Story highlights Mark Foster reflects on "Pumped Up Kicks" following the Vegas massacre The song is about a boy who fantasizes about shooting up his school. Although its tone is jubilant and upbeat -- prompting some fans to blast it during celebratory times -- "Pumped Up Kicks" is about a boy named Robert, who fantasizes about shooting up his school.
The deadliest shooting in modern American history took place on October 1 when a gunman opened fire at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, leaving 58 dead and more than injured. Read More. After the massacre, many Democratic and Republican lawmakers agreed to ban the sale of bump-fire stocks, but a month later, Congress does not appear to be taking steps to outlaw them.
With emotions raw after Vegas, Foster said that he and his bandmates decided not to perform "Pumped Up Kicks" at the Austin City Limits festival in Texas or at the "All Things Go" music festival in Washington because some people misinterpret its meaning.
After Vegas massacre, country music artists largely stay out of gun debate. It's illuminating a situation but from an interesting point of view," Foster added. The Grammy-nominated musician reflected on whether artists have a responsibility to speak out during trying times ahead of the band's headlining performance at the "All Things Go" music festival last month.
CNN: There's been no shortage of bad news in the world. When Pumped Up Kicks first aired in , it was considered a sleeper hit. It was the debut single for Foster the People and was an instant success. It stormed to the number one spot on charts worldwide and was played non-stop on mainstream radio. However, the upbeat and lively vocals and rhythm hide a sinister message.
The song takes multiple perspectives, opening in the third person, then switching to the third-person perspective. This line, coincidentally, also makes up the title of the song. On April 20th, , two students stormed their school and killed thirteen people.
This included a teacher. Everything happened really quickly -- I didn't overthink anything. When I picked up the guitar for the bridge, I wanted to do something in a style like Jimi Hendrix -- like, if he was just casually riffing over this with his hammer-ons and blues influence, Americana style.
So it was little things like that where I was pulling from little bits of history and just experimenting. After that, I just turned on the mic and when I started singing, both of those verses pretty much came out of me verbatim.
A lot of times when I'm writing, I try to leave it open for the universe to try to serve as some kind of a channel, or some kind of a lightning rod, for whatever comes out.
And in that first verse, I didn't change one word that came out. I wrote that song in eight hours, and for me it wasn't necessarily more special than any other song. The thing that made that song special was the public, and the fact that people thought it was special, and it resonated and it created a conversation. And I'm proud of the conversation that it created. But now I've been very seriously thinking of retiring the song forever.
Is it because shootings have continued to happen in this country or is it something else? Yeah, exactly. Because shootings have continued to happen, and I feel like there are so many people that have been touched, either personally or by proxy, by a mass shooting in this country -- and that song has become almost a trigger of something painful they might have experienced.
And that's not why I make music. We're still talking about it 10 years later. It still gets brought up. And I'll tell you, that kid Nikolas Cruz. It's probably too hard to put into a small soundbite for this interview… It's a lot of different things.
Like I said, I've been thinking about retiring the song and just not playing it live anymore. I can't ask other people not to play it live, but the public made the song what it is -- and if the song has become another symbol for something, I can't control that. But I can control my involvement in it.
The way that people perceive the song is their choice, and it becomes a separate entity that I don't have control over. But I do have control over whether I'm going to take part in playing it over and over again. It's like pushing your song in somebody's wound -- I don't really want to do it. And so yeah, it's something that I've been wrestling with. You also have so many other hits that you could still play.
Do you think people would miss it and still request it at shows? I'm sure people would, and that's the scary part. So there is fear, of course. What artist has officially retired their most well-known song? So it's something that I'm really wrestling with, but I'm leaning towards retiring it, because it's just too painful.
Where we're at now, compared to where we were 10 years ago, is just horrific. We played Life Is Beautiful in Vegas a couple of years ago and it was a massive crowd -- I think it was , people at our show -- and it was very close to the anniversary of the [Route 91 Harvest festival] shooting in Vegas and we opted out [of performing the song].
I was like, "I don't want to play the song here, it's just too much, it's too dark. We're in the place where this happened. And after we were done, I said goodbye and we walked off stage and there was a large group in the crowd of people chanting, "Pumped Up Kicks. Yeah, it just felt really dark. It's like, "Wow, we just left you with this unifying song that everybody knows, and there's f--king clowns hanging from the ceiling and spinning around and rose petals being blown into the air.
What more do you want? And like I said, the song, the symbol of the song changed -- the public made it what it was, and if the public wants to make it something different, that's okay. But that's my choice of how I want to react to that. Yeah, I've thought about it. But I don't know, I'm not a huge fan of sequels. If I can figure out a way to do it in a way that's authentic and feels fresh and not preachy, I'll do it. I've even thought about releasing that same exact song, with completely different lyrics.
Or continuing the story, and talking about where Robert went from there -- because nobody knows how that story ends. So people fill in the blanks, and I think sometimes horror is the most powerful when you let the imagination fill in what happens. After Sandy Hook happened, some radio stations began to take the song off the air and MTV censored some of the lyrics.
What was your reaction to that?
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