Harvey Milk: "Death Goes To The Winner"

Ever since it became fashionable for indie kids to have a token favorite band in every genre, the weirdest juxtapositions have kept popping up. Just go to any Pitchfork Music Festival, where you’re more than likely to see Dizzee Rascal cussing out Fleet Foxes or Mastodon and Clipse trading uneasy looks. But does your average Belle & Sebastian vinyl owner really dig on Pig Destroyer or Young Jeezy? Chances are their copies of the split 7” with Orchid and the Can’t Ban The Snowman mixtape are freshly creased and scratch-free.

But when the tastemaker gods finally bestowed their good graces on Harvey Milk, for once it was a token genre band that it would make sense for a prissy hipster to like. Just give a listen to “Death Goes To The Winner.” From a certain angle it almost seems like the metal growls and chugging riffage are winky facades over the hilarious Velvet Underground (“I’m… waiting… on… my… MANN!!”) and Beatles (“woke up, fell out of bed, put a pistol to my head”) references, not to mention the angst-parody chorus that somehow evokes Barry Manilow’s “Mandy.”

Don’t get me wrong, though, they Rock: the squealing solos and piercing noise that fan the krautrock flames for most of the song’s eight minutes are as intimidating as anything on Hell Hath No Fury or Hidden World, making the humor and sludge-Zeppliny quiet/loud transitions necessary to balance things out. Like any of Lil Wayne’s silly, not-quite-street metaphors, it just makes them more daring and strangely charismatic. And the fact that they, or Lil Wayne for that matter, appeal to many with otherwise narrow tastes is proof not of bloggy trends or lowest-common-denominator pandering, but of the secret appeal of the transgressive, the smart, the groundbreaking and the true.