I like Styrofoam. Styrofoam, cardboard, asphalt, generic neon signs (”OPEN”, “CLOSED”, “GIRLS XXX”). I like exhaust trails and the way the sky looks behind power lines. I even like strip malls, though only after the aesthetic and anthropological fashion of an archeologist looking at a Mayan temple—it’s strange and fascinating and nice to look at, but you wouldn’t want to be the guy on the top. Such a predilection is—at least in the circles I inhabit—only marginally more respectable than pedophilia. Few collective beliefs are as certain as that the accoutrements of middle-class sprawl are sad, soul-deadening, and empty. Sad? Well, certainly. Soul-deadening? I don’t think so. Empty? What? Look at all those people!

Granted, it’s a love-hate relationship. Which is why something like Sleater-Kinney’s “Modern Girl” appeals to me so: sunny FM pop from beginning to end, some overlaid distortion the only concession to S-K’s rowdier roots in general and The Woods‘ classic-rock fixation in particular, the song charms me from its first childish abandonment of conventional grammar for an advertiser’s approach to language: “My baby loves me, I’m so happy / Happy makes me a modern girl.” What follows is a languid array of lowbrow iconography—TV’s, donuts, cheerfully vapid art—sandwiched between two absolutely impeccable hook lines: the aforementioned assertion about my baby, as ancient a rock ‘n’ roll line as you can find, and “My whole life looks like a picture of a sunny day.” A love letter to McDonalds it isn’t, but nor is it a pipe bomb; there’s a kind of muddled fondness here for the whole sad mess. The acknowledgement of incompleteness that runs through the song—when S-K’s protagonist buys a donut, “the hole’s the size of the entire world”—tempts one to write the whole thing off as irony, a vicious stab at girls for whom a picture of a sunny day is good enough; but the music speaks otherwise, and there’s no band in the world clever enough to escape “my baby loves me.”

Modest Mouse, meanwhile, rarely leave themselves so open. “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine“—an acquired taste, like every Modest Mouse song recorded before Isaac Brock stopped screaming—intersperses said screaming with one of Brock’s best choruses, in which the man with the titular teeth “sparkles, shimmers, shines,” and we bid farewell to the “soon-to-be ghost towns” Brock makes of the malls. Well, yeah, this is a pipe bomb. But most of the bands tearing down what they’ve been taught is worthless lack the graceful understanding of their targets: where others might take shots at Coke or 7-Up, Brock sings “Let’s all have another Orange Julius,” and there’s a priceless precision in his choice of symbol. And towards the end, when the rumbling, frantic band is “on the corner of this and this and this and this,” Brock’s claustrophobia is perfect. He might want to tear it down, but at least he knows what it looks like, and why it needs to go.

But in a way I’ve saved the best for last. Kimya Dawson, who as the better half of the Moldy Peaches played the little girl to Adam Green’s dick-joking little boy, has a song called “Hadlock Padlock,” a patty cake poem which possesses no more in the way of musical virtuosity than anything else in Dawson’s or the Peaches’ canon but acts as a four-minute overview of everything sad and funny and sweet about power lines and candy-bar wrappers, as well as every reason a person needs to escape them. Opening with Dawson’s cross-suburb investigation into a death that turns out probably not to have happened (”That was just a rumor / Super-duper small-town true-mor / He was shipped off to treatment last night”), the song quickly clothes itself in mundanity and constructs a ballet from the smallest gestures possible—little Davey is learning to skate, an eleven-year-old girl is warding off the attentions of lonely pedophiles, and “the kids all pray that they’ll either get away / Or get a job like Chad’s dad’s meth lab and become rich someday.” All of this small-town imprisonment is raised to a kind of sublimity by the song’s billowing flute and the specificity of Dawson’s references—the entire song is set in and around my girlfriend’s home town, a completely unnecessary piece of information impossible to infer unless you’ve actually gone to Penny Saver for “two roast beef Mighty Bites.” The localization has an invisible effect similar to Brock’s Orange Julius line: for all their mundane sordidness, Dawson’s vignettes are invested with an unmistakable love, and when she finally wonders “if this climbing that you city people do / Ever leads you to a place with such a pretty view,” she’s earned all the grace she gets. Sad, certainly; soul-deadening, maybe; empty, never.

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