SOUNDTRACK: PUP-“Rot” (2020).
Pup has a new EP coming out in October. It’s called This Place Sucks Ass. Ha. This is the first single.
It’s three minutes of angry catchy punk (so a PUP song). The verses are sung by the lead singer while the chorus is sung by the whole band–chanted and rocking.
The bridge changes things a little bit and adds some tension to this otherwise catchy but dark song. It celebrates the paradoxes of life
The more I’m reckless The less I break
The more I care about money The less I make
The less I care about everything The better it goes
And the better it gets The more I lose control
And when I’ve lost it all I self-sabotage
Looks like PUP has been busy over the quarantine.
[READ: September 18, 2020] “Along the Frontage Road”
In this story, the narrator remembers going to pumpkin patches as kid around Halloween. I love that his father is fastidious and hates to get his hands dirty–especially with food–but is also a surgeon and has expert precision as he operates on the pumpkin.
But he now lives in the city and instead of farm pumpkin patch, they go to an abandoned lot on the frontage road where every year people set up a booth with pumpkins and Halloween items. It slowly morphs into a Christmas store and then disappears again until next all.
The narrator is sad that his son, Nicky, seems to love this otherwise gloomy stretch of land. His son was intrigued by the decorations–a rubber snake crawling through a skull’s eye socket. The scarecrow at the entrance had a pumpkin for a head and wore a Friday the Thirteenth goalie mask
I forbid myself absolutely to consider the proposition that in the orchards of my youth it would neve have occurred to anyone to employ a serial killer motif as a means of selling Halloween pumpkins to children.
