Pumped Up Kicks

I keep getting this song called Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People stuck in my head.  When I finally get it out of my head, Adam will walk by humming it and it gets right back in there.  It has been going back and forth between us lately because the melody is so addictive.

I don't really care that much about music.  A lot of it kind of sounds the same to me.  There is some music that I know I love and some I know I can't stand, but this song falls in a weird place in between those categories. 

I love the melody, but don't care for the words or the story in the song.  It is a happy, up-beat sounding song until you listen closely to the words, which are about a troubled boy going on a shooting spree at his school and home.  creepy.

I have probably scared you off from the song, but I suggest you listen to it and see for yourself. 

Here is an interview with the band about the song's meaning:

KROQ: The beat in “Pumped Up Kicks” is almost misleadingly uplifting – while the lyrics are surprisingly morbid. Is that a typical song-writing trait of yours?

MARK FOSTER: I wrote the music first. So that is probably why the music and the lyrics have their own identity. But there’s definite irony. I like to undercut the music with something that is ironically opposite. With music, you can communicate different layers of a story depending on where the music and the melody go. You put a certain melody under a certain word; you can make that word mean a million different things.
KROQ: But the lyrics about a kid with a 6-shooter gun walking into school is surprisingly dark territory……especially for a pop song. Is this an issue you feel close to?

FOSTER: I kind of wrote the song to bring awareness to the issue. That sort of thing keeps happening more and more in our country; it’s kind of turning into an epidemic. To me the epidemic isn’t gun violence; the epidemic is lack of family, lack of love, and isolation – kids who don’t have anywhere to go or anyone to talk to and that’s what makes them snap.
When a 13 or 14-year-old kid brings a gun to school and does something, sure, you blame them for making that choice….. But at the end of the day, he or she is still just a kid and there’s a lot of other things that led up that moment that should have changed.