PrettyFakes

Well, the news isn’t all bad. Pitchfork announces that there are not one but two forthcoming Mountain Goats EPs that will be available on the soon-to-begin tour (making a stop in New Orleans on November 3rd. I assume I’ll see you all there). The first is a four-song affair called Satanic Messiah, and the second is a six-song collaboration with Kaki King called Black Pear Tree. And, to add to our embarrassment of riches in this time of woe, the J and K have made one song available online: “Thank You, Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle.”

You can get it here or you can stream it here.

It could almost be too cute, couldn’t it? A wee bit twee? Nearly a novelty song? Aren’t there dozens of twentysomething bands out there playing songs about Nintendo characters and patting themselves on the back for being postmodern? Isn’t this too laser-targeted for all of us who grew up with Super Mario Bros and who come out swinging hard in our bouts with nostalgia but always lose by TKO?

Maybe. But I always love exercises like this one that adopt the point of view of a minor character in a larger, sprawling work—even if in this case that work is a video game. (Since, after all, that video game did as much to shape our generation’s collective subconscious at Top Gun or Transformers.) The song gets an extra charge from the way it blurs the line between its narrator’s role as a supporting player in a story and his role as a minor subroutine in a computer program: His fear and joy are as real and as intense as anyone else’s, but his ability to express them is thin and fragile, bound by a string of ones and zeroes. The one thing he knows how to say isn’t even about himself.

RELATED:
Jim Roeg on Marvel-Two-in-One #7.
Gorjus on “Paper Dolls Don’t Cry.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.