February 5, 1995. “Bart’s Comet.” The episode of The Simpsons where Bart discovers a comet, but it’s headed right for Springfield and it’s going to kill everyone1.
Ned Flanders is the only person who has a bomb shelter, because as the comically religious character in the show, he, of course, is ready for The End Times. It’s strange, though, that he’s hedging his bets that he won’t be Raptured, but maybe it was a Cold War purchase in the 80s, just in case those godless communists decided to escalate tensions. But it’s probably best not to try to find logic or keep track of continuity with this show.
So, with the entire town of Springfield crammed into Flanders’s bomb shelter to protect themselves from their impending destruction, there are too many people in there for the door to close. And this being the perfect joke, Ned Flanders is voted out of his own shelter. He dutifully acquiesces, and leaves to face his annihilation and courageously spare the lives of those who have turned Judas on him.
Climbing Mount Springfield, Ned prepares to meet his maker with a song.
And what religious hymn does he choose? What rhapsodic declaration of faith?
“Que Sera, Sera” with the parenthetical: “(Whatever will be, will be)”. This couldn’t be where I first heard this song, could it? I don’t think that’s the first time I heard the phrase “Que Sera, Sera,” but it is a masterful usage of the song in a banger of a Simpsons episode.
My parents were young when they “had” me. Seniors in High School — my mom told me that she was just hoping to make it to graduation since I was due in June. She did, which was something that her own mother wasn’t able to accomplish at 16 when she dropped out and had my mother. Babies having babies in the early 60s.
Now, as a toddler, I used to speak Spanish. My father’s side of the family all spoke Spanish, and as a little kid (I’m told) I would talk and mix up the two languages, because how would kids know about different languages? It’s all words. All words are made up.
My parents being young — and is the case with pretty much anyone undertaking the Herculean task of raising a human being for the first time — they made a choice as to what they thought would be the best for me and hoped it was the right decision.
Was it influenced by what was historically the de facto policy of the United States for a time when it came to the Indigenous peoples of this land and others coming from countries that had different languages and cultures? Who can say. But they hedged their bets, and as I approached school age, they decided that I should only speak English.
Of course, now speaking more than one language is the In Thing! All the moneyed mono-tongued whites trip over themselves to try to get their melanin deficient children to speak a language that none of their parents speak at home — private tutors, expensive language courses, semesters abroad — in the hopes of having one more accolade to list on a college application. Perhaps in hopes of being able to berate the working class attending to their needs when they’re on their colonization vacations?
For me, there is a small vestigial Latin root left in my Broca’s Area that recognizes Spanish coming into my ears. Taking it in school, it was yet another thing that came a little easier to me. And by the time I was a Senior in High School (the time we were forming this band), I was taking the most advanced level offered of my dead mother tongue. I remember we were being introduced to conjugating the future tense, and our teacher mentioned that “será” means2: “It/he/she will be” just like in the song, “Que Sera, Sera.”
The key moment of inspiration for this song, was knowing that when you’re writing, you’re not supposed to mix tenses. You’re not supposed to — okay — but, what if I did? What if something in the future was going to be something that already happened in the past?
And you say: It’s impossible to live and not die / And you think it’s kind of strange to be happy and cry / And I think that you’re okay, ‘cause your better than me / And you think that it’s okay, just ‘cause you are free
I will be disappeared / I will be far from here/ And I won’t get in your way ‘cause / I will be (gone)
Stab my eyes, ‘cause I can’t see / It’s an observation unknown to me / And I think that you’re okay, ‘cause you’re better than me / And you think that it’s okay, just ‘cause you are free
I will be disappeared / I will be far from here/ And I won’t get in your way ‘cause / I will be (gone)
And you see me breathe, so you think I’m alive / But you don’t see me smile, and you think I’m a liar / And it’s okay that you’re better than me / And I’ll be okay, just don’t leave
I will be disappeared / I will be far from here/ And I won’t get in your way ‘cause / I will be / I will be...
In that Spanish class, we were also told that “Fulano” was like a nobody. Some guy you don’t know. Just a dude.
And, of course, being a teenager with undiagnosed depression, that’s how I felt. Like a nobody. I will be someone you have forgotten about when you look back at this time in your life... This, of course, was the buried fear choking out the roots of the one romantic relationship that I had in high school.
And it was a lot of me being your classic, immature, teen-aged guy that unfairly threw too much of my own needs and insecurities onto someone that I expected to fix me (or something) that ended up realizing that fear. She was going through her own shit (as I would learn about years later), just as all of us are in that horrible hormone tempest of a time, but I had to make it all about me...
“Stab my eyes,” is something that I read in an X-Men comic and had no context for what it meant. Trying to find a picture of that quote, I only just now learned that it was meant to be cussing in the future, much as we say now: “Fuck me!”
This song was very inspired by Smashing Pumpkins. I try to imitate Corgan’s soft coo when I say “‘cause” in the chorus (something I ended up dropping at some point). I read that he used the Boss BF-2 flanger on the song “Love” on Mellon Collie, so I bought one and used it in this. That’s a Boss FZ-3 fuzz pedal I’m using in the left channel, and I would eventually move on to always using whichever Big Muff pedal I had at the time on this song. As a matter of fact, this is one of the songs where I play all of the guitars and bass with Kevin drumming, just like Billy and Jimmy did on a lot of Siamese Dream.
We played this song through the entire life of the band. I don’t know if it was mostly because we liked playing it, or if it was even a hit with audiences. We recorded this a couple more times, because it felt like such a signature song. This is what our band sounded like — this was the “kibosh sound” — even though we floated through different mists of genre. It’s not something that we tried to harness or capture again, we just always found ourselves returning to the general area.
But I did write most of the songs, so that might explain it right there.
And I also wrote this next track. So, how will it sound? You’ll just have to wait until next month to find out.
-bcp
Something that the universe keeps edging us here in the real world with that proposition, but has yet to follow through on that explosive chestnut.
Share this post