Dead Man's Party

If only this were the afterlife afterparty! I've always loved Oingo Boingo's dark sense of fun with their mortality. If you have to die, you may as well take the reaper by the hand and do a little jig.

Everybody is going to die that's part of life. Don't sit around and fret about it letting it eat away at you and don't go around thinking you're some sort of Duncan MacLeod who can avoid it. Just remember that and enjoy your life for what it is

I HAVE to listen to this every halloween, or I feel like something is missing. I think it has that jaunty kinda style that most all of Danny's non-lyrical compositions end up having, which makes it endlessly charming to me. I think it ended up on the soundtrack to a rodney dangerfield movie, but I think it was on the album of it's namesake first. That said I still can't wrap my brain around how one is supposed to enter someplace without their body and soul.

"Don't run away it's only me Don't be afraid of what you can't see" sounds like something one would imagine a ghost to say, doesn't it?

"Don't run away it's only me Don't be afraid of what you can't see" I love when he sings that bit, Danny Elfman just puts so much into every word he sings. What a total genius is all I can say.

This song is totally going to be played at my funeral.

Or I will have some -serious- haunting to do.

The Rodney Dangerfield movie is "Back to School", for which Danny Elfman also wrote the score. In the film, Oingo Boingo can be seen performing the song.

I don't think this song is about a kickass after-life party. This song is about life. It's about living in the here and now. We are all in the Dead Man's Party, every minute of our lives, waiting for our invitation to the party where no one's still alive, but everybody's coming. It ties in nicely with "No One Lives Forever." They are both about making the most of life and not overly fretting about death. "Who could ask for more?"

I'll agree that this song is thematically similar (and a bit lyrically similar too) to No One Live's Forever. But I almost want to take it a step further than that. Although I wouldn't call Dead Man's Party any sort of "concept album" all the songs somehow strike me as having some kind of common theme. It is most prevalent in those two songs, but I actually somehow want to believe that it's a theme common to all of them.

That said, everybody seems to have gotten the interpretation right. Especially greedyskunk. A Dead Man's Party is a rather frightening way to look at life, but that's kind of what it is. I kind of see life that way too, me being slightly morbid and thinking with some consistency about death. (As a result this song appeals to me.) "Waiting for an invitation to arrive" is basically saying "waiting to die" (if you think the party represents death at all). Which is a scary thought, but one I'm familiar with...

And I have finally figured out what it means to leave your body and soul at the door. I was reading something once that proposed that humans are composed of three parts: body, soul and spirit. (And this is actually a somewhat commonly accepted idea.) Your body is the physical you. That's the part that keeps you in the third dimension, so to speak. Then there's your soul, which is your personality. Your soul is the part that makes you you. When we enter into friendships with somebody, we're befriending their soul. That's the part we like about them. The spirit was described in the book as the part that would allow you to enter an afterlife (although the book specifically was talking about Heaven, being as that it was in a Christian context). So you're basically leaving your physical body and your personality at the door to enter the afterlife.

...That's a scary idea...

Just a great song, the party mix is awesome. To me this song is more about celebrating life than anything else. I think it would be cool to have this played at a funeral. Maybe mine??