Better Things: I Don't Like Mondays

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I didn't include this song in This Year, but it was close. One reason it dropped out is that posting it on a Monday seemed just a little too on-the-nose. But, two years later, why not?

This is the Boomtown Rats, with their most famous song, from the 1979 record The Fine Art of Surfacing.

I Don't Like Mondays is about a school shooting - it was shocking at the time, but there have been so many, more shocking or differently shocking, since then, that I doubt anyone not directly involved remembers this particular event, back in early 1979 in San Diego.

(Oh, of course it was in the US, for all that the Boomtown Rats are an Irish band. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens, as The Onion has put it, over and over again.)

The song is still shocking, I think, still that complex combination of anger and fear and surprise and sorrow. And it only alludes to the shooting until the third verse - I do wonder if someone, hearing the song for the first time now, would get the point before that point. I think so. I think the song itself, the sound of it, the ominous power of it, makes it clear. But we'd have to hear from new listeners to know.

Tell me why: I don't like Mondays,
I want to shoot the whole day down.