Darnielle's Hyper-Ironism: "Cubs in Five" by the Mountain Goats

Here is a song that makes you believe in impossible things: "Cubs in Five" by the Mountain Goats.

This song is an ironic pastiche of prophecy, predicting a series of improbable or impossible events on inter-galactic and local scales, culminating in the pronouncement,

and the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league,
and the Tampa Bay Bucs will make it all the way through January,
and I will love you again—
I will love you, like I used to.
I will love you again.
I will love you, like I used to.

Of course, the sports references are somewhat dated, now that the Cubs have won the World Series and the Tampa Bay Bucs have won the championship for whatever game it is that the Bucs play. So this part of the song has a jarring effect on the post-2016 listener. We can't really hear how deliberately preposterous the sports predictions once were. We're already looking at this song through museum glass; it's no longer "a live one." Maybe that's why Darnielle has to keep writing songs, why we'll always need new songs. We'll need more and more of them as change happens faster and faster. We may find ourselves in a world in which the most urgent imperative is that those of us with hands get them on a Mel Bay chord chart and start putting poems to music. (I pray that our society will be ready to rise to the occasion.)

At any rate, for today I am your museum docent, commenting on the historically conditioned content of the text. This song, heard in its original pre-2016 context, has something of the cadence of, "Yeah, such-and-such will happen, when pigs fly!" It's just in reverse, with the pigs launching in every direction already before we are ushered into the presence of the such-and-such. Together with the shift from the unstable rhythm of the verse to the triumphant gallop of the chorus, this reversal of the impossibility trope creates an upside-down sarcasm that moves out of patent irony into more ambiguous territory.

This move is not, however, a retreat from irony. If anything, the text is doubling down on irony, going so far as to be ironic about its own irony, in a mode similar to what Carl Matheson in writing on The Simpsons called "hyper-ironism." Matheson argues that The Simpsons at once skeptically strips away all values and at the same time "manages to convey the raw power of the irrational (or nonrational) love of human beings for other human beings." Hyper-ironism is not a return to sincerity but an indeterminate space that both nihilistically marks love as an impossibility and insists on love as the foundation of life.

In short, the song invites us to believe in the future of the hero's love, not in spite of its framing as an impossibility but because of it. I would even propose that Darnielle's artistic practice is a series of experiments in finding ways to say impossible things. I will have more to say about that, but for now, here are my questions about "Cubs in Five":

1. Does this song make you reconsider "Scarborough Faire"? Does the lover in that song playfully entertain the possibility of, for example, finding an acre of land between the sea foam and over the sand? Or is it a cynical rejection of the possibility of love?
2. Did this song really need a second verse? I'm not sure there's any "developing urgency here," but maybe I'm missing the vibe.
3. If you could contribute a third verse to the song, what would you put in it?

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club.