Animal Collective: Crunchy Cons?
After puzzling over the lyrics of Animal Collective’s “My Girls,” I found the following:
Is it much to admit I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house
I don’t care for fancy things
Or to take part in a precious race
And children cry for the one who has
A real big heart and a father’s grace
I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls
I think I’ve found Rod Dreher his new favorite band.
Also, Animal Collective’s albums are remarkably kid-friendly. This is spaced-out bourgeois schmaltz, in a good way. “Collective” has a vaguely Soviet tinge. This Collective is singing, in interestingly interpolated fashion, about the longing for property and for home. Of course, Collective has a distributist, organicist connotation as well, which some might characterize as proto-fascist. Also, this is all completely ridiculous.
I won’t rest until you listen to this timeless song.
One minor quibble: social status isn’t a material thing. “Or” social status would have made far more sense. I have to assume that the “material things” the song references are positional goods, which is to say indicators of social status. That is certainly true of one’s home, though that could be why the song emphasizes the “four walls and adobe slabs” — simple, unpretentious, inexpensive building materials. The point is to have a haven in a heartless world.
Because I’m very helpful, I’ve rewritten the lyrics in the last verse.
I don’t mean to seem like I care about the positional goods that signal social status
I just want a crude, primitive dwelling in which to shelter my wife and child
As you can see, my lyrics are far more soulful.
This is excellent, and may get me finally to listen to AnCol, but aren’t OFFSPRING the original material embodiment of social status? Your wife and kids are status symbols you socialize with! Yet the lyrics cut against the transformation of wives and children into totems of tribalism by praising the goods of keeping them SHELTERED from the World…and keeping Our Narrator sheltered along with them. Word to your hearthstone.
— James · Jan 24, 03:17 PM · #
I got the Macy’s Home Sale catalog in the mail today and I found a lot of things I’d add to that song, like enameled cast iron cookware and one of those groovy coffee makers that make it look like everything you do in the kitchen is more fabulous than anything anyone else is doing.
— Joules · Jan 25, 03:34 AM · #
i thought that the social status was that he doesn’t care about material things. sorry, am i meant to say something about Marxism?
(BOOM BOOM WOOOOO)
— alex · Jan 27, 12:47 PM · #
Excellent analysis, and major points for bringing up AC, Reihan. This is my very favorite song on Merriweather (and in recent years in general) and the fact that social status is not a material thing has seriously been bugging me all year.
HOWEVER, I disagree with your central claim that “longing for property and for home” makes you a conservative.
— internet gangsta · Feb 5, 08:03 PM · #