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.