#423: Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHC9HE7vazI

My countdown's introductory post specifies "Don't take the rankings seriously" and "I'll arrange the list for nice song-to-song segues", and starts a longer thought by saying "The list will progress slowly from Songs I Love". I bring this up because, while many of the songs I nominate will be unused to widespread honors, sometimes I'll do something like place a Pixies song at #423. I want to make sure the take-away, as readers, is "I love this song" (true!) and not "I'm dissing one of the most important and admired bands in Alternative Rock by putting 422 other songs by other acts ahead of them". Everything on my countdown, I list out of fondness, full stop.

If they'd made their first record in 1979 instead of 1987, the Pixies would likely have been
classified either as a punk band -- for their musical intensity, Black Francis's rudimentary half-spoken vocals, and straightforward guitar/ bass/ drums setup built on riffs and plenty of distortion -- or a "postpunk" band -- for their oblique chord sequences, strains of '50s girl-pop harmonies (from the charming and almost-in-tune Kim Deal), and indirect lyrics that scribble all over the already-blurry line between poetry and street-corner-mumbler nonsense. Instead, they were from the start a band on MTV's widely-viewed 120 Minutes, and their approach -- chord-wise, lyric-wise, and a dynamic approach in which instruments dropped to low volume for the singer's verses in order to slam back in at maximum intensity later -- became a template for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (intentionally) and a few years' worth of hit "alternative rock" songs.

"Monkey Gone to Heaven" is notable among Pixies songs for:

* A particularly grand, soaring, if still oblique chorus.

* Lyrics that specifically sound like some not-all-there guy walking up to you to mutter about environmental destruction, rather than about something undecipherable, and doing so after earning a literature degree with well-earned good grades that did nothing, obviously, to help him afford rent later on.

* Subtle cello accompaniment.

* The whole "If man if 5, then the devil is 6, and God is 7" numerology that various commentators have found fun in playing with. My favorite (which has no supporting evidence that I'm aware of) turns it into a Doctor Who commentary -- an accurate though unfair fandom shorthand for how Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy played their turns at the title role. But for whatever reason I also seem to have a weakness for numerical lyrics in which the numbered sequence doesn't mean anything concrete.

Veda Hille's "Instructions" -- which will fail to appear in my countdown's top fifty only because I'm going with a different of her songs instead, and which almost inspired me to title this blog "Don't Think of It as Reasonable" -- is my favorite example. I certainly don't claim "Monkey"'s vague Biblicalism has the baffling inspirational power of life guidance like Hille's "8. Clean the wound, and take note of the metal" or "11. Learn to recognize the beauty of your own back" or "16. When blinded, construct images around unknown sounds, and assume you are correct. 17. Remember to surface. 18. Endeavor to dive." .... Or even that it conveys the oddly charming spite of Gordon Gano enumerating his mental health pills on Violent Femmes' "Kiss Off", But apparently I like that sort of thing, and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" has it. So hey.