Modest Mouse are Douchebags

by Lifeguard of Love

Everybody knows Modest Mouse are douchebags. I’ve intentionally never looked at their image, because I’m sure if I did I could never enjoy listening to them again. They were never my music anyway. I never heard them except for that one song on the radio until I met Slim Volume. The first time I heard them not-on-the-radio, I said, “They sound like the Beastie Boys on a Carribean vacation.” (!?!?!) Later, the first time I heard the Pixies (yes, later, it’s my goddamn rock n roll life and I am not ashamed of it), I was like, “oh, that’s what Modest Mouse is ripping off.” Also, isn’t there something about a statutory rape? I know statutory rape can just mean it’s your 18^th birthday and you consensually fucked your still-not-18-year-old girlfriend (we've all been there), but still. Douchebags.

BUT WE FUCKING FALL FOR IT! Because something about it is so sincere. [VULNERABILITY AND MANIPULATION] But it’s not like Built to Spill; girls don’t listen to it to dream or learn about how men feel about them. Girls listen to Modest Mouse to imagine what it’s like to be a dude. And Modest Mouse tell us.

But they weren’t Axl-Rose-style, blatantly-mysogynist douchebags. They were douchebags for a new era. They were the mopey sad sack douchebags when interest in safer sex/HIV prevention was fading from pop culture. (note: I am REALLY into historicizing things in relation to the HIV-AIDS crisis and HIV prevention propaganda right now). Because they can’t get laid aside from statutory rape, they resort to displays of vulnerability to make girls like them. Ted Bundy with crutches.

Modest Mouse’s crutches include: motion sickness, love sickness, claustrophobia, recreational drug use, low-grade alcholism, not giving a damn, chronic cough, blasphemy, sleepwalking, fucking people over.

Fuck all those straight-haired brunettes who did you wrong, Ted Bundy. I’ll love you right.

Intro to The Lonesome Crowded West week

I'd like to start out The Lonesome Crowded West week with some choice quotes from when I googled "why I love Modest Mouse" for research on my essay:

“...the songs had the pain of life stitched onto the great sounds and lyrics...”

“I believe it was playing while I was shopping at American Eagle 3 years ago.”

“Some ex. of that time I listened to Tom Petty, mighty Mighty Bosstones, but not much more than the songs I heard on Guitar hero.”

“After that anything I played by MM was just sex.”

And the BEST:

“My 13 year old self liked pop music, so I couldn't appreciate the genius of Brock's tortured lyrics and originality...I just really felt like I could relate to the song...Their music just makes me so happy, and I can really identify with the originality of the music and lyrics because I am also one very strange girl.”

Preliminary Materials on a Theory of Tracy + the Plastics

VERY minimally edited response to Slim Volume's Questions:

by Lifeguard of Love

To work backwards: The artist lets go of work immediately upon sharing it, especially in this case, as Olympia had a pretty major “all ages” scene circa 2001.

To be a fan is a one-sided relationship, but in a small community it becomes more recipricol. As soon as she left the stage, she introduced herself to people as Wynne, never Tracy. The act immediately came off, which may have further blurred the line between performance and performer. Nothing about her seemed to “change” once she was Wynne and not Tracy (no one ever mistook her for Nikki or Cola). One time there was a Sunday early-evening show for some reason, and she was like “Oh my god guys, I’m so hungover I thought I was going to die.” But she did the show anyway. Her performance was performance, but the closeness of the space (including often playing at venues without stages) was also humanizing. She let one of my friends be the singer at one show.

Humanizing, strangely, can lead to further objectification. In a punk rock community, the MORE we think we can relate to a performer, the more we feel we POSSESS them. (what to make of the possessiveness of fans?).

What happens? What happens is that fans are happy. The fans are 18 and don’t have anywhere to put this information about performance, identity, femininty. Greenwood has a faint moustache and a GREAT ass, and that’s all they need. All the queer kids, butch or femme, can dream of her. We don’t know what she means by Modern. We don’t know what the Art Test is. Queer youth group is telling us that we’re Golden.

What made this actual record the flip side of The Need is Dead? It is like it’s companion album, and not just because I listened to them both the first time I did mushrooms (that is not even a true story).

What puts this record into a rock category? I don’t fucking know! I am trying to figure that out.

How did Tracy and the Plastics employ irony in a way that contemporary electronic musicians today (Grimes), 11, 12 years later, do not need to?

*

It was a weekend in February. My girlfriend’s teeth had crashed into my lip while we were making out and I wouldn’t let her kiss me after; since my lip was cut it was not HIV-transmission safe. Queer youth group had drilled so much HIV prevention in me that I’d missed opportunities to have sex with girls when I didn’t have a glove; all bodily fluids were treated equal.

We went to an all ages performance space called The Midnight Sun. I am most certainly at risk of mixing up this story with a million other stories of shows at The Midnight Sun. This may in fact be a hybrid, this may not even have been the night that my girlfriend’s mouth cut my lip; it may have even been her lip that was cut. This was only 11 years ago. I don’t remember. I was really stoned.

We peeped into the venue. They actually wouldn’t let us in because the place was at maximum capacity. We saw a TV and we were like what the fuck, this isn’t a band, it’s just a TV.

We went and saw Tracy and the Plastics and The Need play almost every weekend for the next several months. Their records, Muscler’s Guide to Videonics and The Need is Dead were flip sides of one another.

 *

Tracy and the Plastics was temporal drag of a very recent past – a past that many of Greenwood’s peers lived with, although we, the all-ages part of the all-ages audience, did not. She employed irony in sound and medium. But then a lot of the fans didn’t get the irony because they had younger parents (???) so they just thought it was cool (???).

 

But that brings in a question of authenticity/sincerity; I personally am still stuck in finding rock n roll more “authentic” than electronic music because it is something you can feel (performing and listening). [I know this to be untrue/authenticity to be not even real, etc., but it is something that grates on me when I think about electronic music in general, even though I fucking love some of it].

 

What about Glass Candy using and recording total analog. You can feel that too? (need to read the section on analog recording in Time Binds by Elizabeth Freeman).

What made Tracy and the Plastics different for me? Was it really just Wynne Greenwood’s moustache and fine ass? Are the teenage hormones that objectify performers the same teenage hormones that make you want to fuck everyone you can just because you can?

On the “legacy” of Tracy and the Plastics

by Slim Volume

Questions to consider:

What are the implications of Tracy and the Plastics bringing dance music (back) to a punk rock crowd? I’m especially interested in this question in terms of the potential of dance music to do the revolutionary work of “killing the rock star” or fulfilling Sonic Youth’s prescription to “kill your idols” not only by providing a song structure and beat that works against heteronormative narratives of closure, desire/faith in fulfillment, and even the authority of the state, but also by de-centering the supposed genius artist, positioning them in a horizontal relationship with “the crowd”.

Tracy, in her interaction with “the Plastics,” seeks to make visible the complexities inherent in the production of the subject in the tangled act of art-making and social performance, to expose as a sham the romantic concept of an artist as an individual genius—the myth that artists are expressing a well-bounded, authentic creative self. But what happens when her music/art is consumed by a subculture that has ritualized punk rock performances? That reads her onstage presence in this context? That renders her identity legible in terms of subcultural queer norms that have tended to reproduce analogs of heteronormative popular culture such as teen heartthrobs, boy bands, etc? Where do the intentions of the artist/producer end and the needs/expectations/interpretations of the consumer begin?

Intro to Muscler's Guide to Videonics Week.

 

Highlight of this Flyer:

 

THE PLASTICS ARE:

LIKE: Being high w/out drugs

LIKE: Jokes about God.

LIKE: THE RE-DO

LIKE: Learning another language.

LIKE: Falling in love w/ the ONLY.

LIKE: Heart-throb

When Slim Volume and Lifeguard of Love were in high school, they went to Tracy + the Plastics shows all the time. Tracy + the Plastics were really good about playing all ages shows. Slim Volume always went alone, up north (he grew up near Seattle). None of his friends were into it. So it was like this solitary experience of performance art.

Lifeguard of Love had a very different experience. She was always seeing Tracy + the Plastics with an ever-growing group of queer teenagers in Olympia. Sometimes their group seemed to be the biggest group at the shows. It was totally a social thing.

Lifeguard of Love and Slim Volume saw each other for the first time at a Tracy + the Plastics and The Need show, when they were 17.

The flyer above is the insert for the Tracy + the Plastics VHS. It is REALLY interesting, because Wynne Greenwood is writing about the "identities" of Tracy, Nikki, and Cola, and indeed identifying herself as not either of the 3. She also describes the equipment she uses. You can see it really fucking huge here if you want to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/weasel_lobotomy/8395372293/sizes/o/in/photostream/