Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Speaker 2: Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Now.
Speaker 2: I frequently do these episodes about monsters from mythology, films
Speaker 2: and comic books, but I figured I'd tried different medium today. Music.
Speaker 2: I previously discussed this was probably a couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: count Drugula from the song by of the same title
Speaker 2: by the band Electric Wizard. This time we're going to
Speaker 2: be discussing the Googo Monk. The origin story for this
Speaker 2: monster goes back to a nineteen sixty two novelty horror
Speaker 2: rockabilly tune by Ronnie Cook and the Gay Lads. This
Speaker 2: was we have to remember sixty two as Boris Pickett's
Speaker 2: Monster Mash, so novelty songs about monsters were all the rage.
Speaker 2: Cook along with Ed James, are the credited songwriters. Most listeners, however,
Speaker 2: are going to be familiar with the grittier nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: one cover by The Cramps, the legendary psychobilly band founded
Speaker 2: by the late Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. They'd already
Speaker 2: featured two monster themed songs on their previous album I
Speaker 2: Was a Teenage Werewolf and Zombie Dance. There would be
Speaker 2: many more to come, so the cover here fit them
Speaker 2: like a leather glove. As louder As Scott Rowley discussed
Speaker 2: in a twenty twenty two article Cannibalism, the Cramps and
Speaker 2: that Wednesday dance scene, the weird story of Googoo Muck,
Speaker 2: the Cramps took the track in a slightly darker direction
Speaker 2: via their Gotha billy style and some subtle lyrical tweaks.
Speaker 2: While the original version of google Muck is concerned with
Speaker 2: a teenage transformation into a cannibal monster with implied sexual connotations,
Speaker 2: the Cramps really leaned into all of this. Their titular
Speaker 2: googoo Muck is strongly sexual in its pursuit of female
Speaker 2: human prey. Now I'm not going to walk you through
Speaker 2: the entire song and its lyrics by all means, go
Speaker 2: listen to either version wherever you get your music, but
Speaker 2: I'll do my best to summarize here. The Googoomuk is
Speaker 2: described as the result of a monstrous were wolf like
Speaker 2: transformation brought out by lunar activity, strong were wolf vibes.
Speaker 2: The Googoomuk describes itself as a teenage beast, and this
Speaker 2: of course references a lot of the old like I
Speaker 2: was a teenage were wolf, you know, I was a
Speaker 2: teenage Frankenstein, and so forth, that whole trend that we've
Speaker 2: discussed on Weird House Cinema. But then the lyrics also
Speaker 2: reference tigers rather than wolves. This certainly brings to mind
Speaker 2: the various war tiger and tiger transformation tales for parts
Speaker 2: of the world where the tiger stands tall or at
Speaker 2: least once stood tall as the pre eminent man swear.
Speaker 2: This detail also probably speaks to the Eastern gazing quasi
Speaker 2: tiki origins of the song. The lyrics, for instance, also
Speaker 2: reference headhunters. Now, one interesting factor here is that the
Speaker 2: only description we get of the monster's body is that
Speaker 2: it boasts quote a way out body underneath that head.
Speaker 2: Now this is pretty vague, but it makes me imagine
Speaker 2: a were tiger who still looks perhaps comically like a
Speaker 2: human from the neck up. But it also brings to
Speaker 2: mind various traditions of creatures like the sphinx and the
Speaker 2: manticore involving hybrid beast bodies with a human face or head. However,
Speaker 2: considering the sexually charged nature of the song, it probably
Speaker 2: speaks as much to the idea of bodily lust contained
Speaker 2: beneath the character's streak clothing you know, you know, aching
Speaker 2: for release. Scott Rawley speaks to all of this is
Speaker 2: while expressly tying the Cramps Google Monk to lust, hormones
Speaker 2: and frothing fluids, and by many estimates, this sums up
Speaker 2: something very key to the Cramps whole vibe, the intersection
Speaker 2: of horror and horniness, full of double entendres and references
Speaker 2: to retro weird cinema. Tune in for additional episodes of
Speaker 2: The Monster Fact the Artifact or Animalist Stupendium each week.
Speaker 2: As always, you can email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow your Mind dot com.
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