I have to admit, Rolling Stone has been hitting its stride lately, what with a great interview of Moby about the California drought, and is now more entertaining to me than pitchfork and cokemachineglow combined, pretty much. Well, you have to concede a certain cultural condescension, like when Isaac Brock is cited as saying, “We’re totally fu**ed.” Anybody paying any attention to Kurt Vonnegut in the year 2006 would already know this.
But I am still interested in whether Isaac Brock drinks or not. Whereas Rolling Stone is totally fighting obsessed, penning about the “street fights that led to the first Modest Mouse album in eight years.” Billy Pilgrim culture rules us all these days, but based on the lead-in you think Brock’s discourse in the interview is going to be violence-dominated whereas this discussion dissipates like “paper thin walls” in the ensuing outplay, and it becomes clear that it was just a tactic to get you to read.
Far more of a recurring theme is “getting wasted,” which Brock self-purportedly did with Big Boi and company down at Stankonia Studios in Atlanta. The more foreboding among us might be inclined to quip something like “We’re attracted to that which kills us,” related to Celine’s following paean in I believe Death on the Installment Plan: “Hurry, hurry. Don’t be late for your death.” Anyway, it seems that the most satisfaction and inspiration can come out of near-death experience, and while Brock seems to almost gloss overt the “faucet of blood shooting out of (his) face,” it becomes clear that drinking gets him into sh** even more, a la the alleged attempted murder charge he apparently incurred regarding a broken thumb of a passenger in a drunk driving incident. Anyway, it’s alcohol to which he invariably steers the conversation back, in default practice, though this these days certainly doesn’t make for the chic news article.