Goo Goo Muck It Up
'Wednesday' capped a big year for '80s alt-rock
We have no idea what Kate Bush does with her free time, but we’d assume it’s a combination of staring wistfully into the fog that accumulates on the moors; communing with the ravens that have become her Familiars; and periodically remembering that she and Peter Gabriel were both surface-of-the-sun hot when they collabed on “Don’t Give Up.”
But she had to stop stylishly haunting her local Pret or whatever last summer to acknowledge that her 1985 single “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was also sprinting back towards Netflix-induced relevance.
“You might’ve heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of Stranger Things has recently been released on Netflix. It features the song, ‘Running Up That Hill’ which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show – I love it too,” Bush wrote in a rare post on her website. “Because of this, ‘Running Up That Hill’ is charting around the world and has entered the U.K. chart at No. 8. It’s all really exciting!”
Bush’s song didn’t stop there: it hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts last June, and also peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 — soundly out-performing the No. 30 spot it reached on its original release. And now Netflix is being credited with introducing TikTok to morbidly sexy 80s band The Cramps too. In Episode 4 of Wednesday, the titular eldest child of the Addams Family does a pretty unforgettable dance to “Goo Goo Muck,” a song from the band’s 1981 Psychedelic Jungle record.
On top of prompting a lot of Would-Be Wednesdays to do their own versions of the “Goo Goo Muck” dance on TikTok, it’s also seriously bumped up The Cramps’ streaming numbers too. According to Billboard, the song was streamed over 2 million times in the week following Wednesday’s release — an increase of more than 8,650% over their average weekly streaming numbers.
“It’s a really amazing, fun little bonanza,” Jim Shaw, the country musician who owns the publishing rights to the song, told the outlet. (Shaw didn’t play on The Cramps’ version of the track, and he wasn’t on the original 1962 Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads release either: the song’s original publisher gave him the rights to settle a “couple thousand dollars” worth of debt.)
Jen Malone, Wednesday’s music supervisor, said that The Cramps had the right vibe for Wednesday, the show, and Wednesday, the character. “We had a huge Spotify list and the Cramps were always on it. We pitched the Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’ to the team, too, then spring-boarded onto ‘Goo Goo Muck,’” she told Variety. “The Cramps are perfect for Wednesday. They’re in her headspace, like Siouxsie and Joy Division. I’m a former Goth. To work with music I love, to find that right moment — the track had to be fun, quirky and lend itself to Wednesday’s personality. For the team to come back with ‘Goo Goo Muck’? Done.”
Even though TikTok is still chocka with DIY Wednesdays grooving to “Goo Goo Muck,” it’s probably not going to see the chart success that Kate Bush did — not that the Cramps ever had chart success. But if this show makes someone more aware of the graverobber-chic of late frontman Lux Interior and the fashionable menace of guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, or makes a weird teen feel a little prouder of being weird, then that’s a chart-topping result of its own.
A version of this story appeared on the news page of Questionist’s parent company, Geeks Who Drink.
Photo illustration: Netflix / Rick Otten (Pexels) / Questionist