Earlier this week, I heard a song I had not thought about for a long time. In the late 1970s the Irish New Wave band The Boomtown Rats released a song based on a news article its lead singer had read about a school shooting in San Diego, California, on January 29, 1979. As the story goes, the event took place on a Monday morning at the Grover Cleveland Elementary School, where a 16-year-old girl called Brenda Spencer took shots from her home across the street with a .22 semi-automatic rifle her father had gifted her with ammunition the previous Christmas. The principal and a custodian from the school died as a result, and nine children were injured as they entered.
When questioned later, after a twenty-minute standoff at her home, Brenda claimed she did the shooting for the 'fun of it' and because 'I just don't like Mondays.'
The Boomtown Rats' take on the incident became a beautiful ballad that introduced me to the band and, if I recall correctly, the incident itself. I had not been aware of the shooting because I paid very little attention to the news at this time in my life. The song and its lyrics opened my eyes to a crime that painted itself as so utterly senseless and mindless I couldn't honestly fathom the thinking behind it and the pain it would bring to so many families and friends of innocents who were doing what the world tells them to do on a Monday morning. They go to school, go to work, and follow the routines of their lives.
I recall thinking the lyric topic was an odd choice at the time. I had never been introduced to the concept of someone opening fire at a school before this time (something that has become prevalent and frequent in current history), and I certainly was not familiar with songs written about this sort of thing. The song's co-writer (with Midge Ure), and the artist who fronted the band, Bob Geldof, would later become a very well-known artist as the creator and organizer of the Band-Aid concept ("Do They Know It's Christmas") at the end of 1984 when feeding the world and specifically Sudan & Ethiopia on the African continent.
Listening to "I Don't Like Mondays" felt a little like a stab at reality at the time of its release, and it still plays out in effect a bit that way today when I hear it. Here is this harsh reality about a complete and wanton disregard for life and the destruction of innocence put into this beautiful melody and captured as an homage to a brutality that would find its way into our lives over and over again in so many different places and methods for years to come. I wondered to myself whether this 1979 shooting might have been an opening salvo to the addiction to gun violence that has increased and shattered our society. I was so far off in that estimation it stunned me. In researching, I found a Wikipedia page that chronologically listed all of the known school shootings dating as far back as the year 1764. The list included any instances of a shooting in or around a school throughout the history of the United States. There are hundreds of them.
In 1979, at the age of 21, I did not have the familiarity to grasp the enormity of gun violence in the past or the prescience to predict what it would become in the future. Quite literally, this song played out as an introduction to that sort of crime, but at the same time, colored it with a meaningful lyric based upon the reasoning provided by the young shooter for her reasoning behind the tragic decision. 1979 was a time in my life when I ignored the news. I didn't care. I was hopping from one bar to another and spending evenings with my co-workers at TGI Fridays in Phoenix, Arizona. The period was the ending of a decade that would represent my coming of age and freeing myself of the perceived bondage of family, New York, and High School. The song was released in October in the United States after spending four weeks at number one in the U.K. during the past summer. The Boomtown Rats had been in the U.S. on a tour, and I believe I heard the song on one of my remote radio stations out of Los Angeles or by visiting a larger record store and hearing it while perusing the stacks for something new and different.
When I first encountered this song, I thought it odd that a song could write about a tragedy such as this. There was a part of me that wondered if this was even appropriate. Aren't all songs about breakups and love? But the tune and the chorus had already won me over, and I couldn't take songs only about love very seriously. A good song can cover any topic with the right lyrics, music, and presentation. This one certainly checked off all the boxes for me.
Over the years, there have been other artists and other lyrics that discussed guns, gun violence, and other school shootings. I found that to be interesting in my research in that a couple I had heard many times over and never really concluded what the lyric was saying. Some music is more direct than others; some people (including myself) may assume the meaning, but all strike a tone about a topic that has only gotten worse throughout my life. Take Foster The People's "Pumped Up Kicks" from 2011. ('You better run, better run, outrun my gun,') or Pearl Jam's1991 release "Jeremy," which is a song about suicide performed in front of a terrified classroom of children who had previously ostracized the young victim. This is illustrated with lyrics like "Clearly I remember pickin' on the boy. Seemed like a harmless little fuck, but we unleashed the lion." Other songs on the topic include The 1975's 2022 release "Looking For Somebody (To Love"), Eminem's "The Darkness," geared directly to a mass shooting the likes of the Las Vegas concert in 2017, and Filter's 2002 response to Columbine called "Columind."
Protest songs can be historic in their own way. Some of the examples provided can fall deeply into this category of celebrated music. Some, branded more as commentary or even simple curiosity about the human element, can be just as effective and create art that becomes timely and provides what I always refer to as my necessary triggers to remembering the past, and more specifically, my past. For the longest time, "I Don't Like Mondays" was an earworm in my world. Once I hear it occasionally all these years later, it holds court in my mind.
The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today; she's going to make them stay at home
And Daddy doesn't understand it; he always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reason 'cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be sure?
Oh, oh, oh tell me why. I don't like Mondays
Tell me why. I don't like Mondays.
Tell me why. I don't like Mondays.
I want to shoot the whole day down.