The Cranberries - Zombie

What's in your head? In your head?

Image by: Amarvudol at alterna2.com Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

When I compiled my playlist on bands and musical artists with fruit in their names (which I mentioned in the previous Earworm piece, “This Story is Bananas”), there was one obvious — at least to me and one other person who called me on it — omission. 

The Cranberries.

I hadn’t forgotten about them. Their being left off the playlist was 100 percent intentional. I simply did not want their pseudo-grunge emo wailing infecting the 20 great tracks I’d already culled.

I know that sounds harsh.

Before today, if you would have said to me, “Steve, The Cranberries helped me get through a tough time in my life,” or “The Cranberries are my favorite band,” I would have looked you in the eyes, pointed my index finger in your face, opened my mouth wide as if to scream and then cackle “Zombie, zombie, zombie!” (but pronounced like: “zahmbee, zahmbee, zahm bee eee eee.”) Then I would have let out a deafening hiss-roar like Donald Sutherland in the final scene of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

Everyone knows I’m about as open-minded as they come where music is concerned. There’s no genre that I cannot appreciate and enjoy. In my alphabetized record collection, I have eight Madonna albums stored sandwich-like between three albums by Madness and five Joni Mitchell classics. I have come around to understanding the songwriting talents of Taylor Swift after a decade of finding her popularity and critical acclaim bewildering. I know when I’m simply not the intended audience for a younger artist.

But The Cranberries released their platinum selling debut album in 1993. I was in my mid-20s. I was the ideal audience for them. They were my generation. So why did this song sound to me like nails on a chalkboard?

Like most hard to understand behaviors, this one likely originated during childhood.

I’ve never liked Thanksgiving.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t against being thankful or having a 4-day weekend, or spending time with family. I simply didn’t like the food. If it weren’t for pumpkin and apple pie, I might have gone to bed hungry every fourth Thursday in November.

I stopped eating turkey decades before I became a pescatarian. Sure, processed turkey lunch meat was tolerable, but so was cardboard if you added enough salt and pepper and preservatives to it. My turkey aversion was due to the fact that no one in my family could cook it without overcooking it, taking it out of the oven only when the bird had the toothsome consistency of leather. “That’s what the gravy is for,” I was told whenever I complained about the turkey’s moisture-free inedibility.

But the gravy was awful for the exact opposite reason. It was an abomination of the senses. It smelled and tasted like the afterbirth if thousand island dressing and barbecue sauce had a baby. I didn’t have a refined palette in the slightest; ketchup was my favorite condiment. So to need smelling salts after taking a whiff of the over-salted gravy —which always seemed to have a questionable viscous consistency —sucked the holiday spirit right out of me.

Then there was the cranberry sauce.

Image by Sciotopost.com

Cranberry sauce was the equivalent of the gravy: mucilaginous and squishy but with excessive tanginess instead of saltiness. There was no attempt at disguising the fact that we were eating cranberry sauce out of a can because the outline of the can was embedded in its cylindrical mold. It never occurred to any of the adults to perhaps mush it up a bit and put it in a bowl, pretend that it was prepared from scratch by a generous neighbor. 

I never had a dog that I could feed boiled carrots and peas to under the table so that I didn’t have to force down food that made me want to gag. So I ate the turkey, I ate the uncertain gravy, I ate the canned cranberry sauce.

“Clean your plates! There are starving kids in Ethiopia/China/Bangladesh!” Nana Muriel would cry out if either me or my sister Lisa ever left food on our plates. I learned how to spoon the smallest servings possible of the scary foods onto my plate and then mush them around so that they looked like they covered the surface. Knowing that the pies were store bought and that I’d be allowed seconds is what inspired me to listen to Nana and finish every last dried out turkey bite, every cranberry globule.

The other form of cranberry that I have a problem with is the dried cranberry. I’m pretty sure dried cranberries were invented by raisins to get the anti-raisin hordes off their backs. Cranberries are to raisins what raisins are to chocolate chips: soul crushing disappointments. 

I don’t think my dislike for The Cranberries the band was directly connected to my dislike for cranberries the food, but indirectly I wouldn’t be surprised if it played a role. We hold on to a lot from our formative years. Though I’m pretty sure that even if they’d named themselves The Bananas (my favorite fruit — as explained in previous post) I still would have formed a visceral aversion to the song “Zombie.”

“Zombie” was the first single from The Cranberries’ 1994 triple-platinum selling sophomore album, No Need To Argue. The band were already an international success, having scored two top-20 hits off their debut, Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? in 1993. “Dreams,” a jangly alternative rock song in the vein of R.E.M. or The Sundays, and “Linger,” a dreamy ballad that lingered on the Billboard charts for 26 weeks, turned this local band from Limerick, Ireland into superstars. They’d made the leap from playing small clubs to stadium headliners in less than a year.

So I was already aware of The Cranberries long before their biggest commercial hit, “Zombie,” would be released upon the unsuspecting public, infecting the brains of the masses across the globe, inspiring more than a decade of increasingly unwatchable Walking Dead TV series spinoffs on AMC Network.

I knew of them, but my early reaction was more indifference than dislike.

Vocalist Dolores O’Riordan, who never tried to hide her Irish accent, would be compared to another Irish singer that was quite popular/infamous at the time, Sinead O’Connor. I get the similarities. They both sing with great emotion and vulnerability. They both wrote songs that spoke to the political climate in their country and across the world. But vocally, Dolores couldn’t hold a candle to Sinead. Where O’Connor had impeccable control of her dynamics and could adjust her tone to fit a variety of musical styles (even Reggae — her 2005 album Throw Down Your Arms is seriously underrated), O’Roirdan keeps within a narrow range. This isn’t a criticism, many of my favorite singers of all time stick to a narrow range. Bob Dylan. Lou Reed. Joey Ramone.

But sometimes a voice just triggers the pain portion in the brain, the frontal cortex gag reflex, and, especially in the song “Zombie,” O’Roirdan’s voice does that to me. Or did that to me. While writing and researching this piece, I’ve come to realize that ”Zombie” is actually a good song but that listening to it is like getting an injection straight into the earworm muscle.

It’s partly the way Dolores sings “What’s in your head, in your head” that sticks to my brain like crazy glue. When she elongates the second “in your head” I can literally feel the phrase forming into an earworm, wrapping its slimy body around my brain and refusing to let go, no matter how many fancy methods of release I’ve developed over the years. Writing about it now, I’m certain that hundreds of times a day for the rest of the week it’ll be gnawing at me, asking me over and over, “What’s in your head?” Taunting me. Knowing full well what’s in my head and not caring if I only get a couple hours of sleep at night because of it.

The song, if you don’t know it, is about two kids who were killed in Northern England in 1993 when a bomb the IRA had put in a garbage bin went off while they were on their way to get Mother’s Day cards. It’s a heavy song and it belongs in the same conversation with U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in terms of speaking to the horrors of the 30 year war between the IRA and Britain.

I don’t mean to make light of it by complaining about the song’s earworm-enriched properties.

Switcheroos & Pees & Poos

In fact, the song has become a bit of a staple in my household. My wife Karen and I will sing to our dog Bernie our own version of the song “Zombie”(using the switcheroo method described in a piece I wrote in July, above).

After Bernie eats his evening bone, he will often rub his head into the couch cushion or his pillow or any soft surface. When he does this we will sing:

Rub your head

Rub your head

Bernie, Bernie, Ber née, née, née

And when we sing this to our lovable pup he will rub his head even more vigorously, making little snorting sounds as he flips upside down, knowing full well how friggin’ cute his is, the three of us reveling in all the attention and love we are all getting.

I consider these head rubbing/singing rituals my daily dose of gratefulness, reminders of what I should be and am thankful for. Reminders of what the essence of Thanksgiving really is.

Eating apple and pumpkin pie.

Bernie, in a post-head rubbing stupor.

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