The Killers are one of the single biggest rock acts of the this millennium, a powerhouse band propelled by the incredible showmanship and charisma of singer Brandon Flowers and three other guys in the background. The band is also one of the few Christian bands that can make any claim to having any kind of chill at all, which is not saying a lot.
But if you’re a youth pastor and you need to make a bunch of pimply teens who have been corralled into a high gym against their will pay any attention to the word of Christ, you’re going to need to seem at least a little bit cool. The sometimes-coherent lyrics of Brandon Flowers, a devout member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, are your friend here, and you’re going to fucking need it because these kids are goddamn heathens.
So, do you have an acoustic guitar with a braided waist strap and a desire to get the word of our Lord through the thick skulls of these slack-jawed teens? If so, keep these words in mind:
“Human”
“Am I human, or am I dancer?”
We’ll begin with one of Flowers’ most grammar-free lyrics, which begs the question: what exactly are you asking here, dude? However, the open-ended humanism of “Human” is a great opener for dealing with these young seekers of Jesus and lets them know you’re not afraid to cut a rug if you want. That’s something kids say, right? Cut a rug? You can also use this song to reference TikTok dance trends and how Jesus was the original “Influencer.”
“Spaceman”
“The spaceman says, “Everybody look down/ It’s all in your mind”
You know who was a real “spaceman?” That’s right, our Lord and Savior, Jesus. He lives in the sky, he’s all-knowing, and he looks down on everyone, just like his true Christian followers. If you get those teens to stop sneaking off to smoke cigarettes behind the gym, like Presbyterians, this one might make them see you as one of the “gang.”
“Some Kind of Love”
“You’ve got the soul of a truck on a long-distance haul”
Kids love trucks. That’s a given. Even if all your practical experience comes from Pastor Colin’s pamphlets, you know that a line like this will open those kids’ hearts to the suffering of the Lamb as He died on the Cross at Calvary. If that doesn’t work, you learned how to play a new barre chord recently, which is pretty cool.
“Just Another Girl”
“All of my friends say/ It’s a great big world”
This will imply to the teens that you both have friends and you’ve actually left your hometown a few times. Both will raise your coolness level and perhaps help a few of them escape the everlasting fires of Hell. Not most of them, but perhaps the few of them that didn’t TP your scooter.
“Be Still”
“Life is short to say the least/ We’re in the belly of the beast”
You’re not one of those youth pastors who’s not afraid to get into the dark, scary parts of the Bible, like…the Devil! To be fair, you think that the “belly of the beast” thing might actually be about ‘Pinocchio” rather than Satan, but Disney is pretty much the same thing these days. Maybe burn a few DVDs, just in case.
“Bling (Confession Of A King)”
“So I ran with the devil/ Left a trail of excuses/ Like a stone on the water”
Those kids need to know if they keep on with their heavy metal and denim pants, they might as well be running with the Devil himself. Sometimes, in order to be kind of cool, you have to put the fear of God into them, even if you have no idea what Brandon Flowers means half of the time.
https://open.spotify.com/track/1Rr17slUHwVRkDz4A2TUcM?si=89004ace4c7044ea
“Fire In Bone”
“Higher and higher, higher and higher”
Nothing gets teens to shut off their brains and accept the word of Christ the Redeemer better than a good mindless chant. “Higher and higher” works just as well as anything else, though you might have to get a few of them to stop giggling about that damn devil-weed they think you don’t know they snort or whatever.
“Mr. Brightside”
“It started out with a kiss/ how did it end up like this?”
It’s about Judas. Fucking duh. Kissing leads to crucifixion, it’s right there in the Bible.
“Flesh and Bone”
“Anointed by the blood, I take the reins”
Now, this song has some pretty trickery fingering, but, whatever you do, don’t tell them that. Never mention fingering in front of teens. You’ll just never live it down. “Anointment” and “blood” is pretty much all you’re going to get out of this one, so just take it and move on.
“Somebody Told Me”
“’Cause heaven ain’t close in a place like this”
Okay, this is where you really get those godless teens: use the same language they do, and they’ll automatically think of you as cool! “Ain’t” is the gateway to swearing language, but sometimes you have to walk the razor’s edge if you and your Yamaha knockoff want to save some souls.
“Read My Mind”
“Slipping in my faith until I fall/ He never returned that call (he always)”
If that doesn’t work, there’s a different foolproof Killers-related method. Just pretend you’re losing your faith by using these tricky lyrics from a semi-hit from ‘Sam’s Town.’ They’ll totally begin to think you’re “hip” and “with it” and “full of an emptiness that you can barely hide from Pastor Colin that threatens to consume you every day.” Remember to add the “he always” part so they know you’re kidding. Just kidding. It’s so much fun to kid.
“Where The White Boys Dance”
“Hold on a minute/ You’re talking crazy, don’t be that jealous girl”
This one’s tricky, but with white nationalism taking over every major domination of American Christianity, you’re going to need to appeal to the white males and let them know you’re not a target with some classic misogyny. Fortunately, The Killers are here for you.
“Bones”
“An angel whispers my name/ But the message relayed is the same/ Wait till tomorrow, you’ll be fine”
A lot of The Killers songs are about how everything will eventually be fine, which contradicts the truth given to us by Jesus Christ, that only his followers will be fine and everyone else will burn in Hell. Still, these youths are pretty dumb, and you just need them to tolerate you for the afternoon, so go for it.
“Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf”
“Leave the bourbon on the shelf”
One way to make those kids respect your coolness, as they say, is to let them know right up front that alcohol, the devil’s lemonade, will never pass your lips. Just make sure you don’t sing the line that follows this one. After all, there is nothing cooler than being the guy who refuses to buy teens beer and calls the cops on them!
“Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll”
“She plays the drums, I’m on tambourine”
Have those kids ever heard of someone who came and brought new life, joy, and wisdom to the world while being tempted by a raven-haired demon from Hell? Her name was Meg White and she told the Devil Jack where to shove it when she decided she could no longer play indie rock drums and bodily ascended to Heaven or possibly Detroit.
“Neon Tiger”
“I don’t want to be kept, I don’t want to be caged/ I don’t want to be damned, oh hell”
Look, at this point, these kids should not want to be damned. Pastor Colin is very clear on that. They should also avoid neon, which promotes sin, and tigers, which are made from sin. Sometimes, the message has to be blunt.
“A Dustland Fairytale”
“I saw the devil wrapping up his hands/ he’s getting ready for the showdown”
There’s nothing cooler than getting into a boxing match with Lucifer himself! That is, as long as you both wear regulation gloves, headgear, and mouthguards, have a licensed referee to make sure everyone fights fair, and remember that you’re both there to have a good time.
“The Way It Was”
“Daddy, daddy, daddy, all my life/ I’ve been trying to find my place in the world”
God, the emptiness. Why did you leave, Daddy? Was it because I was not a good enough at Sunday school? I am now, Daddy! I AM NOW!
“Wonderful Wonderful”
“Motherless child, follow my voice/ and I shall give thee great cause to rejoice”
Brandon, do you just straight-up rip-off lines from the actual Bible and hope that your great hair will get out of things? Because it seems to have worked. Anyway, kids love it when you see “thee.” They just do.
“All These Things That I’ve Done”
“I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier”
“All These Things That I’ve Done” is the only actual cool Killers song, and it still has nonsensical bullshit in it like this. It might just be time to give up on teaching the youths through the power of highly-produced indie-lite rock and maybe just Christianity in general.
This might come as a surprise to some, but Eve 6 truly doesn’t have a bad album in their five LP catalog. However, there has to be something listed in the bottom stinker spot here. Still, we have one question for the peanut gallery and it goes like this, “What the hell is a ‘relevisation’?” Anyway, we’re more than stoked that a band that formed in 1995 has new material this decade, so beggars can’t be choosers. Also, “Hyper Relevisation” came out approximately ten years after their next to-be-mentioned full-length, so we hope it provides a revelushow throughout the underground, foreground, overground, and foreskin, and a sixth comes out in nine years or less.
Eve 6’s first and only album on Fearless Records, came out almost a decade after their final of three major label efforts, and, as we alluded to earlier, can aggressively get your toes tapping more than any other LP in their catalog; trust us. Opening with its best song “Curtain,” and going right into the catchy first single “Victoria,” Eve 6 proved that they were still a one-two punch force long after their teenage years, and “Speak in Code” remains the band’s second most slept upon effort. Wake up, ’90s kids, and read on! There are at least eight or nine songs here that will pique your interest! Returning to Don Gilmore of Linkin Park, Lit, Good Charlotte, and Ludwig van Beethoven fame, for production like he did on albums #1 and 2 was a righteous move even though their third LP sounded fantastic as well.
While Eve 6’s sophomore full-length sounds huger than any LP in their catalog in the best way, and is more than a solid sequel in any right, wrong, manner, or song, its twelve songs just aren’t as endearing as the ones on their self-titled debut album, so it lands in the bronze medal position. Still, “Here’s to the Night,” the album’s third single (remember those?) is their most montage-worthy tune BY FAR, and populates graduations, weddings, proms, and your great aunt Edna’s 1958 Ford Edsel to this very day, twenty-four years after it came out! The album’s first single “Promise” was also a hit in its own right, and has one of the best and most self-aware dad jokes in the lines to its bridge, “Why you gotta keep the fan on high when it’s cold outside? Just wanna let you know that I’m still a fan, get it?”
Eve 6’s almost perfect debut self-titled full-length studio album came out at the most optimal time for numbered bands like blink-182, SR-71, Matchbox Twenty, and Stone Temple Twenty-One Pilots to succeed, and ended the ’90s in a tight longsleeve shirt style complete with a stylish necklace, all whilst counting to six at the top of its plastic lungs. Peaking at number one on Billboard’s US Heatseekers Albums charts is also nothing to scoff at for any band, and neither is selling one million physical copies of ANYTHING! We dare any act in this day and age to counter said stat in the age of streaming. Basically, the three-piece deserves an enthusiastic clap not just on Saturday nights, but on all seven of ‘em. In closing, who can forget hearing “Open Road Song” during “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which is one of the more underrated comedies from the ’90s. Not us.
We’re still shocked that this record isn’t often spoken with the same reverence as its two former releases, by the general public, but that’s sadly how the cookie often crumbles, and we’re still here waiting for more public and private praise over some half-eaten stale chocolate chips. This sentence may sound like a stretch, but we’ll happily die on this two-pronged hill: “Think Twice” is the band’s best single AND this effort is a “no skip” release. Sadly, this album is what got the band dropped from RCA Records and the band called it a day one year later for a well-deserved three-year hiatus. Was closing this album with a song called “Arch Drive Goodbye” a coincidence given the band’s eventual halt? We’ll never really know, but at least we’re dreaming.
Technically this is not a Quentin Tarantino movie—the film is an interconnected anthology with 4 different directors, but we decided to throw it on. Though early in his career, “The Man From Holywood” segment draws heavily on what would only become a more prevalent influence within the Tarantino oeuvre, ’70s television. It is inspired by adaptations of Roald Dahl’s “The Man From The South,” the tale of a high-stakes gambler who bets not with money, but with body parts. In the short, a finger is on the line, and that’s where the whole thing falls off the rails. Should have been a toe. No, not because I love feet, it’s because losing a toe would mess with your life day to day way more. Think about it, your whole balance is off! This is NOT because of my foot thing, stop going there. A toe would have objectively been the more cinematic choice, and for that reason ALONE, I rank “Four Rooms” last.
Yes, I know, this will be a polarizing opinion, but I simply do not hold “Reservoir Dogs” in high regard. While it shows the promise of a great genre filmmaker it just doesn’t quite deliver the way his later work would. It should also be noted that this movie does not contain any foot shots, which I acknowledge only to get ahead of any accusations that the absence of foot fetishism on display has influenced my ranking, and I assure you it has not. This is not about that. At all. I can’t help it if my objective critical take on an almost universally praised crime movie goes against the grain, and I assure you my opinion of the film would not be any different if it did contain a few toe shots. Unless of course said toe shots were done tastefully and artistically, and with Tarantino they always are, so yeah okay it might raise the bar a little, but in an OBJECTIVE way!
Oh boy, I can just see the comment section now. “Hey, this guy is just ranking all the footless movies last!” Nothing could be further from the truth. “The Hateful Eight” was just a miss for me. Sure, it has a few things going for it. The cinematography is gorgeous. The Ennio Morricone score is hypnotic and sublime. Every performance in the film is superb, and the slow-boil plot is captivating, keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat from start to finish, which is particularly impressive because most of the action takes place in a single room. The film is extremely well-directed. All of the elements of a masterpiece are there, but there’s just something missing. I can’t quite put my foot on it. Oh, I mean finger. Hey, shut up! It’s totally normal to mix those two up!
This experimental collaboration yielded mixed results. Truth be told, the half of the film directed by Tarantino is the weaker of the two, honestly one of his least interesting efforts to date. Perhaps this is because Tarantino was more concerned with his acting performance in the film, which is the saving grace of the picture. The chemistry between Tarantino and Salma Hayek is magnetic. Believe it or not, they don’t actually exchange any dialogue! Trust me, I rewatch their scene almost daily. and not a word is shared between them. Pretty wild considering they are the most erotically charged couple in cinema history!
While Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s second collaboration wasn’t as commercially successful as they had hoped, “Death Proof” as a standalone film deserves higher praise. When Tarantino learned that Rodriguez made the baffling decision to have Rose McGowan actually lose a foot in his movie, he knew exactly what to do in “Death Proof” to balance out the “Grindhouse” double feature package.
There was a 6-year gap between the release of “Jackie Brown” and “Kill Bill Vol 1,” the largest gap in Tarantino’s filmography to date, but with this movie he proved he could still wiggle his big toe, creatively speaking. No, I didn’t make that joke because I’m a foot fetishist, it was right there. If you were writing a blurb about “Kill Bill’s” place in Tarantino’s filmography, you would have arrived at the same joke okay? This combined homage to revenge genre films and ’70s kung fu movies high-kicked the Tarantino name back to the forefront of conversation regarding the best directors in American cinema. Again, not mentioning kicks because of my foot thing, it came up organically. Okay fine, Uma Thurman’s feet are featured prominently in this film and it makes me so horny I actually get really dizzy, is that what you want to hear?! Fine!
While the first Kill Bill movie showed us Quentin Tarantino still had it, Volume 2 showed us what he could do with it. Any other director would be hard tasked pivoting a kung fu revenge homage into a Western, but Tarantino does it here as seamlessly and effortlessly as Uma Thurman crushes Daryl Hannah’s eyeball with her bare foot. What? She does! Look I’m being objective here, okay? I graduated from NYU, I’m a professional film critic, and in my EXPERT opinion, Uma Thurman showing that eyeball it’s just a helpless worm under the weight of her foot’s dominant feminine energy is high cinema regardless of any foot-related sexual proclivities I may or may not but absolutely do have, end of story!
One of Tarantino’s greatest strengths is his casting. He is credited with revitalizing the careers of actors like John Travolta and Harvey Keitel. In this film, he propelled longtime television actor Christoph Waltz into international stardom. Waltz is truly menacing as Col. Hans Landa, a terrifying nazi with a Sherlock Holmes-like cunning. The moment he tells Bridget von Hammersmark “Put your foot on my lap” you know that she is doomed, and you can’t look away. Because of the tension. Not the foot. Doesn’t hurt! Certainly doesn’t subtract from the scene, in this foot fetishist film critic’s opinion, but that’s not why I’m pointing it out, it’s just a great scene.
If you know anything about Quentin Tarantino’s upbringing you know he grew up on ’70s Blacksploitation movies, so it must have been a dream come true for him to make a film starring Pam Grier and Bridget Fonda’s toe rings.
Aside from the bombastic finale, this film is devoid of the violence and crime drama that became his trademark. This is a filmmaker fully realized, making the movie he wants to make—a love letter to ’60s Hollywood—unconcerned with our expectations, or our prudish notions regarding the sexualization of women’s feet.
See? SEE?! I put “Django Unchained” all the way up at #2 even though it doesn’t contain a single sexualized shot of a woman’s foot! Believe me, I’ve checked several times. And don’t try accusing me of bumping it so high just to prove that my ranking has nothing to do with feet, it ranks high because of the undeniable quality of the film alone. Is it convenient for me that one of his objectively best films contains no sexualized feet? Yes. Do I also have a thing for horses? Sure. Does this movie feature a lot of strong powerful horses in all their equine majesty? Oh brother, you better believe it, but that has nothing to do with its place in my ranking either.
Hey, it’s the obvious choice for a reason. “Pulp Fiction” is the crown jewel of the ’90s independent cinema boom, a cultural touchstone that will undoubtedly be discussed for decades to come. Perhaps a large part of what keeps “Pulp Fiction” in the conversation is the film’s central mystery, which is infamously never revealed. There are endless fan theories and speculations, but Tarantino to this day refuses to answer the question “Did Tony Rocky Horror give Mia Wallace a foot massage?” It’s like the box in “Barton Fink” or the briefcase in… oh, wait, the briefcase was also in “Pulp Fiction.” Okay yeah, now that I think about it, I guess that’s probably the more discussed thing.