Thursday, February 19, 2009

A Musical Realization Involving the band Versus and cult Mass Suicides

So this morning I was looking for a pair of my shoes. They happened to be navy blue Adidas sneakers with white stripes. I asked my wife if she had seen "my Adidas", to which she replied "my Adidas laced with sadness". Now, to someone who knows neither me or my wife, that might be viewed as a rather cryptic thing to say to one's spouse at 8AM. However, I knew that she was making an inside reference to the song "My Adidas" by the band Versus, who we both are sort of rabid fans of. I also knew that she had gotten the lyric wrong - so I said "no, it's actually "My Adidas laced with cyanide". To which she said "huh?? Why are his Adidas laced with cyanide??" I didn't immediately have a good answer to that, but I pondered the question as I was doing the dishes. I remembered that there's a lyric in the song about Heaven's Gate, and I thought "I wonder if it's actually about the Heaven's Gate cult?" Sure enough, I consulted the lyric book, and found that it is indeed a pop song about a cult mass suicide. Here are the lyrics to the first verse:

"Waiting for the comet to appear
/A new beginning, far away from here /Start the countdown we’re going out in style / My adidas laced with cyanide".

Get it? So, the truly weird thing is that I've been listening to this song for going on 10 years now, singing along to the chorus, and having ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what Richard Baluyut was going on about. This sort of thing has happened to me before, but perhaps never with such dramatic impact. Now, the fact is, up until recently I didn't really have a clear idea of what actually happened with the Heaven's Gate suicides - for some reason it just sort of passed me by when it happened back in '97 (I was in college, what can I say). However, recently we watched a special on the Jonestown massacre, and that got me thinking about cults and mass suicides for about 30 minutes, so I did a little bit of googling and reading, and came across the whole Heaven's Gate story. So, it's entirely possible that when "My Adidas" came out in 2000, I could have read through the lyrics completely and STILL not known what the devil Baluyut was talking about.

So...what does this have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, except that I'll be just a little bit creeped out every time I hear that song from now on. But that won't stop me from listening to it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yay for Versus! I can never understand Richard's singing.