Negasonic Teenage Warhead

Album: Dopes to Infinity (1995)
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Songfacts®:

  • The second track on Monster Magnet's 1995 album, Dopes to Infinity, this became the band's first single to chart. It reached the Top 30 on Billboard's Mainstream and Modern Rock Track tallies.
  • The song originally appeared the previous year in different form in the American movie S.F.W.
  • Frontman Dave Wyndorf told The Wall Street Journal in 2016 that the song deals with those rock stars who, from his point of view, always seem to be "whiny." More specifically, he was complaining about grunge bands, such as Nirvana, whom he blames for rock's dwindling relevance in the US. "These are the guys who gave the whole circus away, by the way. 'We don't want to rock.' 'OK,' the hip-hop guys [said], 'we do. We do,'" Wyndorf said. "Where's the spirit, where's the garage-rock spirit?"
  • Wyndorf explained that the word "negasonic" comes from a musical concept called "nega-psychedelia" that refers to bands such as Hawkwind and Blue Cheer who grew out of the 1960s psychedelic scene.

    "Everything looked psychedelic, but it was really mean," Wyndorf added. "To me, as a kid, that was the ultimate badass thing: Satan-worshipping rock people. That's the coolest thing I've ever heard of."
  • The sci-fi video featured the band members on asteroids being watched by an enormous woman and Wyndorf driving a car in outer space. It was shot by Gore Verbinski, who'd go on to direct the first three films of the Pirates of the Caribbean film saga.
  • Negasonic Teenage Warhead, a fictional mutant character in Marvel Comics was named after the song. She later featured as a main teenage protagonist in the 2016 comic book movie Deadpool, her power being the ability of localized atomic detonation within a certain radius of herself. The character's creator, Grant Morrison, has admitted being indebted to Monster Magnet.

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