Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod? the Mountain Goats
“Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?” is bookended by two of the stickiest lines I’ve heard in a Mountain Goats song. I’m not going to start making judgement calls about John Darnielle’s “best” lyrics—that would be folly even if I weren’t the sort of person to disappear into list-making and thing-ranking tasks only to emerge, years later, subtly altered by yet another failure.
As well as being that sort of person, I’m the sort of person who will latch onto a line from a song and never let go.
you are sleeping off your demons / when I come home
I knew what The Sunset Tree was “about” before I ever heard it. Over the course of many listenings1 I’ve become more than familiar with it, and if I hadn’t I’m sure Darnielle’s many introductions at shows2 would have tipped me off.
And yet the first time I heard the beginning of this song I misread it. Every time I listen without really paying attention, without holding in my mind the fact that The Sunset Tree grew out of Darnielle’s experiences growing up with his abusive stepfather, I misread it again. It sounds like a love song.
It’s the tenderness in that first line that makes my inattentive brain read it as one of the Mountain Goats’ many songs addressed to a lover with whom the narrator has a problematic relationship. Not the sort of thing one would expect from a depiction of child abuse; more often than not, popular culture and the mass media are careful to paint such situations in stark black and white. The abuser is evil; the victim is unambiguously overjoyed to be rescued and to see the abuser justly punished.3 This is understandable enough, as the consequences for being seen to condone or defend abuse would be dire.
But Darnielle knows that it’s not that simple: love and abuse can and do get all tangled up. Naming the latter without writing off the former is a superhuman task. It blows my mind that Darnielle is able to speak so clearly from a firm place between denying love and excusing abuse.
It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that years spent wrestling with this could have informed large chunks of the Mountain Goats catalogue—all those destructive, harmful relationships that nevertheless contain love and affection and beauty. And, yes, tenderness.
In the Mountain Goats albums where Darnielle’s personal demons are closest to the surface—right now I’m thinking of The Life of the World to Come, We Shall All Be Healed, and The Sunset Tree—defiant, intentional hope is a notable motif. Everything is as bad as it is possible for it to be, but I will be triumphant in the end, he insists. Like the last line of this song:
one of these days I’m gonna wriggle up on dry land.
Consider the tetrapod, indeed.
I’m going to guess that I’ve listened to the album about a hundred times. iTunes and Last.fm back me up. ↩
As heard on innumerable recordings from archive.org, as well as the few times I’ve been there in person. I love you, archive.org. ↩
Not counting the times when abused party is assumed to be lying. Let’s not even go into that. ↩
I’m not allowed to read the works of Philip K Dick too close together. This self-imposed rule dates from the time I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik and A Scanner Darkly in the space of about a week, and subsequently struggled to convince my brain to operate in the manner to which I had previously been accustomed. It turns out to be quite difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to read much PKD without feeling as though I’ve taken a rather large quantity of rather bad drugs, or perhaps become a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps both!
Art is dangerous.
“Prana Ferox” is not the kind of destabilising influence that I’m forced to ration, but it does capture a certain something—and encourage said something to take root in the listener’s mind. 1 The notes that would have been the first draft of this piece, had they been coherent or structured enough to warrant the title of “draft”, tried valiantly to describe the certain something using words in all caps inside square brackets: [ALL IN] [THROW CAUTION TO THE WINDS] [READY WILLING AND ABLE TO GO COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS].
The excerpt from a self-hypnosis tape2 that leads off the track assures us that we will “wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that disturbed [us] in the past will now disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of our consciousness”.3 The song’s narrator would certainly like to believe it. We have arrived during the aftermath of an unspecified but apparently explosive event, and things between our narrator and the “you” he has left fuming upstairs are by no means okay, but he is downstairs checking on the makings of some bootleg whiskey, thinking maybe if he fixes his attention firmly enough on the future4 he won’t have to deal with the past and its inconvenient consequences.
He is out of luck. Everything that has happened has happened, and it’s all fuel for what will happen next. The violence (emotional or otherwise) of his experiences just makes them all the more propulsive. We don’t get to see the big explosion, but we know it’s coming. He is turning water into whiskey and life into rocket fuel.
My initial misinterpretation of the song’s title created a mental association I have never been able to undo. The crude translation of “prana ferox” as “fierce breath”5 recalled a conversation from several years ago, in which a friend6 and I discussed the effects of sleep deprivation without the bravado and one-upmanship that usually features in conversations of that nature between nerds in their early twenties. He made a passing reference to the unshakeable conviction that comes to the exhausted-but-wired: you are burning things with your eyes.
Listening to “Prana Ferox” leaves me feeling a little bit like I am breathing fire.
At least, whenever the listener is me. Which, in my experience, it invariably is. ↩
“Resonant Bell World” closes out the Beatiful Rat Sunset EP, which I bought in disbelief at how cheap it was and proceeded to neglect in favour of the albums that I was most obsessed with at the time. Until this came up as the next randomly-assigned song I was to write about I had never paid it much attention.
It turns out that having to really listen closely to something because it isn’t all that accessible can be really rewarding. Barriers to entry can take serious investment to overcome, but the payoff is exponential.
[0:00] - [0:27] - Blunt, primitive acoustic guitar. No need for anything else. This is one of the things I love about the Mountain Goats of days gone by, no matter how much “better” their records may have become since. The indie music world is stuffed full of guitarists who aren’t great guitarists, but John Darnielle might be the greatest of them.
[0:27] - [1:26] - The narrator berates the object of his affections1 for her failure to behave like a normal person should behave. He is sarcastic, yet seemingly resigned; this is probably how things are going to be for a long time yet. There is an outbreak of violence, threaded through as always with affection, or attraction, or whatever these characters always have to tie them together, and it’s still hard to believe that he really minds.
But I don’t care about all that.2 What I do care about is this next part:
[1:27] - [1:30] - “Between you and me”, Darnielle sings. What Mountain Goats fan3 has never felt a Mountain Goats song speak to them on such a crucial, personal level that it can only be a direct communication from JD himself?
[1:30] - [1:31] - Next he appears to drop the performance altogether in favour of a wry, conversational aside. If previously we were glowing with the illusory sense that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has something to share with us and us alone, now he is right on the other side of the room and we are positively incandescent. The upper-register vocal straining vanishes, and he admits: “it was — it was really exciting.”
It is worth mentioning that the saving grace of many an horrific situation in the Mountain Goats catalogue is the exhilaration, or camaraderie, or just plain good things that Darnielle’s characters find despite (or thanks to) the fact that everything is terrible.
[1:32] - [2:00] - More arms-length criticism and hyperbole, but I think we all know by now that there is not going to be an ultimatum, or an apology, or indeed any consequences at all.
[2:00] - [2:11] - This is the kind of broken-record moment I can really get behind. For the first time, the song feels like its title. It conjures up the feeling of being so inescapably a part of reality that you are practically vibrating with it. Like a confused human version of a singing wine glass, or a concrete slab being broken up by a jackhammer.
[2:12] - [2:36] - I love the way the Mountain Goats never shy away from the instrumental outro, even when it’s just solitary, determined guitar hammering at two chords for another thirty seconds or so.
When it first occurred to me to try writing about all the Mountain Goats’ songs, I hoped that the project would get me to find new and unexpected things to appreciate about their catalogue. This was the first time it happened, but I don’t think it will be the last.
Actually, that’s a lie, but this is my fifth attempt to write about this song, and if I try to write about everything in it that I care about I will never get to the important part. ↩
And here I mean the bootleg-downloading, lyric-memorising, oeuvre-blog-writing kind of fan. The kind of fan whose internal jukebox rarely plays anything else. Let’s face it, we’re all that kind of fan sometimes. Well, I am. ↩
I don’t remember ever wanting to have children. I have always been too selfish,1 too horrified by the potential of genetics and environment to create disaster, and not even slightly interested in making more people.
What’s more, for all that I like children I find myself less and less excited about them. This may be because my friends’ children tend to be smothered by swarms of adoring, as-yet-childless friends; I like making faces at very small children on public transport, and I like interacting with children that I meet, but I am not one to cluck and dote and I find that sort of thing unappealing in others.
The idea of bringing up a child has a certain savour, but I can’t connect it to my own reality at all. I think that being an awesome parent is a hugely valuable thing to do — perhaps one of the most important things a person can do — but I couldn’t feel right about doing it unless it became the primary focus of my existence. In the absence of a massive paradigm shift, that will not be happening.
And yet, there’s something reassuring in a song whose narrator finds himself with a brand new baby and not a clue what to do about it. Totally lost, he nevertheless does a thing and then another thing, because there is a baby that needs things done for it. It sounds to me as though they will get by just fine.
I am not an especially selfish person, but I am not talking about some kind of high-flown, radical enlightened selfishness here. There are things that I am just not prepared to give up. ↩
“Horseradish Road” is an unsettling song. The album version1 is all subdued acoustic guitar and cold, pizzicato violin. Even Darnielle’s vocals sound detached and a little distant - a far cry from the snarling, swooning, effervescent narrator-character who, in all his incarnations, dominates just about every Mountain Goats record. The only clue to the fragility of his composure is the way his voice cracks and quavers, just once, a minute and seven seconds in.
But there must be more to it than that. The Mountain Goats catalogue does have its emotionally distant (or distanced) narrators, with their songs of “I” and sometimes “you” but never any trace of a “we”. These songs are invariably discomfiting, but their stories usually give the listener something on which to hang the uneasiness.
At just under two and a half minutes in length, “Horseradish Road” is an impressive convergence of recurring Mountain Goats themes: a couple held together by nothing any outsider will be able to fathom;2 a long drive from one unspecified destination to another; 3 tiny concrete details married to broad presentiments of doom; diegetic music; tacit invitations to the listener to seek out oblique meanings and connections;4 terrible crimes, both legal and interpersonal, and the resultant guilt (or lack thereof).
And yet the song is not really about any of those things - except, perhaps, the very last.
The concept of karma gets bandied about by all sorts of people, to all sorts of ends. Popular usage in mainstream Western culture seems to suggest that it is a magical force that swoops about the place rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. A crudely-fashioned god for the modern atheist, perhaps, to relieve the pressure of personal responsibility. 5 The raw material for said god is a variation on the idea of cause and effect that, depending on who you ask, applies to intentional actions or all actions or everything up to and including thoughtcrime.
The narrator of “Horseradish Road” doesn’t care what it means. He has probably never even considered the word. All he has is his fatalism and a paralysing fear of his own just deserts. Not for him self-deceiving promises to reform; not for him hopes of salvation. He knows the score. The score is: I am a bad person, and you are a bad person too, and boy are there ever going to be consequences.
From The Coroner’s Gambit, which was finally revealed to me in all its glory as I struggled to write about this song. ↩
Not the fabled Alpha Couple, this time. We have not yet met the Alpha Couple in this series, but you can be certain that we will. ↩
This might be metaphorical rather than literal in “Horseradish Road”, but then again it might not. ↩
The song mentions Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Maria Callas; the musical project Enigma released a song called “Callas Went Away” featuring vocal samples from her. I don’t for a moment suspect that this has anything to do with anything. ↩
Whoops, let’s not start me harping on that tune. ↩
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
The most recent Mountain Goats album ruffled a few feathers. There exist diehard fans who claim they cannot possibly enjoy a Mountain Goats album in which all the songs are named after Bible verses. Perhaps these people have not been paying attention, because John Darnielle has been releasing songs named after Bible verses for a long time. The connection between title and lyrics is rarely overt, instead providing an extra layer of meaning for listeners open to a bit of contemplation.
I am a complete sucker for layers of encoded meaning. Back when I posted on Livejournal all the time I delighted in referring to one thing in my post title, another in my “current music” field, and squeezing in allusions and double meanings wherever they would fit. It was irrelevant that nobody was likely to decode it all, or even notice my efforts. If I even suspect that someone else is doing the same thing, it fills me with glee.
Leaving the title aside for a moment, “I Corinthians 13: 8-10” is a relative rarity in the Mountain Goats catalogue: a song of love and hope, pure and simple. There is no relationship here that contains the seeds of its own destruction: for once the threat comes from the outside world (specifically, Nazi soldiers and the start of WWII). The jaunty, stop-start guitar and simple melody disguise the terrifying situation the lovers are in, but at the same time remind us that they are in love, and that is enough.
The song is not called “I Corinthians 13: 8”. “Love never fails” could be an acceptable reading of the song, but it is not enough for Darnielle. Perhaps this kind of optimistic idealism is only tenable at its most extreme. Everything you think you care about - freedom, for instance, or comfort, or not getting shot by Nazis - will cease to matter, he suggests, because everything you think you know is a pale shadow of the truth. Maybe the Bible verse is “about” God, and the Mountain Goats song is “about” romantic love, but they agree that all of our mundane nonsense pales into insignificance beside perfection.
Not only that, but they are both adamant that perfection exists.
In a meme that has been going around, the one where you answer a bunch of questions with song titles from a single band, one of the prompts is “You and your best friends are …”. I answered “I Corinthians 13: 8-10”. I will leave interpretation to the reader.
A couple of years ago I visited the United States and a stalwart friend took me to a corn maze somewhere in Illinois.1 Suddenly I had a better understanding all of those horror movies I had never seen; the corn was taller than I was, and denser than I was,2 and I could just about imagine fleeing through it in the dark, pursued by something. Then we spent an hour or two getting cheerfully lost in the sun.
Fast forward to May 2009. I had just begun to appreciate the full force (sorry) of Full Force Galesburg when I woke up one morning to a bomb in my email inbox. I picked the shrapnel out of myself and put the album back on. When the song called “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” finished I started it again, and I kept playing it for the rest of the day. I listened to it on repeat the next day as well, and the next, and the next. When some time had passed (perhaps a week, perhaps less) I left a comment on the song’s Last.fm page, because what else could I do? The comment said, “I am not sure how to stop listening to this song.”
I felt as though I had been blindsided by a very large, very wet, very metaphorical mattress. Being walloped in the mind by a wet mattress was strangely painless, but the sheer force and weight of it left me stunned and out of sync with myself. Even walking and breathing seemed like puzzling, unnatural endeavours that I undertook clumsily, from somewhere further inside myself than usual.
The geese and guilt and helpless alienation of the song’s narrator made it seem okay that I, too, was wandering in a daze while the unreal world slid on around me.
This is not a song about being out of control, or about being the victim of circumstance. This is a song about knowing that you have brought all this upon yourself, and all you can do is wait to see if you ever get your feelings back. Maybe you can make a grand gesture or two while you wait, but there is no getting away from it: the narrator gives in to his destructive impulses and lets the sky fall, to no avail. Then he tries it again, to no avail. The sun is still shining, and everything is still sad and strange. There is no getting away from it.
I left the apocalyptic gestures to art and fiction, and instead learned to play “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” on the guitar. I played it until my hands hurt, because I can’t really play guitar and I definitely can’t do it in moderation. The internet tells me that ‘blood’ and ‘maize’ are referred to by the same word in Mixtecan languages - neñe - and that a maize stalk drinking blood was the personification of their Goddess of Earth and Maize. Offer neñe to the goddess now and she will grant you neñe in the future, I suppose. Or maybe you just have to sacrifice things, that more important things may live.
I refuse to refer to it as a maize maze. Enough is enough. ↩
