3/23/2023 0 Comments Men at work overkill![]() "At least there's pretty lights," he exalts, "and though there's little variation/it ifies the night from overkill." Hay is engaging in magical thinking at its best, but the music betrays that magic, haunting as it is. Hay's vocals for "Overkill" are his finest, especially as he tries to damp down his unease. Yeah, nothing in that string of singles would alert a random listener to the heart-felt anxiety captured on "Overkill:" "Night after night/my heartbeat shows the fear." We all can identify how being "alone between the sheets/only brings exasperation," even when there is a sleeping, loving body next to us. Jive," putting Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel into reverse: mad scientist turning himself into handsome devil. They didn't exactly back away from that with the lesser-selling, but equally silly, "Be Good Johnny" (about a daydreaming young lad) and "Dr. Riding the wave of MTV with quirky videos, Men At Work first parodied paranoia with "Who Can It Be Now?" Then, they introduced the rest of the world to Vegemite sandwiches with the goofy "Down Under," setting themselves up to be New Wave's Kooky musical comedy act. Nothing in the band's first four single releases prepared its public for the tenor of this song. Nevertheless, fans of Men At Work must have been caught completely off guard when the Australian band released this song in 1983. I suppose it isn't just Morrissey who lamented that everyday is like Sunday in the world of pop musicians. Men At Work's singer, main songwriter, Colin Hay, probably wasn't focused just on Sunday nights when he sang, "I can't get to sleep/thinking about the implications/of diving into deep/and possibly the complications." He was in a successful rock band, so how could he even write such lyrics. If so, I urge you to embrace Men At Work's "Overkill," It's much better than openly singing The Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" when you wake up the next day with maybe 2 hours of total sleep. Are you turning over and over in your bed, agonizing over the work to be done this coming week, ruminating about the crap left undone, unresolved, unsettled from the previous work week? Pandemic Panoply: The Full (albeit incomplete) List of 365 Artists/Songs A Day.Archives: Self-Indulgences (On the book and the blogs).
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