GOOD DANCE LYRICAL SONGS NO WORDS SERIES

“I don't want no monster, no skeletons, and nothing like that around in my house,” she tells me. Kevin Winterĭespite getting the answers to the questions I sought, the best detail from my conversation with Love is that she doesn't really get into the Halloween spirit. Singer Darlene Love accepts the Best Documentary, Feature award for ’20 Feet from Stardom’ onstage during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on Main Hollywood, California. I think that's the only way you can say that that was the Monster Mash.”

Only, they did with their arms flinging, and making all kinds of crazy moves. They just did the mash, like the Mashed Potato.

“They did the mash like they were monsters. “We did the Mash, and you just did it a little more funnier and weirder by doing the mash, just doing the mash like Dee Dee Sharp did it,” as Love explains the dance. 'Monster Mash' was released a few months after the smash hit “Mashed Potato Time,” which was then the song slash dance craze from Dee Dee Sharp. The concept for the song, as Love explains, clears up my first question. They thought it was a hysterical throwaway song at the time-certainly not something that would still be beloved half a century later. At the time, Love had been performing with The Blossoms and got the call to sing background on a new song. All of this leads me to the assumption that we've never actually heard or seen this 'Monster Mash.'ĭesperate for answers, I reached out music legend Darlene Love, who sang backing vocals on the 1962 original version of Pickett’s song. We know it's a graveyard smash, we know the zombies were having fun, we know at one point The Crypt-Kicker Five 'played the mash'-but are bereft of any deeper details. Throughout his story, he never provides any clear description of either a dance or the song-leaving the actual concept of the 'Monster Mash' pretty ambiguous. Nowhere does he confirm that the song we're hearing-that he's performing-is the same 'Monster Mash' that he saw that fateful night. The narrator is simply describing the origin of this 'Monster Mash' craze as he witnessed it. But what do we know about the 'Monster Mash' itself? What does it mean? Is the 'Monster Mash' a dance, a song, or both-like a 'Macarena'-type thing? And, more importantly, is the song we’re hearing the actual 'Monster Mash' the creatures were dancing to in the story, or just an interpretation of the original 'Monster Mash' by the narrator? Have we ever heard the real 'Monster Mash'? This is, made clear from the aforementioned backlash, a dearly beloved song. But the whole episode got us thinking about the deeper meaning of 'Monster Mash.' We have since issued a correction, and admitted that 'Monster Mash' is, indeed, a graveyard smash.

GOOD DANCE LYRICAL SONGS NO WORDS SERIES

Welcome to Overthinking It, a new Esquire series in which editors and writers dig into a very, very specific moment in pop culture-putting our dogged journalistic and critical skills to use in the most unnecessary of ways.Įarlier this year, Esquire got in a bit of a tiff with the Twitter mobs when we mistakenly left 'Monster Mash' off our list of Best Halloween Songs.

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