Step on the glass, staple your tongue
Bury a friend, try to wake up
Cannibal class, killing the son
Bury a friend, I wanna end me…
Well look at me, featuring a song from this century!
You can credit Boots for this one, since she suggested Billie Eilish‘s Bury A Friend as a worthy addition to our Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs. She was pretty much right, too. This one is a strong creeper. (Coincidentally, Billie Eilish was the last concert Boots saw before Quarantine, and my Concert Girl has been going through concert withdrawals. It’s BAD, ya’ll…)
Anyway… Bury A Friend. Eilish is having a conversation with a monstrously distorted version of herself. Just the feel of the song alone is enough to merit inclusion. The tone is dark, cold, sparse, and just haunting enough that the chills going down your spine will beg you turn up the heat. Lyrically the song is an abstraction of disturbing imagery mixed with the dissolution of an unspecified relationship (or perhaps, any and every relationship). Entropy as an art form, as it were.
This is the proverbial monster under your bed, lurking just out the light’s reach, waiting to pounce upon everything your soul tries to protect: secrets, fears, insecurities, all that fun stuff. Eilish reportedly said that Bury A Friend was inspired by her sleep paralysis affliction, one that I have suffered from since I was a 5 or 6 years old. If you’ve never experienced sleep paralysis before, it’s absolutely terrifying; the demon that terrifies you feels very, very real. Every nightmare you have becomes tangible and keeps you trapped, in the dark, for what seems an eternity.
Get a cat companion for that, by the way. They can see the demon in your nightmare and they will banish it and no, I am not kidding one bit. But that’s a knish for another deli…
Bury A Friend forces you to confront the demon inside your own twisted soul. The one that fucks everything up. The one that destroys bonds. The one that holds you down and terrifies you at night…
What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me?
What are you wondering? What do you know?
Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me?
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?
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