Hey Man Nice Shot
by Filter
- 89
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 48
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
On the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, Richard Patrick was touring with Nine Inch Nails when he picked up a videotape from a bookstore holding raw footage of the public suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. Patrick, who grew up in a neighboring state, had been affected by seeing the incident on the TV news and called it a scary topic. He first wrote "Hey Man Nice Shot" in 1991, before his band Filter even had a record deal.
Filter released the song as the first single from the debut album Short Bus in 1995. Many people took it to be about the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain, though Patrick said otherwise in interviews. The chorus guitar line had been used a year earlier in the Stabbing Westward song "Ungod", after Stuart Zechman, who played guitar for Stabbing Westward at the time, showed them the riff.
In 2001 Clear Channel listed the song in a memorandum of songs with questionable lyrics unsuitable for American radio after the September 11 attacks. Twenty years on, Patrick told Billboard he disliked the thought of the song triggering people, but worried about censorship and free speech. Two versions of the video exist, one using the album mix and one using the promo-only remix later heard in The Cable Guy.
Hey Man Nice Shot runs at 89 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.7 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 674 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.