Posted on 02/25/2012 1:24:50 AM PST by Yaelle
So my oldest likes to expose me to his playlists in the car, and sometimes this prompts a nice discussion. He played this song for me and I'd never heard it before, and now for days it is on my mind. It disturbs me more than your shoot-up-a-cop rap song.
I'm listening for the first time and can't really understand. It's a sweet, happy, bouncy chorus. Then I understand "all the other kids... Better run faster than my bullets". "outrun my gun.". I ask my son, is this what it sounds like? Is it PRO shooting up your school??
My son tells me what the writer of the song claims, that it's anti-school violence, that it is written from the point of view of an abused boy who has snapped, but I can't believe it. There are a few clues that make that story a lie.
The title is so sweet and cute, the kids with the fancy shoes: the pumped up kicks. And that does point to a jealous poor abused boy driven over the edge by what they all have and he doesn't. But that's not enough. I read that this guy has made money making jingles for commercials. This makes sense. "Pumped Up Kicks" has an earwormy tune for certain. But if this is truly from then point of view of an abused child who couldn't take any more, why isn't the tone bleak or angry? Why doesn't the song end with the kid getting his just desserts: killed by a cop, or caught and put in jail?
The chorus is sung with relaxed, joyful abandon. That would not be a mood of a kid blasting away at his school chums. It's a device to juxtapose sick, senseless murder with a cheerful jingle that could sell bubblegum. And that juxtaposition is thus meant to be edgy, and edgy means "cool" for either attention or "art.". This jingle writing man INTENDED the cognitive dissonance of joy and murder.
There is even one chorus that is whistled so happily it makes the seven dwarfs' commute sound morose.
This guy has written a pro-murder song and aimed it directly at unhappy high school students. Rather than being edgy or cool, I believe this song is nearly an encouragement to mass murder. I have re-listened to it a number of times and I feel it is morally irresponsible to deliberately mix a happy tune like this with such a violent theme.
My son says there are lots of pop songs like this, and he mentioned "I hate mondays" as one of them, which I also did not know was about mass murder.
Interested to know if this song bothered others. I hate to bring it back to the presidential race, but while I am all for freedom of lyrics, I do think that songs like this should be openly discussed for what they are, not banned. The election has us all talking about culture rot and that's a good thing. Kids need to know that this song is just a cheap device and that this guy is using his freedom to cry fire in a crowded theater.
This song hit the airwaves last year here, in the fall. The refrain is unavoidable but the subtext isn’t. The tension between the atmospheric alt-pop sound and singsong, almost childish vocals, with the startling threat of gunfire that just sort of pops out of the blue, is the reason for the pull it exerts, or exerted, since it’s been long played to death and has fallen out of rotation.
It’s not the lyrics so much as the juxtaposition of them with the tune. And the happy whistling.
True true true. My dad had to hear little me singing to some pretty raunchy lyrics that I didn’t fully understand too.
Except for the unstable souls on the edge who are “validated” by the hype and act on it.
And their victims.
If my son were murdered by a kid with a gun, I’d want to know if this song was on the shooter’s playlist.
“This jingle writing man INTENDED the cognitive dissonance of joy and murder.”
This is happening a lot in our culture right now. One example that I can think of is an APP game I was playing on my phone. You blow things up by placing little explosive colorful icons. But the pictures you blow up are all innocent, happy things. Gingerbread men, candy canes, flowers, sunshine. I noticed it and thought exactly what you noticed about the song: there is a cognitive dissonance to blowing up sweet, happy, symbols. Why would they do that? I stopped playing and uninstalled the game.
Twisted. I think that’s a good word for the culture right now.
Bugs Bunny never made me try to tie a shotgun into a bow
This is funny.
The bass player in this band has a first cousin who was in the library and witnessed and survived the Columbine massacre.
I don’t know why this song was written or what it meant to the writer. If the lyricist is to be believed, then his objective has been met. He claims to want you to discuss teen violence and culture.
That is exactly what I’m talking about. It concerns me. Why is it supposed to be cool and normal to juxtapose mass murder with a soda pop jingle but religious candidates are called “scary” by the mainstream?
I should have clarified a point I made above as well.
“Production Teams” for those not familiar, are teams of writers/lyricists, musicians, a virtual band in themselves, either hired by the record company and sometimes the artist themselves, to write guaranteed hits. Two of the most successful today are called “The Martix” and “Stargate”. They appear in the credits of most top 40 hits you hear today. Sometimes they work with the artist on that artist’s own material to make it more ‘radio friendly’ and other times they simply do the song wholesale and the artist sings it. This is High dollar stuff.
An indy act probably cannot swing them financially. A record co uses them on new unproven acts to ensure they make enough sales to profit. If the artist cant write a hit tune, the production team will - period. If the artist’s songs don’t chart, then you can bet there will be no sophomore effort on that particular label. But the money the RecComp spends on the band WILL be recouped on the Production team hits.
I say this because thats where most of the agendas come in. Sure, you have “Rage Against the Machine” bands out to change the world through their lyrical ideas, but most often the social engineering ideas come in at the production team stage. They take big issues from the day/MSM/Movies/The Dem party and put them to song in an effort to make those ideas ‘cool’. Witness the laws/regs and money going to/from/between the entertainment industry and the Libs/Dems/Soros types.
In all likelihood, Foster was out for $$$ and to make a name for himself - he took a controversial idea and wildly succeeded.
Now take a look at Katy Perry’s kissed a girl song that had Production team assistance, or Hummingbird Heart, or Peacock.
I’m not picking on Perry, she’s just a current example. Riahnna Brittany Spears...the list is endless. All top 40 and a total studio creation...with all that infers.
There’s a lot of songs out there from the POV of the bad guy. But they’re still the bad guy, and it’s not pro the activity. Not everybody gets to write happy songs. And throwing in some cognitive dissonance between the sound of the song and the content of the lyrics makes it more interesting. Listen to the actual lyrics of Steely Dan, very happy music, very very dark lyrics.
I Don’t Like Mondays wasn’t an upbeat, happy song, it was serious exploration of the contents of a (real) killer’s head, so you can tell your son his argument doesn’t hold water.
Liberalism is CREATING these monsters, and I wish people would recognize that so we can start fixing it.
Same atmospheric quality, same childlike vocals. The gunfire reference was inspired by what sounds like automatic weapons being fired rhythmically, but is officially "rapping" that just so happens to sound that way, nudge nudge, wink wink.
It's very pleasant on the surface, it's on my Pandora station still. But, the lyrics are of the tune-out variety for me, anti-American at best, celebratory of killing at worst. The song achieved its first exposure on the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaires.
Why, it’s like making sausages. Lol. I actually wonder which came first, the catchy jingly tune, or his subject matter.
I bet there is great $ in the production team. It’s like editing, but in the music world.
Try Paper Planes by M.I.A.
All I wanna do is
(BANG BANG BANG BANG)
and-ah
(ka-ching)
and take your money.
Pirate skulls and bones
sticks and a stones and a weed and a bomb
Runnin when we hit’em
a lethal poison for the system
All I wanna do is...
Utterly stupid amounts of money. Especially on the back end %. One song like Brittnay’s “One more time” or Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” and the Ferrari basically gets paid off. Granted, that gets paid to the ‘business’ but that ‘business’ then writes the team some very nice checks as those kinda songs get done a lot.
Seriously, if you’re interested, look up those two team on “all-Music” and see just how many, and what kind of songs they do. And there are a dozen or so at their level of ‘name’. Then make the financial and ‘agenda/political’ connections.
You ought to see where that one went with the covers and remixes.
There’s one with a professionally produced video that’s just creepy. I never would have viewed a paper airplane as, well, somehow demonic until I saw that, with clouds of the descending upon a twilight NYC scene.
To me, it’s just a song. Some people take the lyrics seriously, and I think they’re lending far too much credence to the performer/songwriter’s influence. You COULD take it seriously and be offended, or you can just shrug that the guy has issues and just enjoy the tune.
>>from the POV of the bad guy
We recall a song from the late 60s in which the singer talks about happiness being a warm gun; the gun could also be interpreted in a sexual way. “I know nobody can do me no
harm”, the writer and singer says.
Except a little over a decade later, when the singer was
walking home with his wife. He didn’t have a gun. Mark
David Chapman did, and John Lennon was dead just 2 months or so after turning 40.
>>According to Lennon, the title came from the cover of a gun magazine that producer George Martin showed him: “I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.” The reference, whether or not intermediately from the magazine, was one of many 1960s riffs on Charles M. Schulz’s culturally popular saying, Happiness is a Warm Puppy, which began in the Peanuts comic strip and became a widely sold book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_is_a_warm_gun
Unfortunately, where there is free speech, there will also be foolish speech.
You know how you go into a fun house? And they shake the floor and spin the walls to cause you to feel unsteady? I think that’s what is happening with the culture right now. When you cause people to feel like they are not on solid footing they reach out. What do they reach out to? Well in the past it was family and religion. Maybe their neighbors. But now, people are only left to reach for government. Reach for some nameless, faceless, cold hearted bureaucrat.
The underpinnings of our society have been broken down. Divorce, abortion, religious scandals. Who can you trust? Who can you trust? Trust ... your public school. Your president. Your union. Your media. Trust the institutions that have replaced the people.
It’s all about control.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.