\n<\/p>\n
The Killers released \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d<\/a> 20 years ago and hardly anybody cared.<\/p>\n The dominant hits of the day were hip-shakers and party bangers whose titles doubled as bodily imperatives: \u201cShake Ya Tailfeather,\u201d \u201cGet Low,\u201d \u201cStand Up\u201d \u2014 odes to the delirious, thrilling movements that keep the party going. \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d is \u2026 not that.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an intense, dramatic song about the shattering experience of getting cheated on by someone you love. The lead single off the Las Vegas band\u2019s debut studio album, \u201cHot Fuss,\u201d consists of exactly one verse, pre-chorus and chorus, which simply repeat; the singer Brandon Flowers\u2019s voice is the sardonic wail of a jilted lover who is physically ill at the thought of his girlfriend being with someone else (\u201cNow they\u2019re going to bed, and my stomach is sick\u201d), and pretends that he is totally OK (\u201cComin\u2019 out of my cage, and I\u2019ve been doing just fine\u201d) when he is obviously an absolute wreck (\u201cI just can\u2019t look, it\u2019s killing meeeee\u201d).<\/p>\n Yet in the intervening decades, \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d \u2014 which eventually reached the Billboard Hot 100 over a year after its initial release, peaking at No. 10 in June 2005 \u2014 has become something more <\/em>than a hit. It has grown into an all-purpose, inescapable rallying cry: a karaoke staple, a football tradition, a party playlist must-have, a meme<\/a>. It\u2019s a straight shot of nostalgia that, having survived that awkward interval when a song feels dated and falls out of favor, now belongs to a pantheon of modern classics that are both extremely of <\/em>their time and transcend it.<\/p>\n If boomers gave the masses \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believin\u2019,\u201d<\/a> millennials can claim \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d as the generation\u2019s official entry into that canon: a song that gets everybody at the bar shout-singing along.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The track is the centerpiece of the Killers\u2019 oeuvre and the star of their new greatest hits album, \u201cRebel Diamonds,\u201d which is full of hits with lyrics that are basically tattooed onto the hippocampuses of even the most casual fans \u2014 \u201cAll These Things That I\u2019ve Done\u201d<\/a> (\u201cI\u2019ve got soul but I\u2019m not a soldier\u201d), the synthy-sad \u201cSmile Like You Mean It\u201d<\/a> and gender-bendy \u201cSomebody Told Me\u201d<\/a> (\u201cyou had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had\u2026\u201d). But none of those singles comes close to matching the ongoing ubiquity of \u201cMr. Brightside.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve never not played that song live, because it\u2019s stood the test of time and I\u2019m proud of it,\u201d Flowers told Spin<\/a> in 2015. \u201cI never get bored of singing it.\u201d (A representative for Flowers said he was unable to speak for this article because he was in the studio.)<\/p>\n \u201cYou drop this on a Friday night at midnight and the whole club just goes bananas,\u201d said William Reed, a D.J. and founder of Club Decades, a dance party at Boardner\u2019s in Hollywood. \u201cLiterally everybody in there is dancing and singing and dancing on top of the platforms and shouting with their eyes closed and screaming. It\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tony Twillie, entertainment director of the New Orleans Bourbon Street karaoke hot spot the Cat\u2019s Meow, called it \u201cone of our most popular songs.\u201d He can cite its code for the D.J. \u2014 R203 \u2014 off the top of his head. \u201cEveryone knows that code.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Unlike \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believin\u2019,\u201d<\/a> \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d is almost comically easy to sing \u2014 or at least, it is a song that can withstand being sung very badly.<\/p>\n Josh Fontenot, a bartender and former karaoke host at Louie\u2019s Pub in Chicago, always pitches \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d when rookies need a recommendation. \u201cYou can put the song on and not <\/em>sing it and people will be excited that the song is on,\u201d he said. \u201cThe room will sing it for you.\u201d<\/p>\n If you have been to Nashville recently and felt like you heard this song everywhere, you\u2019re probably right: Jer Gregg, who oversees entertainment for TC Restaurant Group venues that cater to country music purists and bachelorette parties alike, estimates that \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d is getting played \u201csomewhere around 300 times a week\u201d at the company\u2019s various locations.<\/p>\n Why does the track slip so seamlessly into so many different settings? Genre-wise, it\u2019s fluid: The Killers are a rock band, but their energy is a little bit glam, a little bit dance pop, a little bit emo. \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d covers a cornucopia of emotional bases, too. You can sing it when you\u2019re ecstatic, on a celebratory night out; you can sing it when you\u2019re miserable, on a \u201cforget about that ex\u201d night out. There\u2019s even a football angle.<\/p>\n At a 2017 University of Michigan game against its rival Michigan State, in the midst of a torrential downpour, the song came over the loudspeakers at the end of the third quarter and everybody in the sold-out stands (capacity: 109,901) kept singing a cappella after the D.J. cut the music. Belting \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d has been a third-quarter ritual ever since. You can even buy \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d Michigan-themed merch<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a weird song to have be a college football anthem,\u201d acknowledged Alejandro Z\u00fa\u00f1iga, a Michigan alum who covers his alma mater for 24\/7 Sports. \u201cThe subject of the song is not related to sports, and it\u2019s not a fight song,\u201d he added. \u201cBut it just had so much momentum that it became what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMR. BRIGHTSIDE\u201d IS<\/strong> what the chart analyst and \u201cHit Parade\u201d podcast host Chris Molanphy calls \u201ca second-chance hit\u201d: a song that fizzled and nearly flopped until something in the culture jolted it back to life. (Like Lizzo\u2019s \u201cTruth Hurts\u201d from 2017, which didn\u2019t really catch on until 2019, when it was released as a radio single after getting a bump from TikTok<\/a> and Netflix<\/a>.) \u201cSometimes certain songs need to marinate before they find their moment,\u201d Molanphy said in an interview.<\/p>\n If artists hoping for a smash in 2020 are praying their song blows up on TikTok, in the early 2000s, the ultimate signal-boost for an indie band was getting on the soundtrack for the soapy teen drama \u201cThe O.C.\u201d The Killers did one better: They appeared on a second-season episode of the show, performing a three-song set at the Bait Shop which included, of course, \u201cMr. Brightside.\u201d Two months later, \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d debuted on the Billboard charts.<\/p>\n