154. Song No. 2,314: “Dark Center of the Universe,” Modest Mouse
The Moon & Antarctica, 2000

This has been such a good year for my once slow-burning but ultimately unyielding love for Modest Mouse.

I have been helplessly besotted with their new album to the point where I actually bought the CD, which has launched me into more than a few days of listening to their entire catalogue chronologically. And while that is a different conversation for another post, it has been a whirlwind of considerable retrospection for a band I was kinda lukewarm about at first but has been a font of truly excellent tunes for just about half my life now.

One of the few things I distinctly recall from a 21st birthday weekend spent drunkenly ambling around Upstate New York was picking up this CD to complete my Modest Mouse discography. At the time, I was still pretty infatuated with their eminently, endlessly popular Good News for People Who Love Bad News, so this album was some pretty intense brain crack to finally pipe directly into my sloppy earballs.

The Moon & Antarctica is how I retrospectively fell in love with MM’s pre-fame oeuvre, being the linchpin linking their early deliberate chaos to their increasingly well-polished major-label output. This song that I love, which is easily among my top five Modest Mouse tunes, is a big part of that. And it has so much going on!

On a purely surface level, I love how this song sounds. It’s raw and jagged and raucously orchestral and intense and as sprawling as the universe unfurling from its yawning void of a middle. It is such a perfect example of how Modest Mouse combines self-awareness and self-deprecation with painstakingly orchestrated cacophony and mouthfuls of lyrics inconsistently spread across and squeezed into ill-fitting spaces their meaning somehow resonates perfectly inside. As a writer who enjoys breaking the rules to see what else works better, musicians doing the same to their medium is a homey kind of warmth that I apparently will never stop enjoying.

The older I got and less defined my own boundaries became, the more this song turned into a sociological observation of a personality I don’t usually seek out. “It took a lot of work to be the ass that I am” is the antithesis of my own journey of personal overhaul. The person I started out as was a much angrier version of me, always looking for reasons to be indignantly hostile and detonate a hair-trigger temper, all of which were learned responses from being too much around deeply insecure people who had no business raising children. Anyone is capable of change, but only when they want it; people are inclined toward well-intentioned overcorrection when they have something to prove and want nothing more than to never, ever see a hint of their parents’ personalities reflected in their own. As far as unhappy extremes go, I’ll take changing for the better even if I couldn’t seem to do it in moderation.

That insistence that the narrator, however, while a deliberately cultivated and self-admitted asshole, “is not the dark center of the universe like you thought” is softened by the ensuing revelations suggesting their dickish evolution isn’t so much of an option as a last-ditch defense. An unwelcoming shell makes you less of a target for the true villains of a much larger story—those anyones looking to easily fuck you over. The narrator is perfectly willing to peace the fuck out forever if that’s what’s best; they’ve grasped at closure and attempted a conciliatory metaphorical handshake before an utterly unremarkable parting of ways. It’s funny as hell, even if no one laughs when they get there because the richest ironies are also the most brutal.