Fate Up Against Your Will

Echo and the Bunnymen “The Killing Moon”

I have spent a lot of time trying to parse who “me,” “you,” & “him” are in “The Killing Moon.” Is this a love triangle? A cuck fantasy? A love song about two men? Three men? Is the singer always a passive character, or does he switch perspective when active – another self that he’s alienated from? Is “him”…God? Is “him”…death?

Ian McCulloch deliberately wrote “The Killing Moon” to be ambiguous. That’s a lot of why it’s so powerful and timeless – a lot of songs invite you to make it your own with interpretation, but McCulloch’s lyrics are so vivid and intense that they seem to be telling you something very important that you must decode. It’s like he’s offering a key to something inside of you: What are you afraid of? What turns you on? Who do you want? Who do you want, but resist? What do you feel is unavoidable?

“The Killing Moon” is a song about desire and inevitability, and how desire can create a situation that is more or less inevitable, and how desire can also resist inevitability. There is romance in either scenario. The lust in this song is so strong – it’s repressed to a large extent, but the gothic romance atmosphere of the music gives it away. It’s sexy, but incredibly gloomy and bleak in tone. McCulloch is singing about a maddening desire, something so mind-bending that every kiss is cosmic in scale. He sings it all with a weary desperation.

So, is their love the inevitable thing, predetermined by fate? Or does his lust invariably lead to madness or humiliation? Is heartbreak inescapable? Is he doomed to never consummate this love? All of that and more seems plausible to me. Anything is possible in “The Killing Moon,” because it is stuck indefinitely in the moment before resolution. Something feels destined, but you don’t know what it is. You hope for the best, you fear the worst. You wait for the moment, and then you let go of your pride and submit to it. You give yourself to it.

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