Daily Jam - This Corrosion

I’ve always been a pretty big proponent of Halloween, obsessively assembling as unique a costume as possible to show off in, from Sid Vicious to Hunter S. Thompson to Courtney Love to Corey Feldman’s character Edgar Frog from The Lost Boys, and then drinking all the beer…until horribly slacking off for the last several years.*  Getting old and having kids will do that to you. My attentions are now on my son whom just last year was the most excellent toddler version of Ash from The Evil Dead 2 ever.**  I made him a cardboard chainsaw hand and everything.

A lot of hard work and pride goes into my craft.

But for some reason or another, the Halloween costume I concocted for myself when I was a freshman in college, way back in October of 1997, was this ugly and twisted Goth brat character, all black pants, black shirt, black makeup and nails, and a seemingly endless amount of video tape wrapped around my entire body. It was not well done. We could blame it on the fact that I was a poor college kid. We could blame it on waiting until the literal last minute. We could blame it on drugs or alcohol. But really, we should blame it on The Sisters of Mercy and “This Corrosion” from 1987’s Floodland in particular. That song was a smash hit in my dorm room.

During my teenage excavation and rediscovery of 80’s music that I missed the first time around, The Sisters of Mercy went unnoticed and unappreciated. Thankfully, my roommate remedied that, and “This Corrosion” spent a long number of weeks on repeat throughout the fall, along with select jams from Suede and The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack.

It’s still on repeat now.

The choir. The proto-industrial beat. The gothic posturing and sneering. The fact that it goes on for ten minutes. I love it all. Front man Andrew Eldritch comes off like some kind of alternate universe version of Iggy Pop staking his claim for the black nail polish crowd…and conquering them all. It’s as ridiculous as it is spectacular. And now, every time I hear it, I think about Halloween, about old friends and old parties, about my horrible Goth kid costume, about Simon Pegg in The World’s End (in which the jam is used comedically, brilliantly, and poignantly), and about dancing around my living room by myself. I am prone to do that from time to time.

So sing this corrosion to me.

*This post was originally written in 2015. I've gotten better with my costumes again since then.

**My (oldest) son is now almost 11 years old.

Listen to the track below, our Daily Jam.