never say forever, cause nothing lasts
dancing with the bones to my buried past
nevermind, there's nothing i can do
bet your life there's something killing you
When Dave Grohl, Nirvana's drummer, formed the Foo Fighters after Kurt Cobain's death, I was intrigued by the name. Obviously it was inspired by what computer programmers know as metasyntactic variables like foo, bar, and not to forget, foobar.
The Jargon File defines them thus:
(1) they are variables in the meta language used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages like “the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar”).
Or to put it more simply, scratch terms that you can plug into computer code to demonstrate how it works (or doesn't). Why Grohl wanted to fight metasyntactic variables wasn't clear, but I thought it was a cool name. A bit geeky, but cool.
Imagine my surprise, then, to recently find out that the real origin of it came from WWII radar operators, who used "foo fighters" to describe mysterious traces that couldn't have come from known aircraft. In other words, UFOs. Is that a stupid thing to name a band after, or what?
Notwithstanding that misunderstanding, and Grohl's reputation (despite being a Bush-hating moonbat) as one of the nicest guys in the business, I never really warmed to the Foo Fighters. To be fair, I've haven't seen them live, and the only songs of theirs that I knew were the ones that got radio play; but they seemed almost too well made and stripped of spontaneity. Sort of formulaic, like Tom Petty's gotten to be the last few years.
I might have to rethink that with the release of DOA, the second single from the In Your Honor double album. To those who say "Enough with the crunchy guitar-driven rock already!" I reply: "You can't handle the crunchy guitar-driven rock!"
Or something like that. The video can be seen at the official site here (click on the guitar icon labeled "Foo Player" on the right; then "Video" at the bottom of the window that opens -- probably best for dial-up users); or here if you want a full-screen version. (Fourth down, on the left.)