Scramble Up The Steep Side of a Cliff with Mark Doten’s Mountain Goats Day @ Dennis Cooper’s The Weaklings
Greetings from Hong Kong! It is early in the morning here and a five-year-old is trying to get me to help her watch some kind of Barbie-as-the-little-mermaid DVD, but instead I am doing this. Mark Doten, good friend of HTMLGiant’s (and of mine), has put together a Day dedicated to The Mountain Goats for The Weaklings. It is filled with riches, not the least of which is a new interview with John Darnielle. Here’s a choice gleaning:
MD: People often speak of certain common technical mistakes in the work of young fiction writers — POV that doesn’t gel, overuse of adverbs in dialog tags, that sort of thing. Are there specific technical problems you see repeatedly in the work of beginning songwriters?
JD: Yeah there’s one, a pet one, which I’ll get to shortly, but the main thing is less technical than – well, for lack of a better term, “moral.” Not moral problems in the sense so much of “what you are doing is morally indefensible,” but more of a “the terms of the moral universe in which you are setting your song are lame, and since you’re the one setting those terms, this is a problem you should fix.” What the hell am I even talking about — this: young men (this problem really doesn’t seem to exist for young women who write songs) often like to present a narrator whose self-destructive “urges” (they usually aren’t real “urges” so much as cosmetic choices about how to present himself) are clearly placing him on a collision course with doom. The narrator of these songs often seems to hope that the important people in his life will be both very impressed by the special nature of his pain, and that some people who have spurned him will be so horrified by the things his pain has made him do that they will either a) give him what he wants from them or b) speak with awe about him.
Really can’t stand that kinda stuff. There is one thing special about your pain: it’s yours. That ought to be enough, in my opinion; you can describe it from there, and take control of it, detail it lovingly, etc. But when a narrator seems to think that he is somehow beatified by his own particular collection of neuroses, well, this bugs me. I was as guilty of this early on as anybody, and one of my most popular songs is pretty much One Of These Types, and it’s not that all songs like this are bad. In fact many of them are quite good. But it’s a tendency that should be outgrown quickly. Often there are two main characters in a song like this, and almost always, the song would be a much better one of the two weren’t acting like a child.
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You should definitely go over there and check out Mark’s Goats Day. Also, you might want to refresh yourself on this Goats essay by Alec Niedenthal, published here last November.
Tags: john darnielle, mark doten, Mountain Goats
I wonder if he’s talking about “The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton” there. I always took that song as a really sweet, smart joke, personally, so hopefully not.
I think it’s more likely he’s referring to Going To Georgia.
I love this post because I know nothing of music and don’t really care that much about music, which makes me a freak among writers. They all look at me like I have four heads and I only have 14. Etc. BUT I listen to the Mountain Goats. So I feel special now. That’s all I know. The last 10 years I listen to 80s synthesizer music, The Smiths, and Mountain Goats. That’s all I know, period. I don’t listen to any other music, ever. I feel like the dumb guy, but this post helped.
Thanks
Yeah, that makes more sense, but I can’t take that guy seriously either. Darnielle has too good a sense of humor to commit that particular sin very egregiously.
I wonder if he’s talking about “The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton” there. I always took that song as a really sweet, smart joke, personally, so hopefully not.
Thanks, John W—I have 300+ of Darnielle’s songs and I couldn’t figure out which song he meant. Even if you’re not right, the choice of “Going to Georgia” makes sense to me—so you allowed me to stop scrolling through the titles again and again and to get ready for bed. I’m one of those elitist jerks who misses the Panasonic hum and frenetic guitar strum of The Mountain Goats’ early records and wish 4AD had never courted him. Even so, his songs still somehow survive the “overproduction” of these latter years.
I think it’s more likely he’s referring to Going To Georgia.
I love this post because I know nothing of music and don’t really care that much about music, which makes me a freak among writers. They all look at me like I have four heads and I only have 14. Etc. BUT I listen to the Mountain Goats. So I feel special now. That’s all I know. The last 10 years I listen to 80s synthesizer music, The Smiths, and Mountain Goats. That’s all I know, period. I don’t listen to any other music, ever. I feel like the dumb guy, but this post helped.
Thanks
Yeah, that makes more sense, but I can’t take that guy seriously either. Darnielle has too good a sense of humor to commit that particular sin very egregiously.
Thanks, John W—I have 300+ of Darnielle’s songs and I couldn’t figure out which song he meant. Even if you’re not right, the choice of “Going to Georgia” makes sense to me—so you allowed me to stop scrolling through the titles again and again and to get ready for bed. I’m one of those elitist jerks who misses the Panasonic hum and frenetic guitar strum of The Mountain Goats’ early records and wish 4AD had never courted him. Even so, his songs still somehow survive the “overproduction” of these latter years.
i also take it as going to georgia.
I think it’s in his “tiny desk concert” for NPR music that he plays Going to Georgia by request and beforehand describes it in the same way he describes the aesthetic sin in the interview – i.e., the glorification of neurotic behavior. I could be wrong and might be thinking of a live performance some time in the past, but check it out!
i also take it as going to georgia.
I think it’s in his “tiny desk concert” for NPR music that he plays Going to Georgia by request and beforehand describes it in the same way he describes the aesthetic sin in the interview – i.e., the glorification of neurotic behavior. I could be wrong and might be thinking of a live performance some time in the past, but check it out!
Awesome.
Awesome.