If any modern song or artist was remotely accepted by large quantities of people, it was poison in my mind. I sneered at people who listened to and, God forbid, enjoyed pop music of any kind, knowing that in my heart they simply weren’t enlightened yet. Naturally, this made me very dismissive to literally anything outside my wheelhouse. I staunchly believed that I was listening to “real music,” while others were listening to garbage sold for mass consumption. I grew up exclusively on classic rock and I was fed the rhetoric that rock music-and music as an art form-died in 1979. Basically it means that my music taste was so well categorized to my liking that I refused to open my mind to-and openly dismissed-anything except what I was already exposed to. The two things I remember most from that year was the tail end of Bush’s first term and “Float On” being culturally inescapable.Ī small confession: I am a former musical conservative. I’m not trying to argue the politics is the primary factor behind MM’s mainstream success because I’m not entirely sure how one does that, I’m just saying that to me “Float On” and the cultural and political atmosphere at the time are seemingly intertwined. “Float On” secured MM’s placement on Modern Rock radio stations for the foreseeable future and brought attention to the band and Brock’s powerful, yelping voice. It was nominated for a Grammy and was featured on both American Idol and an OnStar commercial, and let’s not forget its prime placement on Kidz Bop 7. For a while, it certainly felt like that song was everywhere. I can’t help but wonder whether the widespread success of “Float On” can somehow be attributed to that very sentiment. Bush was “just a fucking daily dose of bad news,” so he wanted to write something positive.
Club, Brock explained that he was inspired to write “Float On,” because he was “fed up with how bad shit had been going,” and former President George W. The left felt marginalized and voiceless like never before, and it didn’t seem like it would ever turn around. Senator John Kerry would lose the election by fewer than 2% of the vote not more than four months later.
The state of the country was in disarray and the now almost irreparable political polarization was just getting started. Bush and his cabinet were forcing stringent, unforgiving foreign and domestic policy agendas that would define the better part of the decade, and a new brand of neo-conservatism was dominating the political discourse. To recap: America had just gone to war with Iraq on shaky evidence which our government sold to us by capitalizing on our post-9/11 fears, President George W. Not all of us had the pleasure of starting with The Lonesome Crowded West.Įven though it was not that long ago, it bears repeating that mid-2004 was a strange, depressing time for liberal-minded Americans. It’s not their best song, nor is it my favorite, but to leave “Float On” out of the discussion is to overlook a crucial point in their career and to deny a legitimate gateway for many, many people. I’ve chosen to start with “ Float On” for a few reasons: 1) it was the first Modest Mouse song I ever heard and dovetails with an important part in my musical development, 2) it was the first MM song to gain mainstream popularity and their only #1 Billboard hit, and 3) it achieves the ultimate goal of a pop single: to capture a popular sentiment and express it in the broadest terms possible. A search for self inevitably will lead to bumps in the road, but by reflecting on them we can understand our faults and mistakes. Even though our rationale made so much sense at the time, we only see how myopic and irrational our decisions sometimes were with the benefit of hindsight. On January 9, 2007, the album was reissued with 4 bonus tracks under the title: Something You've Never Heard Before: The Bluegrass Tribute to Modest Mouse.It’s funny how often we make strange, regrettable choices when we try to forge an identity outside of the pack. Pickin' on Modest Mouse is a bluegrass tribute album to Modest Mouse by Iron Horse a part of the Pickin' On Series.
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