SOUNDTRACK: THE HOOTERS-“All You Zombies” (1985).
WXPN played this song on the day after Halloween and the DJ said she couldn’t believe they hadn’t played it as part of their Halloween show.
It made me laugh about what people consider a Halloween song (and I know I need to let up on this). Like so many other songs, the simple fact that there’s a monster reference in the title does not make the song a Halloween song.
Indeed, this song is about as far from a Halloween song as you can get.
The song itself is catchy as anything. A great guitar riff and some tension-building synths support these rather dramatic lyrics:
Holy Moses met the Pharaoh
Yeah, he tried to set him straight
Looked him in the eye,
“Let my people go!”
Holy Moses on the mountain
High above the golden calf
Went to get the Ten Commandments
Yeah, he’s just gonna break ’em in half!
Interestingly, there’s no real chorus to the song. The “All you zombies” part follows the same musical and vocal pattern. The third verse is, like the first, Biblical.
No one ever spoke to Noah,
They all laughed at him instead
Workin’ on his ark,
Workin’ all by himself
Only Noah saw it comin’,
Forty days and forty nights,
Took his sons and daughters with him,
Yeah, they were the Israelites!
The Hooters guys say there was no explicit message to the song. A 1985 interview with the Chicago Tribune, co-writer Eric Bazilian (with Rob Hyman) said
We really weren’t thinking at all when we wrote it. We were working on something else, and, true to the spirit of the song, it just came to us, like a vision. We were sitting there working on another song, and all of a sudden we started singing, ‘All you mmm-hhhmm-mmm.’ Then I heard something about Moses in my head, and I started singing, ‘Holy Moses.’
We just chased it down. We stopped what we were doing to go after this thing, and an hour later, the song was written, start to finish. We’re still trying to really understand the song. People ask us what it’s about, and while there’s a lot of heavy stuff in there, the weird thing is we didn’t consciously put it there. Who knows? Maybe in some bizarre way it came from somewhere else through us.
Interestingly, it got banned on several stations and there were some Christian stations that refused to play it.
So, not Halloween-related at all, but super catchy and lyrically unexpected.
Also interesting is that Hyman and Bazilian went on to work with Joan Osborne on her album Relish, with Eric writing “One Of Us” another religiously themed song.
[READ: September 2, 2019] Dead Weight
I haven’t read a graphic novel by Oni Press in a while. They were once my go-to comic book publisher.
Then they stopped doing single issues and started publishing only graphic novels. Nothing wrong with that but I had been collecting single issues back then, not books, so they fell off my radar. I have to get them back on my radar because I really do enjoy their books.
I didn’t know what this was about, but the title and cover art appealed to me, so I grabbed it.
This story is set at a fat camp–Camp Bloom. We meet many of the kids who are there for the summer as well as the counselors who are there to help them get through the summer. (more…)
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The last time we saw Kishi Bashi at Union Transfer, his opening act was Twain. We hated Twain. Probably more in retrospect now that we’ve joked about him so often. But Kishi Bashi talked about how much he loved Twain. So we were a little concerned about who might be opening for this tour.
I Just Read About That... 