"Hammerhead" Vs. "Pumped-Up Kicks"
So, in the interest of putting something else out there... here's a song comparison!
Now, I happen to love the Offspring. In fact, when I was back in high school they were one of my favorite bands, if not my favorite ever, and I listened to their music constantly. And it was at this time in my life that they came out with their eight studio album, and with it singles like “You're Gonna Go Far, Kid,” and, of course, “Hammerhead.” Now, I loved both songs of course and I even made Death Note AMV's of them (which I will NOT link to because they're super old and I don't even use that YouTube account anymore, but you can look them up if you really want to see them). But by the time I started college they'd more or less fallen under the radar with me.
Foster the People's “Pumped-Up Kicks” was not a song I gave much thought to originally, though I heard it on the radio, largely because I'm very tone-deaf when it comes to trends in music. I've recently begun to take an interest in it thanks largely to seeing it recommended by a reviewer on That Guy with the Glasses, and with it, I developed a renewed interest in “Hammerhead” thanks to the similar subject matter (coincidentally, both bands are from the south of California).
So, both songs are about school shooters, obviously; but what's different about them is the way the bands relay that point. There's a number of really interesting ways in which the bands get their points across and how they adopt very different styles.
So, to start, there's the actual sound of the song. Now, “Pumped-Up Kicks” is infamous for making use of a feature known in certain circles as “lyrical dissonance,” that is, having a melody that doesn't match the lyrics and vice versa. In this case, we're dealing with a song about a disturbed school shooter, which sounds cheerful and upbeat (so upbeat, in fact, that the reviewer who analyzed the song didn't even credit the notion it was about something as depressing as school shootings, even though it is!). Now, the Offspring can and do do lyrical dissonance (their song “Hit That,” the first Offspring song I ever listened to, is one such example), but “Hammerhead” is not an instance of this. It sounds ominous in the beginning, and only gets more and more deranged-sounding the longer you listen. In particular, there's a point at which the creepy but mostly controlled melody goes quiet for a bit and then suddenly erupts into something much more frantic and fast-paced (hard to describe, but if you listen to the song you'll know what I'm talking about). Additionally, for most of the song, the singer has been more-or-less singing in the conventional sense. But by the end of the song, he's screaming. This is not a song trying to mislead you about how dark the situation is!
And we see the videos following their examples. Analyzing the video for “Hammerhead” is a bit tricky because I don't think it was actually created by the band, but rather picked out by them after running a contest, and so the things I say about it may be a bit wonky. Whatever the case, though, it is undoubtedly a very dark, trippy video, to the point I found it kind of hard to watch (I actually had to talk myself into watching it again so I could write this comparison). It's full of dark shapes and creepy figures and stuff blowing up and black liquid which may or may not be or represent blood cropping up in various places (though there isn't any actual gore, thankfully). By contrast, the video for “Pumped-Up Kicks” is mostly shots of the band playing, intercut with groups of young adults who may or may not be the band members going out and having fun in soft lighting, and if you just watch the video without paying attention to the lyrics (especially after watching anything by the Offspring), it's kind of relaxing. In fact, it doesn't seem to have anything much to do with the actual lyrical content.
Let's talk a bit more about the lyrics themselves. I've so far spoken a lot about how Foster the People seem to be misleading the audience of their song by giving it a happy melody and a harmless-looking video of scenes mostly unrelated to the song's subject matter. But if you bother to look at the lyrics, it's pretty obvious what it is they're trying to say: there's a kid, and he's being neglected/abused at home and/or at school, and so he decides to shoot everyone who has it better than he does (a bit of research informs me that the song's title, “Pumped-Up Kicks,” refers to an expensive shoe brand). The song even gives the kid a name, to further cement the narrative they're trying to tell.
The Offspring go about their song rather differently. Unlike Foster the People, they don't try to be ironic with the sound of the song itself, but they mislead in another way-using the lyrics. For most of the song, the narrator and school shooter is talking as though he's a soldier going to war. It's only owing to a few choice lyrics at the end (“And you can all hide behind your desks now/And you can cry 'teacher come help me'”) that it becomes clear what's really going on. In the video, this comes out in the way that wartime imagery is everywhere (there are crows that turn into fighter planes, for instance) but it's intercut with scenes inside a classroom. The title of the song, “Hammerhead,” is a reference to the hammering the narrator feels inside his head, which deludes him into thinking he's doing something he's not.
What the Offspring have done, then, is completely immerse you in the killer's head. The entire song is sung in first person, and his is the only viewpoint that gets expressed. As such, the fact that he's a school shooter essentially comes as a surprise, and the effect of all this is that many people misconstrue the song and think it really is about being in war (something the video has taken and run with, though it keeps the classroom setup as well). This is a very different style from what Foster the People have done. In “Pumped-Up Kicks” the chorus is actually sung in first person, but the rest of it, while it's still technically the killer's point of view, is told by a third party, thus leading to a certain level of distance from the killer's express thoughts-which, I have to say, at least to me makes it rather less intense of an experience than “Hammerhead” even before we consider the differences in melody.
Finally, it seems like the killers in each song are two different sorts of people. “Pumped-Up Kicks” is about a kid killing other kids, as happened in Columbine, for example; but it's not clear that the narrator of “Hammerhead” is a kid; in fact, he's almost certainly not. Pretty much everything about the song seems to support the notion that he may very well have been a soldier at one point, and has now become so delusional from fighting that he can't stop killing. Of course, this is speculation on my part.
So that's all the analysis I've got of these two songs. I couldn't say I think either one is “better” because that would imply that I think there's a significant difference in quality, and there really isn't. I personally like “Hammerhead” more, but I'm biased because of how long I've listened to it and because I think it's just more my kind of music. If anyone wants to argue that one of these songs is objectively “better” than the other, well, they're a more thorough music critic than I. I will say that either song is pretty cool, and totally worth checking out, if you haven't already.
You can see the videos below:
Hammerhead
Click to viewPumped-Up Kicks