Already, We Won’t Float On Alright
It’s hard to consider it, but 2004 was more than a decade and a half ago. It was the year of the ill-advised invasion of Iraq. It was a year before the launch of the Xbox 360. It was also the year of what was Modest Mouse’s first indie rock hit, “Float On”.
I can’t admit to having ever been a Modest Mouse fan. This was not a conscious decision. At the time I was something of an underdeveloped music snob who only listened to classic rock—and while I wouldn’t reach peak snobbery until college, the seedlings were there even in those formative teenage years. Taste, unfortunately, was not something easily acquired back then. The indie rock of Modest Mouse struck me as too mainstream in a period that featured the return of Green Day, the rise of My Chemical Romance, and the eventual chart-topping of Coldplay.
In retrospect, of course, these and the ten years that followed formed the last period in which the music industry maintained the appearances of its namesake. It still attempted, at the time, to sell its consumers actual music, degraded, compressed, or electronified as it was. Sometime after 2014, it seemed to give up, if we’re being charitable in our presumptions; rap and electro-pop sludge took over the charts afterward, interspersed with the images of pop divas who, inevitably, would just be empty containers into which rap, electro-pop sludge, and sexuality were dumped. Any pretenses of a musical tradition were dispensed with by the executives that ran the industry in the ‘10s, and they haven’t looked back.
“Float On” is something of an oppressive song to get through. Its driving guitar and percussion push an F# major chord progression through Isaac Brock’s signature Portland-cried lyrics about merely making it through a day. “Well, we’ll float on, good news is on the way,” he utters in the second verse, effectively ending the narrative halfway through the song; the rest of the piece is a repetition of the chorus for two minutes. The good news, of course, doesn’t come. Instead, all that’s left to chew on is the refrain: variations of “Already, we’ll all float on, alright, don’t you worry.”
The song offers no resolution or conclusion. A listener tunes in and finds himself paraded down a cacophonous array of instrumentation accompanied by a largely monotonal lyricist insisting that everything will be just fine—a message totally at odds with both the content of his lyrics and the dissonance of his music. One can’t help but wonder whether this is intentional, whether there this is an ironic display of a man’s psychology as he vehemently denies the reality around him, or if it’s just the absurd ramblings of a madman.
From an interview given to The A.V. Club at the time, Brock had this to say about the song:
O: “Float On” almost seems like it was written as a challenge to yourself to write a more “up” song, both lyrically and musically.
IB: It was a completely conscious thing. I was just kind of fed up with how bad shit had been going, and how dark everything was, with bad news coming from everywhere. Our president is just a fucking daily dose of bad news! Then you’ve got the well-intentioned scientists telling us that everything is fucked. I just want to feel good for a day. I’d had some friends die, and with Jeremy kind of losing it… After we got out of that dark spot with everything melting down with the band, I just wanted to make a positive record. I think we managed to make a quarter of the record positive, and the rest is either kind of dark or more just relaxing into things being how they are, resigned.
Brock insists, at least in this old interview, that the song is upbeat. It’s supposed to be happy. The lyrics, which embrace a vague, blasé sense of accepting the world and surrendering to its excesses, are to be taken completely at face value. If Brock is to be believed here, then there’s no ironic sentiment whatsoever; he’s not cruelly depicting the erroneous thinking of a man hell-bound by complacency. He actually means all of this.
The video for Modest Mouse’s old hit ends appropriately: a sheep happily guided down a slaughter house chute to a door. It opens and two large arms cradle it up; behind them are the fruits of their labor: bloodied sheep carcasses and the evidence of industrialized slaughter. While video directors rarely seem to work very closely with the creative team that writes the songs, it seems unlikely that Brock was unaware of the choices made in the video’s storyboard. Perhaps he thought that his interests in writing an upbeat, positive song about floating through unfortunate events provided an ironic counterpoint to a video about leading sheep to the slaughter. Or, perhaps less consciously, he recognized the real meaning of his words and considered the imagery perfectly fitting for a song about doing nothing, albeit without necessarily understanding why. Whatever the case, the video is a direct nullification of the words he gave in his interview to The A.V. Club.
“Float on, everything will be fine,” our lyricist manically intones. You don’t have to do anything. Don’t you worry about it. It’ll all turn out just fine. Fitting for the attitude of a self-professed atheist. As he mentions later in the same interview,
I don’t think I’m living wrong in the first place, so when the lights go out on me, and brighter ones come on and I have to talk to some guy with a big, bushy beard, or some big glowing blob, I think I’m going to be fine. I’m 100 percent on the whole Christianity thing being a crock of shit, pretty much, but I don’t give a fuck if other people are religious. Believe what you want. Whatever makes the day easier for you.
We should remember that 2004 sat at a critical juncture. The internet was widespread, but its use was not inescapable. Social media was in its infancy, and no one as of yet could understand what would happen when it became paired with the smart phone revolution that would occur before the end of the decade. The general sentiment Brock expressed in this interview is one we’d now just dismiss as “hopelessly Reddit”, more cringe-inducing in an understandably dated way than even Redditors tend to come across today. At the time, however, that culture of smug, atheistic, cluelessly self-important ambivalence was not the defining baseline of pop culture. It was still indie, somewhat quirky, if no less obnoxious. It dominated certain subcultures, but it did not dominate the culture at large.
But put these two things together: first, his insistence that things will turn out alright if we just don’t worry about them; and second, his own self-professed hatred for the Faith, his blind trust in science—by which he means materialism—and his total disregard for any sort of moral standards. These two aspects form a whole composite attitude. It’s the state of a soul in abject despair, one who has given up trying not just to understand reality, or God, or man’s place in the world, but even the governance of his own life. Things like faith, hope, and charity can only be used ironically, within the context of hollow projections of feeble minds. This attitude is itself rather ironic, considering the lifeless animation that such a despairing atheism inflicts upon both the intellect and the will. A soul that lacks even the interest in holding out hope, engaging in faith, or believing charitably is enfeebled by default. Imagine an amputee who has cut off his own legs to spite himself, laughing at those who walk by him: “you fools won’t get anywhere that way!”
We know, presumably, that things aren’t going to get better any time soon. We know, also, that things don’t simply get better all on their own, either. History is not moved by forces except in a sort of colloquial sense, unless we consider the providence of God as some sort of ambiguous force of nature (which it most certainly isn’t). History is moved by people, foremost of whom is Christ, a divine person, but whether either through Him or against Him, the actions of human persons move the events of creation along until and towards their final consummation. What New Agers mistakenly refer to as the Tao of the universe, misappropriating an incomplete, pagan understanding of this same providential character of history, is nothing more than a cope for a spiritual slothfulness—acedia, as it was once termed, but it’s an acedia masked with ataraxia: serenity.
This manifests not only in misunderstandings about the world at large, but also in every individual human life. The providential character of history is to be found in the minutiae of daily life every bit as much as it is in the movement of nations and the actions of great men. God is personal; He seeks a unique and defining relationship with every one of his subjects, not just as a ruler but as a father.
Any engineer, doctor, or clinician can tell you that a problem can only be addressed if it’s first found. Growth in virtue is something that can only be accomplished by the person looking to grow in virtue. His actions and behavior may affect those around him, and these are just exterior manifestations of his interior life (or lack thereof); if he wants to be happy, he must address himself interiorly. He must go to God.
But that is not how despair works, is it? Despair insists everything is fine, that you don’t have to do anything, and while it indulges you with sloth or alleviates your fears with inactivity, it poisons your mind the way a dull ache turns to a great pain. And when the cause of the problem is addressed, despair recoils out of self-preservation: “do not listen to anyone who suggests that something is wrong! Listen to me! Love only me!” It is death given a voice.
Some may wonder why despair is considered a mortal sin. The Church’s purest definition of despair is “the loss of hope in God’s mercy,” as the Baltimore Catechism proclaims:
We may be guilty of despair by believing that we cannot resist certain temptations, overcome certain sins, or amend our lives so as to be pleasing to God.
Does this not characterize the attitude proclaimed by Brock’s interview? “I don’t think I’m living wrong in the first place,” he said. Is this not but a total embrace of the passions that assuage the soul? Far from surrender, this is the defection of moral fortitude into moral abasement—the rule of man’s life by his passions at the expense of his life. A man can continue to live in such a state—indeed, most do—but the forfeiture of true life, not by accident but by intention, means that he lives with blood coursing through his veins and propped upright, but functioning intellectually as something of a zombie. The only thing that can bring life into him anew is repentance: the true pursuit of the good, the seeking-after of a friendship with Christ. And this includes all that such a disposition entails.
I chose to pick on “Float On,” and Isaac Brock’s comments on it, not to single out Modest Mouse among the times. His comments in that interview about atheism, science, and Christianity in particular are, all cringe aside, completely in line with what was expected Portland-liberal beliefs of the time: abject rejection of Christianity, vague but apathetic embrace of the spiritual, and a complete trust that, “with any luck, [science] will save us all.” In retrospect, such sentiments come across as miserably and embarrassingly dated; the prideful self-assurance of New Atheism was strong in the mid-00s but found itself totally eclipsed a decade later.
Modest Mouse was by no means the only band or popular figure to express such sentiments. Most did. Many still do, although LA’s shift from scornful apathy toward the Faith has shifted, by and large, toward open hostility when they can’t use it for their own agenda.
I picked on “Float On” because it encapsulates the mindset of modern despair so appropriately. It’s an isolation that tries, unconvincingly, to tell itself that things are fine. It meets the conflicts of the world with gentle resignation. It does not rise to fight, whether for good or for bad. Go along to get along; things will be fine; don’t worry about it all. But beneath it is a growing dread or discomfort that can’t be gazed upon, because if light should touch it, it would sting like an open wound prodded by the tender ministrations of an alcohol swab.
This sort of despair must be known and recognized for what it is. This is the deluge of modern life deprived of the Sacraments and deprived of the Church’s active presence. There’s a reason that the ironic apathy of Portland-liberalism has spread throughout America’s millennial culture. There’s a reason it’s flourished as families have dwindled, birthrates have cratered, and suicides have skyrocketed. The correlation can’t be ignored. If it sounds familiar, consider that there is an alternative, and consider that inclination that calls you to hold fast to despair is wrong.
