‘Caribou’: the anthem that defines the Pixies’ subtle surrealism
Going back and listening to the alternative icons of yesteryear is much like watching classic horror films. One has to really try and put oneself in the frame of mind that you’ve never heard or seen anything like this before. One has to ignore that Freddie Kreuger is a Funko Pop today to feel the raw terror that A Nightmare on Elm Street inspired at the time. Just like you have to ignore that The Stooges’ Raw Power now sounds like so many Hives records now. However, just as The Shining still terrifies in 2024, the Pixies still sound otherworldly nearly 40 years on from their formation.
Black Francis and the gang approached indie rock with an outsider’s eye. For Francis, a comic-book kid with a deeply religious upbringing, no influence was too out there. Musically, lyrically or otherwise. It’s no surprise that Kim Deal was recruited on the back of a classified ad requesting a bassist “into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary”.
Once the nascent Pixies were formed, Francis was hard at work writing the first wave of Pixies songs about such subjects as UFOs, sexual violence and grisly, surrealist retellings of Bible stories. One of those early songs, recorded initially for their debut EP Come On, Pilgrim and revisited for their deathless debut album Surfer Rosa, was ‘Caribou’.
It’s a genuinely haunting piece of psychedelic spaghetti western creep-rock that prowls along as if The Cramps were actively trying to scare you. Frank unveiling that inimitable banshee screech, beseeching you to “repent”, still sends shivers down the spine four decades on.
So, where does a song like that come from? Well, I suppose we’ll never know for sure because the man himself hasn’t a clue. Francis and drummer Dave Lovering sat down with the NME to discuss ‘Caribou’s Song Story’ and the first thing Francis has to say about it is that he “has absolutely no memory of writing that song.”
Off to a wonderful start there. However, this is not a comment on his time for the song. In fact, he goes on to say he likes the song so much that if the song isn’t on their setlist for a concert, he’ll often just play the song anyway in place of something else.
This makes sense because there’s an argument to be made that it’s the first true Pixies song. Frank mentions that it was probably played at their first show. It has the loud/quiet/loud dynamics they pioneered, along with the sweet singing into the screaming. In the interview, Frank says that the song “runs the whole gamut of things we do with music.”
This extends to the song’s lyricism, too. The piece is not so much telling a story as painting a picture of a soul descending into animalism, of repenting his human form for something more violent and primal.
This Lynchian descent into the underbelly of human desire informed many Pixies songs, like ‘Cactus’, a song in which Frank’s character begs a woman to cut herself up on a cactus and then mail him the bloody dress. Grotesque, amazing, and utterly unique—all aspects that make this most timeless band hit in exactly the same way they did when they arrived on the scene.
