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[And it slogs on...]
#9. The Killers, Somebody Told Me
February 2004–
I’m driving my friend, my friend’s friend, and my friend’s friend’s friend to an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. It’s about half an hour away, which–by Rhode Island terms–is a long drive, especially when you’re in the car with one work friend and two people you don’t actually know.
We’re listening to The Left End, this hipstery dance-punk show on WERS, the Emerson College radio station. If you lived in the Providence area, it was the only place you could go to hear that vein of Interpol-Rapture-Fischerspooner dance-punk that was all the rage at the time. (FNX, the Boston Phoenix, had a Providence affiliate back then, but while the Boston network played lots of cool stuff the Providence outlet mysteriously focused on crappy nu-metal. But I digress.)
I distinctly remember hearing two songs in the night of that strange, fateful party: one was Gianni V, the song about Andrew Cunanan by an almost totally-forgotten group called The Fitness. It resonated with us–”I wish that you were stalking me” is a good chorus when you’re on your way to an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party–and we didn’t notice actually notice that it was about Versace’s murderer until the DJ said the title.
That night we also heard Somebody Told Me, the first any of us would learn of a new Las Vegas group called The Killers.
It was kind of gay, which I liked. And really, really catchy, which I liked more. And over the next eight months I’d find myself dancing to it weekly at this hipster club we used to go to. But that first night we didn’t know that, didn’t know that the Killers would go on to fame and fortune and a major sophomore slump and an even more major junior year comeback. We didn’t know that they’d go on to sound like twats in interviews, or that every music writer would frame their story by comparing their sound to the tacky glamour of Sin City, or that their management would soon be setting them up in a trashy feud with a group called The Bravery.
That night, Somebody Told Me was just as mysterious and precious as Gianni V was.
Since I’ve started The Pop Chart, I’ve gotten into some fairly new bands, obscure to Americans, who had some overseas hits–The Temper Trap, The Big Pink, Hockey. But they’ve all gone on to success on American rock radio, months later, which always surprises me. Every time.
I don’t mind; I’m glad they’re getting out there. And I’m not bragging; there’s really nothing remarkable about listening to the current Australian singles chart and picking out a song you like. But what hits and what doesn’t, what lingers for years versus who’s around for six weeks, never ceases to surprise me. Hot Fuss, the Killers’ first album, is big and loud and condensed and expanded to the extreme; at the time, I remember thinking it was the loudest album I’d ever heard. But in the context of college radio, that doesn’t matter so much. It’s presented as equal to a song like Gianni V, which would never be a hit even in Urban Outfitters circles.
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