Music of the Weak: The Killers Show Up To Kanye’s Worst Single of the Year Party With a Bottle of Cheesy Electronica and a Fat Bag of Suck

The Killers – “Human”

The handful of moderately significant cultural touchstones that arrived with the release of Andrew WK’s I Get Wet in 2001 included both the album art—for which Andrew WK gave himself a bloody nose by bashing his own face with a brick—and the adrenaline-heavy aggro cock rock contained therein.  But the real coup happened when, for a brief moment, blatancy overtook irony as cool music’s chief signifier.  Andrew WK achieved where The Strokes, The White Stripes and that whole generation of “Rock Is Back” artists failed—bringing rock back to its gooney, sloppy, weird essence.  It was enough to send Ryan Schrieber into a major conniption fit, and if that’s not enough to put you squarely in Andrew WK’s corner, did I mention that he bashed himself repeatedly in the face with a brick? 

Andrew WK still makes his musical asskickery for Japan-only releases (and, incidentally, Pitchfork loves him now that they don’t release his albums in America.)  While he never had a clear successor here, his legacy lives on in bands like The Killers, whose complete lack of subtlety and penchant for fist pumping don’t necessarily impede the quality of their music.  Singles “Mr. Brightside,” “Somebody Told Me,” “All the Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young” could stand alongside any rock singles of the last eight years; for mall rock, they’re fucking pinnacles. 

It’s this context that makes “Human” a raging disappointment, lacking the rawk that gave substance to the earlier hits.  When “When You Were Young” only had “We’re burning down the highway skyline/On the back of a hurricane” to hang its hat on lyrically, its music became a hyperkinetic rock history search engine that started at Bruce Springsteen and ended at My Chemical Romance, aiming at pleasure and nostalgia and nailing both of them.  While those ideals may seem shallow next to, say, the detached commentary of another monster single from that year, Guillemots’ “Trains to Brazil,” they’re not bad for an early morning walk to the subway.  “Human,” on the other hand, begins with a simple dance beat.  The missing guitar highlights Brandon Flowers’ overproduced, affected, fey vocals—it makes him sound like Cher, and not in a good way. 

Careening from rock music into dance music may be de rigueur these days, and, Simian Mobile Disco aside, it may produce universally horrid results, but the major crime of “Human” comes down to something much simpler and even more common: The Killers completely misunderstand their own strengths.  “Human” makes it seem like The Killers view themselves as capital A Artists.  Maybe they began to believe their own press—after all, they managed both to connect with critics and to have commercial success.  In actuality, The Killers play a different cultural role—their successes have caught the zeitgeist (massive choruses, 4/4 beats in rock music, sexual ambiguousness, earnestness) and distilled it into something marketable.  It may not be a role quite as weighty as that of an innovator, but it secretly takes a comparable amount of skill.

What has happened, though, is that The Killers have misidentified what their actual skills are; maybe they thought the ideas contained within their other, better, singles were their own.  The good news here is that, from “Human,” we get high comedy:  Electronica that sounds like it could have been pre-loaded into Pro Tools; non-ironic use of vocoders; and the most amazingly ridiculous hook with “I’m on my knees looking for the answers/ Are we human or are we dancers?”  No doubt The Killers thought it was a profound question.

-Martin Brown, 2008

Comments

[Kenny]

I greatly dislike The Killers, so I have nothing of worth to say about this article other than Andrew WK is *awesome*. I'm very sad I've not yet seen him in concert.

I'm mostly commenting to say I bought that Black Sabbath book about Master of Reality from the eyes of a mental hospital inmate, and it is *awesome*. Good looking out on that one!

[Tucker Stone]

I've got high hopes for the Andrew WK produced album by Lee Scratch Perry, which I think is still unreleased. Is that Kit Kat jingle story about him true?

[Tim O'Neil]

Well, I could not have disagreed with you more about that Kanye song - I never cared for Kanye before, but Love Lockdown is pretty awesome. I have never lived the Killers before, either - so, if you hate this new single, does that mean I'll love it as well?

If this happens, we'll have some sort of strange reverse synchronicity thing going on.

[Kenny]

What's this about a Perry produced Andrew WK album??

I'm sensing we need an Andrew WK column! lol

As for Kanye, I was embarrassed about my love of Love Lockdown until I read Tim's comment. I really like the song, and I have no idea why!

[Marty]

Here's what I think about Love Lockdown: You like it because Kanye's a good pop songwriter, and the key element of any pop song is that it be likeable. But that in no way makes it a quantitatively good song, because I've done the math and that would be impossible.

I am interested to see what you think of The Killers song, though, Tim. I have heard that there are people out there who like it, but I find that a little hard to believe. Maybe there's a small army of Killers loyalists out there who have all moved to Las Vegas and now, thanks to "Human," have all traded their copies of Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch for copies of Daft Punk's Human After All.

[TruthSeeker]

ITS SIMPLE.
He is asking us if we are humans (material form) or spirit beings (light consciousness/ divine dancers)?
From St. Germain:
"the true self knows no lack; the divine self knows there is only love in the truth and humble with its beauty. Surrendering to that part of you that expresses love is the only way to freedom."
"the idea that thought creates reality and meditation helps the process of evolvement is old news; lets all join the Divine dance. In truth you are participating in this dance whether you know it or not, the point is to do it consciously."
St. Germain believes aliens from out of space that are human type spiritual beings will appear in our skies October 14, 2008. The point for doing so is that humans no longer have free choice, and the time is right for disclosure.