Alternate UK album cover photo for Strange Little Girls (2001). This is the photo for “I Don’t Like Mondays” in the liner notes

This is the second in a pair of posts about Bob Geldof’s song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Read the first post here.

“The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels”

My son had a Social Studies assignment last year to watch a few episodes of Aaron Sorkin‘s “The West Wing.” Watching them him, my wife and I got hooked again on the show, and we’re continuing watching the series with him well after the assignment has passed. The two hour premier episode of Season Four, “20 Hours in America,” incorporates a montage of scenes with a familiar soundtrack. As the stressed-out White House staff reacts to a deadly bombing at the fictional Kennison State University, we hear a mournful Tori Amos singing “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The clip below is cut in a place or two, but is reasonably faithful to the original broadcast.

It’s powerful television. Watching West Wing clips can be like listening to a piece of music–aesthetically and emotionally. (Incidentally, the “streets of heaven” line is borrowed from Tom Hanks’s 1993 Academy Award acceptance speech.) This clip first introduced me to Amos’s version. Before we turn directly to it, I’d be interested in your thoughts about how the song’s effect (or affect) changes when placed in the context of a terror attack when compared with its original source in the case of a disturbed teenager. Does the issue of senselessness diminish when the violence is put in a quasi-political rather than a psychological context? Every time I have thus far felt my foot land solidly on an answer, the ground on which I’m metaphorically standing has a little earthquake.

Amos recorded “I Don’t Like Mondays” for her 2001 album Strange Little Girls. Hers is decidedly my favorite version.

Strange Little Girls is a concept album, in which Amos performs songs about women written by men. She accompanies each song with a picture of her portraying a character depicted in or derived from the song. The image at the top of Amos in a sheriff’s uniform is the picture for “I Don’t Like Mondays.” This promotional video for the album, featuring “I Don’t Like Mondays” shows the process of the photo shoot.

The sheriff’s uniform confused me at first. I had trouble finding the picture for “I Don’t Like Mondays,” or thought I did, because I was looking for Amos made up like Brenda Ann Spencer. Why the change? Well, Neil Gaiman‘s vignette accompanying the song in the liner notes gives us a further clue.
__________________________

Neil Gaiman

monday’s child

Standing in the shower, letting the water run over her, washing it away, washing everything away, she realises that what made it hardest was that it had smelled just like her own high school.

She had walked through the corridors, heart beating raggedly in her chest, smelling that school smell, and it all came back to her.

It was only what, six years, maybe less, since it had been her running from locker to classroom, since she had watched her friends crying and raging and brooding over the taunts and the names and the thousand hurts that plague the powerless. None of them had ever gone this far.

She found the first body in a stairwell.

That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, “I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“That this job is making me hard. That it’s making me someone else. Someone I don’t know any more.”
He pulled her close, and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.

Listen to Sexsmith on YouTube here.

These singer-songwriter treatments replace angst and rage with sadness and resignation. They are the most successful covers, in my estimation; but plenty of alternatives are out there to satisfy different tastes. A number of Punk bands have delivered more fully on the edgy promise of The Boomtown Rats’ original, eschewing the piano for more aggressive guitar and rhythm work. Divit and Mad Parade‘s versions follow this vein. Trunk Federation provides more of an industrial music feel. Rather than paste these songs in one by one, I’ll provide a short Spotify playlist, which will give you Industrial, A Cappella, and Reggae options. The song has also been sampled within Hip Hop pieces.

Most intriguing to me is Marcela Mangabiera‘s Bossa Nova version. It’s vocally lovely and very pleasant to listen to, but quite surprising in the context of what the song is about and its original tone. (There’s a mix up on Mangabiera’s Myspace page [see link] so I can’t provide you the version there. Listen on YouTube here.)

Marcela Mangabeira

Alternate approaches

In the previous post, I wrote about how Bob Geldof took a thematic, rather than a narrative, approach to turning the Brenda Ann Spencer story into art. This is part of what made the song’s true meaning elusive in the early weeks of its introduction by the band, but also part of what allowed for the broad tent of meanings that people could infuse into the song before they eventually discovered its true reference. In addition to sparing Geldof  lawsuits, it also maintained some decorous distance from what must have been the horror of that Monday morning in January 1979.

The Spencer shooting would likely have passed into complete obscurity without Geldof’s song–an issue we’ve seen present him with some pangs of conscience. In the popular imagination and memory, subsequent attacks, most particularly Columbine in 1999 and Sandy Hook in 2012, have eclipsed whatever attention Spencer’s Cleveland School shooting was given. Of these two more recent tragedies, Columbine has thus far brought forth the most musical artistic production, attempting to grapple with the horrors of that day.

Amanda Palmer

In terms of murder ballad interpretations of school assault incidents, in my experience there’s a delicate balance to be maintained between being clear about what’s being described and being artistically effective. Probably the least successful murder ballad I’ve heard, actually, has to do with the deadliest school assault in U.S. history. I won’t link to the song here, and I’m reluctant to single out the songwriter for a well-intentioned attempt to make artistic meaning out of the tragedy, but the song suffers from an excess of plot exposition because it relates a tragedy hardly anyone remembers. It also lays on the moral with a pretty thick coat, but it’s a moral that doesn’t provoke any real existential challenge–it’s more like “can you believe it?”. I’ll let the internet sleuths among you find your way to that song. But, suffice it to say for the purposes of this discussion, sometimes a true, narrative ballad is exactly the wrong thing for this kind of episode.

In thinking about how The Boomtown Rats approached the video storytelling for “I Don’t Like Mondays,” I was reminded of Amanda Palmer‘s “Strength Through Music.” This is a much more successful example. Palmer’s song develops a theme closely tied to the Columbine High School massacre.  Maureen introduced some of Palmer’s music in our first post last year, and is probably better positioned to place this song in the context of her work than I am. (Incidentally, Palmer is married to Neil Gaiman now.)

The influence of music in the Columbine tragedy itself and the subsequent musical interpretations of those events could fill a whole week of posts here at the blog, at least. (Incidentally, there’s an open, if unanswered, invitation to one of our bloggers to take up that topic when and if inspiration strikes and time allows.) But, I want to add this particular song to the discussion here because both through the song, and especially through the video, Palmer stands face-to-face with the artist’s relationship to the killer. Listen to the song, and then watch the video.

Lyrics

Chilling. I find it to be a remarkably effective piece of video augmentation to the song’s theme. The conclusion of the video, where Palmer reaches the shooter to find her song playing on his portable music player evokes the artist’s tie with real world perpetrators in a deeply affecting way. I can’t do an exhaustive exploration of Columbine related songs, but despite its musical style not lending itself to an easy sing-along, I see this song as a clear successor to “I Don’t Like Mondays,” thematically and in its approach to narrative.

Foster the People

For one more point of contrast, let’s give a listen to and a look at Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.” This song has one of the best pop hooks of this millennium thus far, in my humble opinion. It’s success probably sailed forward well before many people fully realized that the song’s voice inhabits the mind of a disturbed teen gunman. In various places, Foster the People have argued that their peppy, dance-able song isn’t intended to trivialize these episodes, but to open up discussion. One member of the band has a family connection to a Columbine survivor, and band members’ comments about seem to reinforce a certain seriousness of artistic purpose. Their idea appears to be that the pop music underlying the lyrics is an aesthetic avenue to get people thinking by getting them dancing first.

The video for the song gives every appearance of being an outtake from a remake of The Monkees, in that it relates nothing directly about the thematic content, and just appears to feature them as a happy-go-lucky, successful boy band.

Lyrics

There’s more than one way to get your listener’s attention about homicidal feelings, I suppose. To give them the benefit of the doubt, we can hear and see that the pop hook and the frivolous video both contrast sharply with the content of the lyrics. So, there’s a consistency there. Perhaps this is the best way to take up the theme for a more ironic age.

The three songs give us three different artistic approaches. The first is un-self-conscious and straightforward–art doing what art does. The second is self-conscious and straightforward. The third is self-conscious and ironic. The contrasts give us some different options for understanding artistic responsibility (not moral responsibility exactly) in relating these kind of events.

Bob Geldof

Despite its youthful angst and the overall problem of senselessness, Geldof’s “I Don’t Like Mondays” strikes me as a sincere artistic grappling with an otherwise incomprehensible situation. He’s not ironic, although the song does force the singer and the listener to inhabit the voice of the killer in a fashion that’s essential to the success of the song. As we learned later, he came to feel the moral and emotional burden of providing a kind of consoling fame to Brenda Spencer.

Palmer’s song takes the shooter’s relationship with music very directly and self-consciously as its theme–as is clear through the title and particularly clear in the music video. It is one of many responses by the musical community to Columbine and similar events where music was looked to as a factor. To be clear, I don’t think she’s assigning blame anywhere, but she is provoking serious reflection on the issue.

Foster the People’s approach to the issue might plausibly considered a rhetorical or artistic strategy to introduce the conversation to an audience far too weary of too many real-life, shocking stories of this. They open the door to listeners of “The Age of Irony” by getting them dancing first. Taking FtP at their word, that’s what they’re getting after, although fully to take them seriously on this point requires a bit of research into their personal background and what they’ve had to say outside the song.

We often stir up more than we settle here, and I hope I have at least stirred something up. The contrast of “Pumped Up Kicks”with “I Don’t Like Mondays” and “Strength Through Music” we see three different approaches to artistic responsibility–responsibility both to truth and beauty on the one hand, and responsibility relative to getting their audience engaged in meaningful reflection on the other. What is the hook that brings the moment of revelation or the cathartic purge? There’s more than one way to go, but among songs like this the way is perilous–however worth traveling.

Thanks for reading. That will be it for this week, I think. See you next week.

Amanda Palmer