This Year: 2009

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

This may be the most obscure song in this series. [1] It's also the one I'm sure should have been a big crowd-pleasing moment in a gigantic Hollywood movie, the one that's used in all the trailers and defines that movie for a generation.

That could still happen. The wonderful thing about obscurity is that it can end at any time, and obscure things don't seem old, because they're unfamiliar. So let me have my dream.

For 2009, my favorite song is the apocalyptic We're All Gonna Die, by Mieka Pauley.

(She re-recorded it three years later for her record The Science of Making Choices - and that's a great record, don't get me wrong, with the devastating Never Fuck a Woman You Don't Love among several other killer tracks - but, as usual, I like the first, rawer version better. For me, Gonna Die is a generation-later avatar of the Psych Furs' Pretty in Pink: the second version is good, but the first version kills. So I'm specifying the version from the EP From the Mouth of Paris here.)

Gonna Die is a story-song - one of the reasons why I think it would translate to Hollywood so well. (The sound is another, of course.) The story is simple and straightforward: the title basically says it.

The part that would play over the giant expensive SFX is, of course, the chorus:

The scientists proved it: we’re all gonna die
They got charts & equations, the how when & why
You did not invite them, and neither did I
But they’re here—drink up, we’re all gonna die

This song rocks. I don't know how better to say it. It is big and imposing and just a great rock song, the kind that takes over a room and pushes everything else happening to the side. Again, it would be awesome over expensive Dolby speakers booming in the darkness on all sides in some multiplex, with CGI eye-kicks popping on a giant screen in front of you.

Until that happens, you'll just have to listen to the song, and imagine the apocalypse. That's pretty damn good, too.

[1] Since it is obscure, and I'm choosing the less-known version of an already obscure song, here's a link to it directly on Bandcamp. Really, you need this song in your life.