Debaser
by Pixies
- 135
- BPM
- F major
- Key
- 7B
- Camelot
- 49
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
"Debaser" opens Doolittle, the Pixies album released in April 1989. Its lyrics are based on Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. One scene in the film has a woman's eye apparently cut open with a razor, and that is where the lyric "slicin' up eyeballs" comes from.
Black Francis said he watched the film twice in a naive, amateurish way and thought he would make a song about it. He sang "un chien andalusia" because "un chien andalou" sounded too French. The earliest version of that line was "Shed, Apollonia!", a reference to a scene in Purple Rain. The title refers to the film debasing the morality and standards of art in its time. Francis said it meant one who debases, and that he meant to introduce a new word into the language. He did not think it had caught on.
The song had a second life after the band split. The album version came out as a single in 1997 to promote the compilation Death to the Pixies. A live version recorded in Chicago on August 9, 1989 is on the 1991 "Head On" single. One mix of it also appeared in the game DJ Hero 2, blended with The Prodigy's "Invaders Must Die".
Debaser runs at 135 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.78 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 444 ms. It is in F major, Camelot 7B, which shares its notes with D minor and mixes cleanly with Bb major and C major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.