Foster The People Reckon They Might Retire ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ And Yeah, It’s About Time
"I’m proud of the conversation that it created," lead singer Mark Foster told the press. "But now I’ve been very seriously thinking of retiring the song forever.”
‘Pumped Up Kicks’ by Foster The People is a song that you’ll hear gently playing at your local bar on a Sunday afternoon, which is a little odd, given that it’s about a school shooting.
Yep, the song has been widely and warmly accepted by the mainstream for almost ten whole years now, on account of its upbeat chorus and hooky melody.
But all that prettiness obscures a cruel sentiment at its heart, as the song is constructed around a not-so-thinly veiled reference to real-life school shootings — chief among them the Columbine massacre. “All the other kids with the pumped up kicks,” goes the chorus. “You’d better run, better run, out run my gun.”
The song has generated controversy for years now — not so much because it deals with gun violence, but because of how it does it. The song is written from the perspective of a shooter, offers no criticism of him, and basically uses a real-life epidemic as background dressing to a song that sounds more like the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a car ad.
Indeed, the song has even been co-opted by two school shooters, one of whom made a reference to it in his journals, and another who adopted it as an “anthem”. Now, Mark Foster, the lead singer of the band, has revealed that he’s considering retiring it for good.
“The thing that made that song special was the public,” Foster said in an interview with Billboard magazine, “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.”
Foster isn’t interested in sinking the song entirely from the public eye — this isn’t a suggestion that the thing be cancelled from the record altogether. He just isn’t interested in spreading it 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,” Foster said. “But I can control my involvement in it.”
Good call.