Understanding Zombie

Not an easy story, but an important one.

Written as a response to the violence of The Troubles, Zombie is a raw, intensely emotional look at the damage and pain caused by these sorts of conflicts. It's a plea for humanity, and one that still resonates today, decades after the end of the specific conflict it was written for. It was a hard song to spend this much time with, but it remains an important piece of art, and I hope I did it justice.

Huge thanks to our Elephant Club members:

Susan Jones
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) I want to clarify that, as someone who isn't Irish, I tried to be as respectful as I could when telling the story of The Troubles because it's not really my story to tell. It's a particularly difficult subject to engage with using my usual, cartoony aesthetics, but I did my best to avoid making light of what are, at their core, incredibly serious tragedies. Hopefully I did that successfully, but if not, I apologize in advance to any Irish viewers who were upset. I know this is a sensitive part of your history, and I did not in any way intend to trivialize it, but if you feel that I did I'll take that criticism.

2) In the intro I mentioned that O'Riordan was herself Irish, which affected her experience of The Troubles, but to be clear, the rest of the band is Irish too. She was just the one who wrote the song.


4) I attributed most of the guitar stuff I talked about to O'Riordan, which may be a little surprising because to the best of my knowledge Noel Hogan is the official lead guitarist for the band, but I'm doing that based on who appears to be doing what in the various pieces of live performance footage I found. (Mostly at Woodstock '94, 'cause that's the earliest one I could find and thus most likely to reflect the original arrangement, but also some supplemental sources when the camera wasn't on the guitarists at the right moment in that one.) I don't have official, labeled stems, so it's possible they did things differently in the studio, but as far as I can tell she played those parts live, and I have no particular reason to doubt that they did the same thing while recording. I don't know that for sure, though, so I wanted to acknowledge the ambiguity.

5) I think in the D major voicing in the intro, she also leaves the G string open? At least for the first attack, anyway. Dunno, it's a weird chord.

6) I should note that, when I say the verse melody sounds hopeful, I don't mean it in an immediate sense. The events she's describing are tragic, and the line captures that, but in comparison to the guitar riff, it feels like it leaves space for a brighter future, as reflected in the second line of each verse calling for action against the violence.

7) Technically, for the first line of each verse, she skips the first accented syllable in her trochaic septameter structure, so maybe it's trochaic hexameter with a pick-up instead. Don't really care, though, the number of feet wasn't really my point, and the second line clearly has 7. (Also I think it's actually heptameter? Don't care.)

8) Amphimacers are also called cretics, which is probably a more normal-sounding word, but why would I use a normal-sounding word when I can instead use the word "amphimacer"?

9) There's actually another small difference between the walk-down and the ending lick: In the end, she lets the C sustain for longer, shortening the rest between it and the A. Unfortunately, I had to use a professional recreation for that particular line 'cause I couldn't isolate just that one single guitar part, and that recreation doesn't quite do the sustain correctly, so I couldn't demonstrate it. (I tried stretching it with melodyne but it didn't sound good.) It's not hugely important anyway, but for the sake of completeness I figured I'd put it here. This is also why I used the semi-isolated clip for the solo: the recreation played the rhythm wrong and it bothered me enough to not want to use it.

10) I said the Troubles "officially" ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, but of course history is more complicated than that. The violence didn't just end overnight or anything, but as far as I can find, that's broadly where historians draw the line, so it's what I went with as well. (Also in case it wasn't obvious, when I mentioned that this was a couple years after the song was released, my point was to situate the two events in their historical context, not to imply that the release of Zombie directly led to the Good Friday Agreement. They happened in that order, but causality doesn't work like that.)

11) I didn't realize until far too late in the process that releasing a video about a song called Zombie in late October might look like a Halloween video, so if you came here looking for content on, like, ghosts and goblins or whatever then I'm sorry, that's not what I made and it's not what I wanted to make. Maybe next year.

[PassiveSmoking]

I wish you'd mentioned the keening, as that's such an important element of the song. Keening is a style of Gaelic singing used as a lament, which Dolores uses here at the end of the chorus to lament the state of affairs the song was written in response to.

[TazTheYellow]

On the subject of poetry, one could make a whole extra video about the multifaceted nature of the "zombie" metaphor. I'll spell out one of those facets here and now: Tim Parry did not die instantly in the bombings. He died five days later, at the hospital. This is what was meant by "child is slowly taken." Zombies here represent a slow, creeping sort of death.

[bmac]

Grunge-era rock was a style that predominately featured men singing about personal troubles which much of it feels like it was from a specific point in time, so it's fascinating to see the power this song by a band that didn't even typically employ that sound managed to capture in this song sung by a woman singing about a conflict like the Troubles which vastly transcends the era Zombie was performed. It captures that raw emotion but turned it into something timeless and relatively unique, both for the band and for the era.

[Magnymbus]

One other important thing to mention. The fact that this song came from THE CRANBERRIES makes it all the more heavy. When literally every other song is light pop-rock, this song feels like the most optimistic and friendly kid in school is finally angry. I don't know if anyone else had that sort of kid in school. But for me, there was a girl that never got upset, saw the best in everybody, was a wholehearted and sincere hopeless-romantic, and above all, abhorred violence...
And one day she used her fists where her words held no power. She screamed and cried and even though she was pretty short, it felt like she filled the entire hallway. The girl that always kept the peace and actively stopped fights. And when we found out the reason why... Classes were pretty quiet for a few months. It was powerful enough that it makes me hesitate to explain what actually happened, but it involved five or six people, and one of them never came back to school... She was one of the only people that even knew he existed.

[DylanMatthewTurner]

I never interpreted it as anger, but rather more desolation and grieving, crying out "why? how could you?" rather than "screw you!"
In the context of a protest song it gave me more of a vibe of "This is painful. Stop what you're doing; it's wrong" rather than "We're going to make you stop what you're doing bc we're angry."

[BobDerGute]

It's such a shame that the "outro" solo part often doesn't get played out on the radio. Such a powerful emotional piece of art.

[shawnreap]

"Works of art like Zombie will be there to remind us of everything and everyone lost along the way"
...including Dolores O'Riordan herself. 😔 Such a powerful voice in every meaning of the phrase gone far too soon.

[hanna-liminal]

I'm not Irish, but I was born when my country was in a civil war and one of the most foundational parts of my life was when the sectarian conflict set off again when I was a young adult.

I say all this to support my idea that the true power of this song is how PAINFULLY accurate it feels towards all civil war situations, and especially ethnic/sectarian ones. It's just vague enough, and just harsh and *real* enough. Yes, the Irish musical culture is embedded in it, but different aspects of it can also call to (for example) Arabic musical culture.
The song will never not make me weep.

[rmdodsonbills]

There's another interesting lyric choice that I think adds to this discussion. I was introduced to a song in high school when I sang in the All-State Chorus, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye. I don't know which came first, but it's the same tune as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." The latter is very much a joyful homecoming song from the US Civil War while the former is a graphically morbid homecoming song. Where "Marching Home" talks about church bells ringing with joy and getting ready for the jubilee, "Hardly Knew Ye" asks where are your eyes, where are your legs, I hardly recognized you, you're "so low in flesh so high in bone, " but "I'm happy for to see you home." The reason I bring it up is that the chorus of "Knew Ye" is "with your guns and drums and drums and guns, the enemy nearly slew ye" which is clearly (I think) the reference of "tanks and bombs and bombs and guns." There have been several versions of "Knew ye" released by Irish groups, so I feel like there's a clear Irish history to the song such that it's not weird to think O'Riordan would have known of it. Invoking the horrible costs of war that way seems very in keeping with your analysis.

I'm also a little surprised you didn't mention the connection of zombies to mindless destruction, but maybe that's just a little too obvious.

[charlesmartin]

When you isolated that bass flourish, I recognized "dies irae". Genius

[Hughes]

A friend of mine is from Palestine and a few years ago I played this for her as it's one of my favorite songs. She actually had trouble listening to it and started to tear up cause it brought up so many memories for her without me even telling her the origin of the song

[GrimmFLawless]

Isn’t it strange how often a band’s biggest song is uncharacteristic of their extended catalogue. Such a great band.

[ikepigott]

I am not a musician. I am not a music theorist. But I do appreciate great analysis, well-explained. You succeeded in allowing me to understand how the deliberate construction of the song made me “feel” truths that weren’t spoken directly. So thank you.

[thjnz]

I used to play this song pretty regularly with a cover band I played guitar in. I had to fight to keep it together almost every time I played that devastating (perfect word) G live. That walk-down that is desperately trying (but failing over, and over, and over) to be a walk-up is one of the best rock guitar phrases of all time, in my book. Thanks for this, such a meaningful song, and such a moving and thorough analysis. As per your usual.

[Birkguitars]

A covers band I was in decided a few years ago that we would play this. Our office was next to London Bridge and between making the decision to add it to the set and performing it the attack at Borough Market occurred. One of our colleagues was badly injured in the attack. Although thst incudent arose from a different origin playing this song in that context made it even more moving. I think you handled the complexity and pain of the backstory superbly. Some years ago the father of one of the boys who died invited Martin McGuiness to speak at a rally in Warrington organised for reasons connected with the peace process. When asked how he could share a stage with a man who had been actively involved with the IRA he responded simply "we don't make peace with our friends". I doubt that I would have been capable of that but I am so glad that he was. Without that perspective from so many of the people affected by the Troubles the GFA might never have happened.

[danielleohallisey]

In your section about her vocals, I was surprised you didn’t even mention her characteristic upward inflection at the end of each phrase when she is “distorting“ her voice. I don’t know if that has an official name in Irish singing or anything, but I always thought of it as a sort of anti-Grace-note. It’s an incredibly powerful addition to all of her songs, but particularly adds an intense sort of grief to these lines…

[sebastianquintana]

I first heard this song when i was a kid before i could understand english and the sheer atmosphere already communicated everything the band was feeling. Incredible music writing

[opexe]

Breaking down this tune without talking history, was never going to happen, so I am glad that you chose to do so. And therefore thanks for chosing to do so anyway.

Edit: Reworked my statement to being clearer about my intention.

[TheKingOfToast]

Whelp time to listen to Zombie on repeat for the whole day. Such a good song.