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Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures and continuities in the music of Modest Mouse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2014

Kenneth M. Smith
Kenneth M. Smith*
Affiliation:
School of Music, University of Liverpool E-mail: Kenneth.Smith@liverpool.ac.uk
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Abstract

Indie-rock band Modest Mouse's earliest music connects aphoristic fragments into uniquely disjointed narratives that resist standard formal categorisation. The band's homespun narratives make us process dramatic interactions between drastically opposed musical paradigms as we search for new formal schema by which to classify them. This, I argue, is one answer to the ‘negative dialectic’ that Adorno thought was missing in popular music. In this paper I analyse three songs in particular depth, extending a methodology borrowed from the ‘classical tradition’ that extends Edward T. Cone's ‘stratification’ analyses of Igor Stravinsky. In Modest Mouse's later work, which seemingly signals a return to simpler strophic song forms, this dialectic is spread across entire albums such as Good News for People Who Love Bad News; but even in individual songs, despite a simplistic façade, my ‘stratification graphs’ reveal deep dialectical negativities.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 428 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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