{"id":15146,"date":"2014-01-22T14:59:58","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T19:59:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=15146"},"modified":"2015-02-18T17:32:46","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T22:32:46","slug":"midweek-music-break-modest-mouse-dashboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/midweek-music-break-modest-mouse-dashboard\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Modest Mouse, &#8220;Dashboard&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">M<\/span>odest Mouse is one of those bands I&#8217;ve heard about all the time &#8212; for years &#8212; without ever knowing much about them. In fact, for the longest time I assumed it was an individual, not a whole\u00a0<em>group<\/em>. The name kept showing up in reviews of albums and songs by\u00a0<em>other<\/em> artists, often in a &#8220;Featuring Modest Mouse&#8221; or &#8220;w\/Modest Mouse&#8221; sort of phrasing. I figured it was a stage name for a producer who didn&#8217;t care (for whatever reason) to use his real name. Snoop Dogg, Modest Mouse. Made sense, right?\u00a0<em><strong>[See <a href=\"#addendum\">addendum<\/a><\/strong><\/em><strong> below]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, <em>duh<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Some things to like about this song (from 2007) and this video:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Per Wikipedia: &#8220;The lyric, &#8216;The dashboard melted but we still have the radio&#8217; references <em>Planes, Trains, and Automobiles<\/em> when Del (John Candy) is telling the police officer about the car after it is burned.&#8221; (The line does crack me up. It shares the ironic, mordant sensibility of the old line about a medical procedure:\u00a0<em>The operation was a success but the patient died<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<li>The story told in the video really has nothing to do with the lyrics, except in the most distant, hint-of-an-allegory way. But the video consistently entertains nonetheless &#8212; especially at the song&#8217;s end.<\/li>\n<li>Guitarist Johnny Marr (originally with The Smiths) became a semi-regular member of Modest Mouse around the time this video was shot. In <a title=\"Google Books: 'Feeding Back,' by David Todd\" href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=LFYy5CKYRCsC&amp;pg=PA256#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\">an interview with David Todd<\/a>, he reported on his favorite thing about the video:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>One of the best objects that I&#8217;ve ever come across, I got when we did the &#8220;Dashboard&#8221; video for Modest Mouse. I&#8217;m only in it for a split second*, but I&#8217;m playing a guitar that is a record deck with a guitar neck on it. That was the device I&#8217;ve been looking for all my life. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m trying to do, using the guitar as a record player.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>I really do like the lyrics to this song, <em>looooong<\/em> lines and all. Also according to Marr, Modest Mouse&#8217;s Isaac Brock more or less wrote them on the fly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally, in the course of preparing this Midweek Music Break, I at last learned the source of the band&#8217;s name &#8212; a line from\u00a0<a title=\"Bartleby.com: 'The Mark on the Wall,' by Virginia Woolf\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bartleby.com\/85\/8.html\" target=\"_blank\">a Virginia Woolf story<\/a>, of all things:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/cache.vevo.com\/m\/html\/embed.html?video=USSM20601295\" height=\"338\" width=\"600\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>[<a title=\"Lyrics: 'Dashboard'\" onclick=\"javascript:wopen('https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/lyrics\/dashboard_modestmouse.html', 'new', 650, 500); return false;\">Lyrics<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a name=\"addendum\"><\/a><em><strong>Addendum:<\/strong><\/em> oh, this is funny &#8212; I knew the band okay, but somehow in my head they got conflated with the musician\/producer Brian Joseph Burton, a\/k\/a&#8230;\u00a0<a title=\"Wikipedia, on Danger Mouse\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Danger_Mouse\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Danger<\/em> Mouse<\/a>. This revelation came to me a second after I turned out the light at bedtime last night; I suppose I should be happy it came to me just a couple of days too late. Or ever.<br \/>\n_________________<\/p>\n<p>* The &#8220;split-second&#8221; in question comes at around the 3:26-3:27 mark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modest Mouse is one of those bands I&#8217;ve heard about all the time &#8212; for years &#8212; without ever knowing much about them. In fact, for the longest time I assumed it was an individual, not a whole\u00a0group. The name kept showing up in reviews of albums and songs by\u00a0other artists, often in a &#8220;Featuring [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2252,74],"tags":[3718],"class_list":{"0":"post-15146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-midweek-music-break","7":"category-music","8":"tag-modest-mouse","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-3Wi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15146"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15169,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15146\/revisions\/15169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}