Merry Christmas everyone! You have made it to the #1 song on the Music Court’s annual countdown. So, what has found itself among the distinguished company of past top songs like “King of Spain,” “The Afterlife,” “Pompeii,” and “Got it?” We have to travel back to January 2015 and “the center of the hollow moon” for this gem.
The #1 song of 2015 is “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf)” by the eclectic, potent, and genre-less AWOLNATION.
There are so many comments that I want to make about this song that I just don’t know where to begin. So, for the sake of chronology, I will start from the first few seconds of the song. Do you know the feeling when you listen to the first few notes of a song – in this case AWOLNATION employs a rhythmic electronic beat – and you know immediately that this song is about to be played on repeat several times. It’s a gut feeling, but most times you are correct. In this case, my hypothesis was tested and proven true.
The draw of this song is the electronic beat, the electric conductivity of the song that makes the listener feel like he/she is in the middle of a Nikola Tesla experiment. Aaron Bruno, the mastermind of AWOLNATION, possesses a unique artistic ability to make any song he creates sound perspicacious and driving. The song powers forward with Bruno’s almost reckless voice mixed with fragmented percussion. The chorus, which features the repetition of the line, “Ima make a deal with the bad wolf so the bad wolf don’t bite no more,” carries forward with a unique, toe-tapping, almost pernicious intensity; this quasi-wickedness is one of the best qualities of AWOLNATION’s music; every song sounds like there is some evil, malevolent intent behind it, and that makes the song powerful.
How about cleverness? Does the song have any cleverness. It certainly does. Bruno sings about making a deal with the bad wolf and then subtly, in his repetition of the lines, sings “Ima bad wolf” indicating that he is the entity he wishes to make a deal with, thus introducing an acute duality.
From there, the song escalates with imprecation and anger. The song is almost violent in its power, reckless and entropic. The disorder of the song is ordered. The carelessness of the song is clean. The song is an oxymoron and that is just the way the band wanted it. And, thankfully, as you see in the video above, the video reflects the song perfectly, depicting frozen dancers who eventually erupt in a wild dance party.
“Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf)” is the clear choice for song of the year. It is creative, unique, eccentric, and tremendous. The song is a melodic and visual spectacle. It is a depiction of the talent of AWOLNATION, and I, for one, cannot wait to hear more from this band.
The Music Court 
Leave a Reply