MURDERGRAM

I often forget it sometimes but The Misfits' Walk Among Us is one of my favorite albums. I'm not sure exactly how  - because on many, many levels its just terrible. Bad production, bad lyrics, bad playing, bad conceptual idea for a band. Oh god, its awful. But even as I write this, while listening to Walk Among Us straight through for the first time in probably 10 or 12 years (via Spotify), I'm laughing and smiling and utterly transported (I'm off to Narnia! Thanks, Glenn!).

Already past the age of taking The Misfits seriously - in 1999, done with college, living alone for the first time, working a temp job with a giant pharmaceutical company - some friends of mine bought me a copy of Walk Among Us after I looked after their two-year old son one afternoon. The preceding year, I had only listened to one cassette in my car - Radiohead's Ok Computer on one side, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique on the other. I always fast-forwarded through the Ok Computer side - not sure why. Paul's Boutique is another one of those albums that's absolutely genius but captures some growing pains - the Beasties weren't yet doing ironically terrible lyrics: Paul's Boutique frequently features rhymes that are bad and sincere. The point is that I was obsessing; I was unhappy with music and life in general, and looking backwards. I didn't get TV in my apartment and I was scared to be there by myself, because I'd just seen the Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, so I just listened to The Misfits and read comic books until I was too tired to stay awake anymore.

Holy crap - Spotify's constant commercials are horrible. Their business model must be based on annoying people into paying for their service. Ok - every song on this album is awesome and horrible. Such a come-hither velvety croon on the lyric "collect the heads of little girls and put them on my wall."Also, it takes like 22 minutes to listen to this whole album. I think a brilliant musical undertaking would be reworking all the lyrics to Walk Among Us so that they actually become the romantic-movie cliches that all the horror-movie cliches seem to partially imply.