#131, "Werewolves In The City," Viking Moses (2006)

150 Favorite Songs: #131, "Werewolves In The City," Viking Moses (2006)

I read an interview with Cameron Crowe once where he said something that stuck with me: if there's someone doing something you're really into, you should wave the flag for 'em, he said, explaining why he put Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. Why not wave the Lester Bangs flag, if you have the chance?

Here's me waving the Viking Moses flag. I don't know Brendon, who makes this music, particularly well, but I’ve known him for a long time—I played a handful of shows with him when I was in my twenties, and I always admired the fact that he would just show up anywhere and play, no matter if anyone there had heard of him or would like his music, and he kept doing it—is still doing it—for decades now, inspiring others to do the same and sometimes that trickles down and you end up with, like, Deer Tick because Brendon took John McCauley on the road with him for a few months for his very first tour. And, of course, I admired the fact that he makes music this thrillingly weird.

Listen to “Werewolves in the City,” which I’m fairly certain you’ve never heard before unless you also spent a few years in your twenties performing in someone’s living room and happened to run into him. (The Bandcamp link up there is because it’s not on YouTube! Do you know how rare it is to find a song that’s not on YouTube in the year of our lord 2023?) But give it a listen—it’s two minutes of re-purposed comedy rap* into a haunted, intense roar over some spooky tones and an off-the-rack beat, and he just sells it with that voice. By the time the song's near the end, and he starts screaming that nonsense chorus—"Werewolves in the city are a big problem / why don't you get out of the sky and stop them / from tearing up children / children in the night / last night I found a kid's head on my bike"—the sheer conviction in his voice as he delivers those lines has me utterly convinced: What the fuck, Mr. Police?? why don't you do something about the werewolves??

I love that stuff. I live for those moments in music when the utterly ridiculous becomes sublime because of the conviction of the person who's doing it. I've always loved really intense music—I don’t mean to brag but my favorite Michael Jackson song as a kid was "Beat It”—and as I've gotten older, finding things for people to get really intense about that isn't the person who dumped them or whatever, that's really important to me. Werewolves in the city? You know, I'll take it.

*I can't remember the name of the group that actually wrote this song. It was a joke rap group out of Riverside, California, and apparently I played a show at one of the members' houses at one point. My time in Riverside was short, but I saw no signs of werewolves. Which, if you think about it, maybe just proves how big a problem they really are.