If you’re anything like me, you can’t read a news story about coronavirus without hearing these words in the back of your head:
“Virus gonna kill you. Gonna thrill you. Gonna knock you out.”
KMFDM wrote that song, “Virus,” in the late-80s during the height of the AIDS crisis, and it contains some questionable lyrics. If you’re able to overlook that, the song feels pretty prescient today given the incessant media hype surrounding coronavirus.
Industrial music has always flirted with doomsday scenarios, from nuclear annihilation to robot uprisings to climate catastrophe. Global pandemic is no doubt a part of that oeuvre.
For the record, I don’t think we’re looking at a Mad Max scenario. But it seems increasingly likely that many of us will be forced to spend two weeks or more in isolation when the virus peaks.
We may as well have some tunes to pass the time.
