DATE | WEEKS |
December 11, 2004 | 10 |
One night, my wife and I were out and about when we decided to go to a bar in Bushwick that has karaoke. My wife has her one go-to song for these occasions: "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. I, on the other hand, like to mix things up. So when I settled upon "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers, my wife's approving reply was: "That will get the white people going."
Now, I guess I never thought about the song in those terms before. But this seems to have become the reputation the song has earned. In a recent column on Stereogum celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Killers' debut album Hot Fuss, Tom Breihan wrote, "If you play 'Mr. Brightside' at a sufficiently loud volume around a crowd of sufficiently drunk white people, bedlam will ensue." More broadly, in 2023, the New York Times made the argument that the song is to millennials what "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey is for boomers.
I'm Puerto Rican on my mother's side. So maybe I shouldn't like "Mr. Brightside" as much as I do. Maybe there's an alternate universe where "Oye Mi Canto" by N.O.R.E. spent 10 weeks at number one at the end of 2004 instead.
For some, its cultural endurance may have reached oversaturation. It's become such a staple of wedding receptions that my wedding photographer once quipped she never wanted to hear the song again. Somehow, I didn't include it on the playlist my wife and I curated for our reception, which feels like kind of a shame. But maybe that just means that our tastes run deep enough that we were able to avoid low-hanging fruit.
And yet, I can't get enough of "Mr. Brightside". It's a perfect song in my mind. I absolutely loved it when it was released in 2004, and it still holds up 20 years later. It's still my most played song on my last.fm profile, with a considerable lead over the song at #2. There are very few songs that feel as timeless and ageless as "Mr. Brightside". With the dominance of streaming and our continually fracturing culture, it may be a long time before another song reaches the ubiquity that "Mr. Brightside" enjoys.
America's first encounter with The Killers was "Somebody Told Me", the nervous, jangly banger that improbably spent 48 weeks on my top 40. But that wasn't their debut single. Six months before "Somebody Told Me" was released, the UK got "Mr. Brightside" as The Killers' proper debut single. It steadily built up enough word of mouth that by the time the US was getting "Somebody Told Me", "Mr. Brightside" was re-released in the UK, where it debuted at #10 in May 2004.
Brandon Flowers really was Mr. Brightside. He suspected his girlfriend might be cheating on him, and when he finally opened up his eager eyes, he found her at a bar one night in Las Vegas with another man. Flowers wrote the lyrics for the song after Dave Keuning composed the melody. "Mr. Brightside" wound up being one of the first songs The Killers recorded and performed while they were working the Las Vegas club circuit.
Flowers was heavily inspired by David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory around this time, and he cited the song "Queen Bitch" as an influence on "Mr. Brightside". In that song, Bowie's narrator is rejected by a lover and hooks up with a drag queen while watching this other person in their apartment.
Flowers creates an unreliable narrator with the protagonist of the song. Since he says he's falling asleep and "it's all in my head", we're unsure if his partner his actually cheating on him or not. If it is a dream, then his imagination is running wild: "She's touching his chest now, he takes off her dress now. Let me go."
I think Flowers' lyrics are masterful in conveying the paranoia that one's partner is not faithful to them. He compounds this with the anxious way he sings them. I like how the instrumentation feels grand and urgent, like a baroque power ballad. That guitar intro lures you into the song. Those interludes are absolutely sublime.
The song's structure is interesting since it repeats the first verse and chorus. We never get a payoff or denouement for the narrator's story. Flowers' narrator is stuck with this notion that his girlfriend is cheating on him, but we never know if it's reality or delusion. The fact that the lyrics repeat themselves only reinforce the notion that it's all a fantasy playing out in the narrator's head.
Two decades after its release, it's tempting to say that the reason "Mr. Brightside" has resonated so much is that it captures the constructed realities many of us have built for ourselves through advances in technology and culture. Now, MySpace had only just begun to grow in popularity in 2004, and the social media ecosystem as we know it was nowhere in sight. Reality television, with its messes of voyeuristic melodramas, was only barely in its ascendancy.
For me personally, I was incredibly isolated at this time. I was living in a new town where I knew no one, in a situation I desperately wanted to escape from but had no means to do so. I already knew what it was like to fall into my world and get pulled into some variety of solipsism. So maybe that, unconsciously, was what attracted me so much to the song. I wanted to make the best out of a bad situation, to the point where I could feel how delusional I was being at times. And while I eventually did manage to break free, in the moment, it can feel hopeless as fuck.
It's fair to say "Mr. Brightside" wouldn't be remembered as much were it not for its video. Originally, the video for "Mr. Brightside" was a black-and-white performance piece that wasn't especially memorable. Once "Somebody Told Me" became a hit in the United States, The Killers' label sprung for a higher budget version of the video. Sophie Muller, someone whose work we've already seen in this column with Coldplay and Maroon 5, was hired to direct. In this version, The Killers play a house band called The Genius Sex Poets for some sort of burlesque show. I've always thought it would be hilarious if a band called The Genius Sex Poets eventually came along and made it big, since that's basically how The Killers came to be. Alas, no one yet has thought that would be a good name for a real-life band.
Flowers is in a love triangle with one of the burlesque dancers, played by the Polish actress Izabella Miko, and a mysterious man played by Eric Roberts. The dancers are remarkably memorable, wearing body paint and gorgeous dresses, in stark contrast to the patrons of the show, who watch in almost catatonic fashion. It's clear Flowers is trying to hide his relationship from Roberts, but Roberts is wise to it. Eventually the two try to settle the matter over a game of checkers, but Flowers angrily flips the board over when it seems Roberts has the advantage. The quick edits to the video and close-ups of the characters' expressive faces keep the pace moving and convey the urgency within the song.
Let's talk about Eric Roberts here for a minute. Up to this point, he had an incredibly consistent, if unremarkable, career as a character actor in film and television. A few years after "Mr. Brightside", he made the most out of playing Gotham City crime boss Sal Maroni in Christopher Nolan's masterpiece The Dark Knight. He even managed to stake out a claim in Doctor Who fandom as the only American actor ever to portray The Doctor's main rival, The Master.
But somehow during the 2000s, he became a go-to actor for antagonists in music videos. He played cops in videos for Ja Rule and Akon. And most notably, he starred once again as the third wheel in a love triangle, this time in a two-video plot for Mariah Carey. The second of those videos, "We Belong Together", wound up being her biggest hit in almost a decade, resurrecting her career from a considerable fallow period. (On my chart, "We Belong Together" peaked at #28.)
I remember KNDD playing the fuck out of "Mr. Brightside" when it was out. But somehow it only peaked at #3 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart. It still wound up being the biggest pop hit ever for The Killers in U.S., peaking at #10 in the summer of 2005. Once the song clicked for me, there was no going back. It spent five weeks at #1 on my chart, fell back for a couple weeks in January 2005, then got another five weeks after that. All told, it wound up spending 47 weeks on my top 40, meaning The Killers' first two singles spent a combined 95 weeks on my chart.
Hot Fuss was in constant rotation on my CD player for the better part of 2005. Another song from the album, "Smile Like You Mean It", got some radio play and managed to reach #4 on my top 40. And even though it never made my top 40, the opening track to the album, "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine", might be the best opening track to an album this century. But there was still more in the tank for The Killers from their debut album. We will see them again in this column.
EXTRAS
It probably goes without saying that "Mr. Brightside" has been in a lot of media over the years since its release. Here's The Killers performing "Mr. Brightside" on a 2004 episode of The O.C.
I'd love to link to the scene from 2023's Saltburn where "Mr. Brightside" is featured. But that clip doesn't seem to be online yet. So here's Cameron Diaz singing "Mr. Brightside" as her character recovers from a breakup in the 2006 film The Holiday.
There have obviously been plenty of covers of "Mr. Brightside" over the years, as well. Here's the California band Run River North's cover of "Mr. Brightside".
(Run River North's biggest hit on my chart, 2016's "Run or Hide", peaked at #33.)
And here's Kelly Clarkson covering "Mr. Brightside" on a 2020 episode of her talk show.
(Kelly Clarkson's biggest hit on my chart, 2013's "Catch My Breath", peaked at #40.)
BEST OF THE REST
My Chemical Romance's emo freakout standard "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" peaked at #9 behind "Mr. Brightside". You really need to listen to me because I'm telling you the truth, I mean this, this song fucking rules.
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