Pumped Up Kicks

I still don’t know what pumped up kicks are.

The trainer we have is excellent. He tells us little funny anecdotes to keep things moving through eight hours of training. One of his anecdotes he had to mention the band Foster the People, and the song started in my brain again.

I HATE that song.

I remember when I first heard the song, with its catchy beat and its lilting vocals and its crazy pop sensibility. It bit my foot hard and didn’t let go. I couldn’t wait for it to come around again. I think I even bought it off of Amazon.

Some kind of shoes? I guess?

Then I listened to the song. Really listened.

It’s not new territory for a song to cover, certainly. Bob Geldoff did, as did Pearl Jam. But neither of those songs were deceptive about it. Certainly with “Jeremy” the music, the tone of it, the horror pastiche it creates, melds with the subject matter.

The FTP song just makes a kid plotting to kill his classmates seem like a walk in the park.

I always wondered how that band could continue after Sandy Hook.

Anyway. That’s my sideways way of saying that the gig I was babbling about here some weeks ago did not pan out and now I’m at a new gig and still training so that I can answer phones and explain things to people.

So that happened.