October draws to a close, and I take time out from writing New Year’s Resolutions to celebrate the flickering spectrum of colors floating from the trees to land at my feet. Suddenly, the year is almost over, and I relish the opportunity for an evening of good-natured puerile fun—the chance to put on a silly costume, sing silly songs, and happily wander the streets of Seattle holding hands and celebrating Halloween with the woman I love.
But 2020 has been Halloween without the candy; horror without the reward. Instead of cheerful children dressed up as mermaids and superheroes, their colorful bags full of candy, we observe roving mobs of unmasked, pink-faced, bile-spitting adults, toting assault rifles and grammatically problematic placards, lorded over by a Lord of the Flies himself: an inarticulate high school bully, abundantly sweating into his ill-fitting corporate criminal costume, sneering defiantly into the distance like a constipated orange gorilla. That aching scream you’ve been holding in these last three years? Keep on holding it. Only music can save you. And what better music can you celebrate the end of western civilization with than The Misfits?
A long time ago, The Misfits flabbergasted the world with lyrics trafficking in all manner of morbid absurdity, primitive carnal melancholy, and general unseemliness, delivered by a silver-tongued devil whose voice reminded your ears of Roy Orbison or Jim Morrison. The Misfits were a band whose scuzzy lo-fi guitar chords, shiny jet-black hair, and menacing leather-jacketed worldview seized its listeners, delivering them to the middle of a dark alley with Charles Manson standing at one end and John Wayne Gacy at the other.
With their conspicuously violent, horror-core sensibilities, the Misfits confounded audiences in the late 1970s—mainly childlike onlookers come to witness the primordial fatalism of East Coast punk rock up close. The Misfits greatest songs encapsulated a minimalistic post-Ramones translation of rock ‘n’ roll invoking peculiar 1950s doo-wop harmonies delivered straight from the warm coffin of Elvis Presley.
The Misfits sang about eating diseased omelets. About French kissing killer robots. About straight ‘A’ students exacting crimson revenge on their bullies. Coincidentally, they even wrote a song called “Halloween.”
Bonfires burning bright
Pumpkin faces in the night
I remember Halloween
Dead cats hanging from poles
Little dead are out in droves
I remember Halloween
Brown leafed vertigo
Where skeletal life is known
I remember Halloween
This day anything goes
Burning bodies hanging from poles
I remember Halloween
Candy apples and razor blades
Little dead are soon in graves
I remember Halloween
This day anything goes
Burning bodies hanging from poles
I remember Halloween
The sound of the Misfits always makes the perfect soundtrack for Halloween because their music symbolizes the irrational dark parts of our lives. No matter how the Halloween of 2020 lands in the history books—a swan dive or a bellyflop into the murky waters of time—I will somehow always associate it with them.