Isaac Brock is god.
There isn't a song on any one of their albums that I couldn't personally relate to during my high school years.
About the selling out thing, I'm pretty sure that the only hypocrisy is coming from people who called them sell-outs. If there was a quote from Eric Judy from 1996 wherein he said "Modest Mouse doesn't believe in selling music for profit," then the story would be different, but I hate it when people rag a band for getting known. I didn't hear "Gravity Rides On Everything" (off of Moon And Antarctica) on the commercial until AFTER Good News came out.
It's true they wouldn't be nearly as popular in the mainstream without MTV playing "Float On" every 10 seconds last summer, but that isn't the band's fault. They made the music they wanted to, then MTV decided it'd be very hip of them to "break" M.M. through to the general public. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be poor. Sure it's nice to play small clubs for 10 years, and have about 30 people know who you are, but it's even nicer to be able to live in comfort and still make music that doesn't suck. Also, it gives everyone who listened to Modest Mouse before Good News the right to say they did, and who doesn't enjoy doing that?
And if you actually get your music in a TV commercial, you can get a chance to expose thousands of Top-40 zombies to some actual good music. If I still haven't convinced you that there's nothing wrong with bands leasing their music for commercial purposes, consider the fact that "New Slang" by The Shins has a line about "the dirt in your fries," and it was featured in a McDonald's commercial.
Takin' the man down from the inside...