” I look at the earth and remember that He spoke it into existence. I look at my daughter, my only act of creation, and I understand God slightly more.
