Freak Scene
by Dinosaur Jr.
- 76
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 29
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
"Freak Scene" has turned up in other bands' hands. Blink-182 covered it on their debut demo Flyswatter, and Belle & Sebastian have played it live. It also topped the "All Time Indie Top 50" list. The single reached number seven on the UK Indie Chart and spent 12 weeks on it.
J Mascis wrote and produced the song. It opens Dinosaur Jr.'s third album, Bug, from 1988. Engineers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade recorded it at Fort Apache Studios. SST Records released it as a single in the United States, and in the UK it was the band's first release on Blast First. A music video was made to promote it.
Music journalist Everett True wrote that the song invented the slacker generation. The band formed in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1984 around Mascis on guitar and vocals, Lou Barlow on bass and Murph on drums. Bug was the third of their albums on independent labels.
Freak Scene runs at 76 BPM, the tempo of soul, trip-hop and half-time hip-hop. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 3.16 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 789 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.