The Sweeping Scope of Modest Mouse’s "3rd Planet"

Yes, Modest Mouse’s “3rd Planet” is a song– but what are songs other than poetry put to music? This song reads more like a poem to me than most poems. It illustrates nature’s cycles through unique images like the moment of conception, death, and the shape of the universe.

Most of the song rhymes, which I think enriches its sound and provides more of a challenge to write than free verse. The rhymes also fit logically into the natural flow of a sentence, like the line “…another had been found, another ocean on the planet/Given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.” They don’t sound forced or rearranged to fit the scheme to me.

Nature’s cycles are the major theme: birth and death, beginning and end, start and finish. “3rd Planet” first illustrates this theme through first the creation and then the death of a child. The first hint we get of this theme is in the chorus: “Baby cum angels fly around you/Reminding you we used to be three and not two.”

Society associates angels with people who die, although that isn’t necessarily accurate. According to Christianity, God created humans and angels separately, so angels were never humans to begin with. But the symbolism remains, so angels could also mean souls. “Cum” is slang for semen, and its key component is sperm which fertilizes the egg to produce a baby – new life. “Baby cum angels” could refer to a baby that was once fertilized but died. “Three and not two” would then refer to the death of the baby reducing the size of the family.

The next lines are just interesting: “Your heart felt good/It was drippin' pitch and made of wood.” According to the Encarta dictionary, pitch is resin derived from pine tree sap. This image compares a lover’s heart to the core of a tree where the sap, its lifeblood, is carried. The image of dripping pitch suggests bleeding to me, so the lover may be hurting emotionally – a possibility considering the theme of losing a child. Yet this happened at the moment of conception long before they lost the baby, so I don’t quite understand the image.

The next series of lines give a beautiful description of making love outside at night:

“And your hands and knees
felt cold and wet on the grass to me.
We’re outside naked, shiverin', looking blue
from the cold sunlight that's reflected off the moon”

Cold sunlight reflected off the moon is moonlight, although I think of it as white instead of blue. The beautiful imagery brings this scene alive and makes me think of being in a field where grass grows below and the moon shines above, where its light isn’t blocked by a forest’s canopy.

The cycle of life and death continues into an image that blends conception with the origin of life: “Well, a 3rd had just been made and we were swimming in the water/Didn't know then was it a son was it a daughter.” Scientists believe that the origin of life began when cells evolved in the ocean, when the planet was all water. This image could refer to said concept as well as a baby created in the “ocean” of the womb. The third just created is a reference to a baby since the narrator doesn’t know if it’s a son or a daughter.

Next, conception merges with the universe: “It occurred to me that the animals are swimming/Around in the water in the oceans in our bodies/And another had been found another ocean on the planet/Given that our blood is just like the Atlantic.” Size is relative to the organism. A zygote drifting into the expanse of the uterus might consider our bloodstream a universe. Perhaps the universe we know is just a growing cell in the bloodstream of another organism. These exponential proportions could go on forever.

Life and the universe are revealed to be cycles as well. The lines “That’s how the world began/and that’s how the world will end” suggest the world began with life and will end with the loss of life. This corresponds with the cycle of life and death as well as beginning and end.

I’m going to go off on a philosophical tangent to delve further into this concept. According to the song, the world would end with the loss of life because no beings would exist to perceive it. But just because we aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. The opposite isn’t true either: imagining a cheeseburger will not make it pop into existence right before your eyes. Reality exists beyond our individual perceptions.

One of the simplest, clearest examples of a cycle is the comparison between the universe and the earth in the line “Well, the universe is shaped exactly like the earth/If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were.” A planet is a sphere with no beginning or end, and Earth is a planet. If the universe is shaped like it, then it too would be a sphere: infinite.

One last interesting thing I noticed is the repetition of threes. Earth is the third planet and a baby is a third person. The concept of exponential proportions can also make the two interchangeable. Earth, our solar system, and even the universe could just be a baby in the bloodstream of another organism. A baby, in turn, can be considered a planet because other life forms reproduce and grow in it like bacteria and cells. Three is the magic number because it is the creation of life.

Modest Mouse’s song “3rd Planet” is one of the deepest poems I’ve read. The image of a baby’s conception and death are tragic but beautiful, and the concepts about the universe are fascinating. Poems can be great, but song lyrics often go unnoticed despite incredible themes like the ones here.

--Jessica Murphy