We hope you find this short analysis of The Mountain Goats’ Dance Music to be insightful. Truthfully, there are so many great lyrics on The Sunset Tree album and we struggled to choose which one to write about! After deliberating between ‘This Year’, “Up The Wolves” and this one, we decided upon this for the simplicity of the lyrics in creating such a vivid story. However, if you would like us to visit any other songs, let us know in the form at the bottom of the post.
Anyway, we have found this website where you can find the lyrics for the whole album or, feel free to watch this incredible live performance of the song from 2007.
The Ploughman’s Poetry Discussion. Dance Music – John Darnielle.
Dance Music, to me, may be one of Darnielle’s strongest songs lyrically. It tells the story of an upset beginning to life by focusing on only two fragmented memories.
In the first of these memories Darnielle is very young. Yet, even within his early childhood, his recollections are intrinsically tied in with the notion that there is something not quite right. Whilst he initially put this down to there being “something wrong with [his] new house”, the next stanza completely flips this notion around as we are given a suddenly violent and disturbing description of domestic abuse.
By placing this opening unknown feeling of a certain defect within his life besides a vivid, traumatising image of violence towards his mother, Darnielle structurally portrays the disillusionment with life that comes with age. The unknown becomes known, just as it is revealed that the thing that was wrong with his house was his step-father.
The second fragment of memory comes when Darnielle is right at the very end of his childhood, at the age of 17. As life has led him to his adolescence, this disillusionment has grown further. It has grown so far in fact, that he introduces us to a person who is “the last best thing [he’s] got going”. And just as there is a sudden shift within his first memory, this new character within his life is suddenly revealed to be ill.
This is revealed in the line: “But then the special secret sickness starts to eat through you/ What am I supposed to do?” This “sickness” which Darnielle is describing seems to be linked to a depressive state of mind. To describe depression in this way, as an all-consuming plague which gnaws through you and the crevices of your mind – wow. Further noting the depths of his sadness, Darnielle uses metaphorical language to describe the pathway to these crevices as a long, winding road. The idea of a young Darnielle, endlessly walking through these “cul-de-sacs” and “twisted alleyways” as he desperately tries to cling onto the final thing in his life that is good is truly heartbreaking. Within this desperation of staying with this person, Darnielle seems to find himself suddenly lost within the maze of his own mind.
As he is a 17-year-old kid who is facing these issues, Darnielle finds himself with no other way to be able to articulate his dark thoughts than by using these metaphors to relate them to the physical world. It seems the veil of life’s falsehood that was placed on him in childhood has been finally shaken off, and he now has to live within its truth. In Darnielle’s childhood, he was able to drown out the household violence by listening to dance music as a form of escapism. Now, as his childhood has come to an end, it is that very same dance music that he listens to now, but this time in alignment with his ailments instead of in replacement.
Leave a Reply