In defence of ‘Mr Brightside’
Some 20 years ago, The Killers were a little-known indie band just beginning to make ripples in the UK. In their US homeland, they were an unknown entity, yet to breach the burgeoning alternative shore of MTV 2. Those days are now a thing of the past in both senses. Presently, The Killers stand as one of the few rock ‘n’ roll bands to have emerged in this strange century of music to call themselves a headline act. At the heart of that rise is ‘Mr Brightside’.
The song has become a record-breaking hit since it was first released in 2003, still receiving millions of streams every week, sustaining itself in the charts for a cumulative total of eight years and counting. But the operative phase in the previous sentence is that the song ‘has become’. Despite having accolades up to its eyeballs, the anthem was actually a sleeper hit. The song entered the charts at 40, two years after its release, and peaked four months later in tenth place. That’s hardly the sort of charting start you’d expect from the most successful rock song of the century.
Needless to say, it simmered its mildly promising opening position into a rolling boil and has now bubbled over the edges of the tight-jeaned indie scene that spawned it, transcendently entering society at large in a manner few songs can ever hope to accomplish. The way in which it achieved this is actually rather beautiful: people simply love to sing ‘Mr Brightside’. That is, simply put, as pure as it gets.
At the point of initial release, the band didn’t have any major backing. They were signed to the now-defunct London indie label Lizard King Records. They released the song on a limited press of 500. Fortuitously, it captured enough of a buzz to make it onto Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 evening show – the last bastion of alternative music’s place in the mainstream before it was segregated into its cultdom corner, away from streamlined commercialism – and enough people liked what they heard to urge for a wider release.
It then took two years to slowly flourish and establish itself as a societal staple of the modern age. Other tracks from the era threatened to achieve this, but few had enough timelessness to escape ties to dated indie fads and straddle future epochs. Today, the song is still an ever-present at indie discos, straining vocal cords as youngsters belt out “jealousssssy”, and you will hear it at karaoke nights the world over—rendering it the ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, (the biggest song of all time according to the RIAA after it went platinum for an 18th time), of the 21st century.
Subjectively, perhaps the same question marks over artistic quality can be levelled at both ‘Believin’’ and ‘Brightside’—but objectively, the latter’s status is unimpeachable. Every single band of the era will have at one point posited the same objective: let’s write a huge indie hit that ‘saves rock ‘n’ roll’ and pushes us closer to our ageing headline heroes. At that time in alternative music, such a dreamy rhetoric was still possible. But few acts managed to take advantage of the replenished wellspring of interest in rock ‘n’ roll and write a defining anthem.
‘Mr Brightside’ surged from the edges into the heart of the masses. Imagine how many people have tried and failed to write something like that. It is a ubiquitous, transcendent hit, which might be marked with asterisks by hipsters, but we’re clearly firmly in the minority. And all of this is simply borne from the catchy merits of the song itself.
It wasn’t launched to its current lofty mantle by any gimmicks or giant conglomerates. It didn’t weave itself onto the right soundtrack or get boosted by a sudden trend. It simply hits upon the romantic rock ‘n’ roll subject of impassioned envy in the easy, hooky, but atypical key of D-flat major, making it stand out as the perfect, unique five-pint anthem. It’s an emotive earworm that people have never been able to shake since it was released—wangling this by virtue of clever songwriting tricks like “jealousy” coming in half a beat before expected, a mid-chorus key shift, repetition, sincere intent and nothing more.
In this regard, when an artistic objective is nailed with such unerring, enduring precision, perhaps subjective sneering should be quelled. In fact, there are times – perhaps this coming Christmas in a hometown flat-roof pub, with just the right amount of booze and guard-down comfort in their system – that even the staunchest naysayers can appreciate its indisputable qualities.
With that in mind, it is also worth reconciling that the exact inverse of any critical rhetoric that it actually marks the moment indie music died – diverging into toothless commercialism and ever-narrowing non-commercial artistic niches – is actually closer to the truth. Maybe it did help to save rock ‘n’ roll to some extent. After all, it was, frankly, the gateway drug for a fair chunk of the current alt-inclined population whether they care to reconcile that or not… as they now sit in their Sun O))) t-shirts, sipping Nespresso, listening to SWANS and Black Midi, blurring out the night in their youth that they bawled “it was only a kiss… it was only a kiss” over a bottle of Bella, claiming it never happened, but damaging their case by phrasing their defence as: “I never… I never“.
In this regard, there is a vitality – essential importance, even – to tracks by young bands that make a mark on the charts, masses and youth of the day. These rare hits from the outskirts that land in the centre of culture via hooks by crooks serve as great beacons to the youth that there’s a bohemian world outside of the boring mainstream, even if some of the more expansive avant edges have to be chamfered to create a point simple and sharp enough to be in with a shot of piercing its way towards the bulls-eye.
‘Mr Brightside’ might not be perfect, but it’s perfect enough to be the most beloved indie song of the century so far. Rather than lament that, we should celebrate the fact that it‘s a rare modern behemoth with a fairy tale story. It’s the ultimate DIY success in an era of perverse rampant commercialism: beginning life as a naff open mic night effort, inspired by David Bowie’s ‘Queen Bitch’, by two young lads trying to make it in Las Vegas, before being modernised into something that seized upon the zeitgeist and brought Bowie’s glam ghost forward once their buddies joined the band, it then organically built up enough hubbub to attract a little indie label and then boomed over the course of years, propelled by people-power alone.
When you look on the Brightside, that’s a victory for the arts in the truest romantic sense.