Just in time for a nice holiday push, America’s favorite torchbearers of Liberace schmaltz – The Killers – return next month with the brand new studio album Day & Age. I say “brand new” somewhat loosely, however, and not because of all the chatter about how it’s a return to Hot Fuss’s synth-heavy hooks or any of that; nah, I’ll just keep insulating myself from critical interpretation of the Killers’ canon if it’s all the same to you.
You see, even without any prior research into readymade topics like the band’s “mission statement”, “evolution”, or “intent” on this album – all of which I’m sure will be peddled for journalist fodder on imminent magazine covers and such – I can tell you right now that there’s most likely not a hell of a lot about Day & Age that will be new or interesting.
The whole affair just has a worn feel to it, something that’s awfully familiar, and it’s not just in the Eurythmics-aping video for the first single “Human”, which finds Flowers and company in the desert wearing some sort of extinct bird’s plumage and in possession of a few Blue Man Group stage props (watch it HERE).
The real familiarity comes with the album’s tracklisting, a spread of 10 names so bland and hackneyed that you can’t help but feel they’ve already been used many times as song titles or derived from previous sources:
1. Losing Touch
2. Human
3. Spaceman
4. Joy Ride
5. A Dustland Fairytale
6. This Is Your Life
7. I Can’t Stay
8. Neon Tiger
9. The World We Live In
10. Goodnight, Travel Well
And guess what? With the exception of “A Dustland Fairytale” - which in itself just sounds like Flowers flipped to a random page of the Cliffs Notes for The Grapes of Wrath and picked it - every song on here has numerous precedents in popular music, either explicit or implied. A closer look please…
1. “Losing Touch” – Prior examples of popular (and not so popular) songs titled “Losing Touch” include a 1978 cut by Barry Manilow, a 2002 song by Toby Keith, a metal song by a band called Circus of Dead Squirrels, an insipid emo-ish track by My Vitriol, an electronic-tinged song by Nine Leaves, and many many more. I just selected these to demonstrate the presence of the bland title “Losing Touch” in seemingly EVERY genre of music.
2. “Human” – Seeing as this is the first single from Day & Age as well as the same exact title as the #1 hit popular song by Human League (whose sound The Killers clearly pilfer), I think we’ve just identified the most obvious source of déjà vu on the list already, yes? But wait, there’s more. The sheer lack of imagination behind a song title such as “Human” becomes even more evident when considering that everyone from Metallica and the Pretenders to the Cheetah Girls and Goldfrapp have penned songs called “Human”.
3. “Spaceman” – My first thought upon seeing this track name was that it must be a restrained (restrained for a band as into sequins as The Killers, overt for anyone else) homage to David Bowie, another presumed idol of Flowers judging by his bombastic androgyny. But it’s quite simpler than that; see, like the preceding songs, there are a number of pre-existing tunes titled “Spaceman”, including selections from Harry Nilsson, 4 Non Blondes, Journey, and Birdmonster (to name a few). And that’s not even counting the classic “Mr. Spaceman” by The Byrds.
4. “Joy Ride” – You guessed it, more of the same. Other artists who have written songs called either “Joy Ride” or “Joyride” include Mariah Carey, Roxette, Ray Charles, Built to Spill, Sly & Robbie, Spyro Gyra, and Snot. Hmm.
5. “A Dustland Fairytale” - A gasp of originality? Could be, until you skip to the next track…
6. “This Is Your Life” – Or, “This Is Your Pre-Existing Song Title That We Took For Our New Album, Thaaanks!”. At the risk of seeming redundant – whatever, not like that’s ever stopped The Killers, zing! – here’s a list of artists that have already released songs with this exact title: The Commodores, Dropkick Murphys, The Dust Brothers, En Vogue, Switchfoot, Low vs. Diamond, Carcass, and….wait for it…Nuno Bettencourt!
7. “I Can’t Stay” – Doesn’t this name just ooze a shitty-bar-band-playing-blues-covers vibe? No surprise then that many of the existing songs titled “I Can’t Stay” are of the generic “woe is me” 12-bar-blues variety, including cuts from artists called Big Fat Snake, Big George Jackson & Serious Bidness, and Bluesman. The flipside to this are a series of generic slow-jam R&B songs titled “I Can’t Stay” by such esteemed artists as L.E.S. and Ernie B. That’s some rarified air you just placed yourselves in, Killers.
8. “Neon Tiger” – My theory with this song title is that the band chose to conflate two established trends to create a SUPERTREND. The first trend here is using the word neon to precede a completely arbitrary and unrelated noun, seen previously in “Neon Bible” by Arcade Fire, “Neon Knights” by Queensryche (and again separately by MSTRKFT), “Neon Wilderness” by The Verve, “Neon Golden” by Notwist, and “Neon Moon” by Brooks & Dunn. The second trend involves placing the word tiger after a preceding adjective, resulting in phrases that make sense – see “Paper Tiger” by Beck and separately by Spoon – and those that don’t – witness “Tiger Tiger” by Duran Duran and “Easy Tiger” by Depeche Mode. By combining the two, The Killers have emerged with a name that’s sure to win you over by sheer force of its familiarity: all hail “Neon Tiger”!
9. “The World We Live In” – This is a pretty sneaky one. Instead of simply lifting, say, the title “Land of Confusion” from Genesis, The Killers instead “borrowed” the most hummable lyric from the entire song and used that as a title. The result? You’re sitting there with “Land of Confusion” in your head wondering why the hell the name “The World We Live In” sounds so damn familiar.
10. “Goodnight, Travel Well” – Not wanting to break patterns of predictability and familiarity at the end of the race, the final track on Day & Age uses yet another time-honored tradition in naming songs: the last song “farewell” title. Popular precedents for this include the Beatles’ White Album closing with “Good Night” and the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness concluding with “Farewell and Goodnight”.
Like the bland safety of The Killers’ actual music, there seems to be some reason to picking such familiar titles. It’s emblematic of their whole function as a band, using just enough cozy familiarity to set off the requisite cognitive bells and whistles to let you know it’s inoffensive and equally malleable for inclusion at your next cocktail party playlist or whilst shopping at Pottery Barn.
And with all that in mind, I’m only human, not a spaceman, and though this is your life here in a dustland fairytale, I can’t stay in the world we live in because I’m losing touch so just wanted to wish you a joy ride that’s brighter than a neon tiger and say goodnight, travel well. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
10.29.08 10:07 am
Nice post Mike! I should make one of those things where you have two lists of words and you pick one word from each list to make a name. Bands could use it for song titles. Maybe add on one of those “take your mother’s maiden name and the street you grew up on” and ta-da! You have a band name!
10.29.08 10:57 am
amazing post!! But I saw the same post written by my grandmother in 1976…(Yes, before the internet even existed. Big whoop, wannafightaboutit?)
10.29.08 11:13 am
Yeah, this was by far my best procrastination reading of the morning. Mike’s post has made me articulate something that I have long felt: The Killers are really only good for one thing–hating. Like the LA Lakers and the Dallas Cowboys, it’s just really pleasurable to despise this band.
11.06.08 3:21 pm
So you are some sort of music critic? You chose to ignore the content of the entire album and simply reviewed the song titles. Here’s what I think happened: I don’t think you’ve listened to the album at all because you were not sent a copy for reviewing. Instead, you pretended you’ve heard the whole thing and then wrote a negative review of it, due to some personal distaste of the band and an unnecessary fascination with song titles. Judging by the same criteria, you would have given a negative review to the most famous band of all time, The Beatles.
11.06.08 3:33 pm
John, here’s what I think happened: I think you missed the entire point of the piece, which was to take a look at an album with NO prior information and extrapolate based exclusively on song titles. Where in the piece did I say that I had heard the whole thing? I’m pretty sure the caveat “even without any prior research” suggests as much.
The whole conceit was that these song titles were ridiculously uninspired; you’re right, maybe the songs themselves are amazing, but that wasn’t the point of it all, which I thought I had made pretty clear with the title “Recycled song TITLES galore on The Killers’ Day & Age” , (emphasis there being my own because you clearly missed it the first time).