From the album Look How Far... - Single
This is Isaac Brock dismantling the idea that humans have evolved into anything worth celebrating. The narrator shapeshifts through evolutionary history, from branches to grass to inanimate rock, only to land on the present as proof we have not gotten better. We just found fancier ways to be stupid.
I used to sleep in the branches, I used to slither in the grass / I can't believe how long I've wanted to be livin' in the past
The narrator moves backward through evolution, primate to reptile. The punchline is that regression feels like nostalgia. He wants to go back because forward has been a disappointment.
You said you're related to ancient kings or ancient tsars / Why don't you build a time machine and show em' you've fallen just so far?
Brock goes after the kind of person who brags about lineage as if proximity to power centuries ago means anything. The time machine dare is brutal. Go show your royal ancestors what you became.
An object inanimate, layered deep in the Earth's crust / They pulled me out, then they chiseled me into someone else's bust
The narrator becomes a rock waiting in the ground until someone else decides what to make of him. Humanity did not climb up from nothing. We got carved into shapes that serve someone else's monument.
Look how far we haven't come / Oh my God, we're so fucking dumb
The repetition of "so fucking dumb" and "so stupid dumb" is not lazy. It is mimicking the frustration of realizing the same thing over and over and still not fixing it. The chorus does not build. It just restates.
This is Modest Mouse at their most plainspoken and most damning. Brock does not dress up the critique. He just says it twice and dares you to disagree. The song ends where it started because nothing has moved.