Reanimate Your Feet

I’ve been thinking about resurrection—not just because My Chemical Romance released their first new song in 8 years. Defying death is a fantasy ubiquitous as death itself. Except for that one book, you know, The Bible, resurrection tends to go quite poorly.

A childhood favorite, Jurassic Park, comes to mind. In his book on the politics of nostalgia, Grafton Tanner admits to his own love for this campy romp, and for the star attraction: dinosaurs. The creatures, he notes, are perfect for the young imagination because they are wholly nostalgic interpretations of an uncertain past. The first thing we learn about dinosaurs is that they’re extinct. We can then imagine their reality however we see fit. Sure, scientists have all sorts of tools to simulate the way those fossils once moved, and how they might’ve looked, but it’s all an act of faith. The popular consensus now suggests dinosaurs had feathers more like chickens than Godzilla. Where’s the romance in that?

My parents rightly only let me watch Jurassic Park with their supervision, rented from the local movie store, and for years after velociraptors plagued my nightmares. Despite the terror the movie instilled, I was desperate to revisit it. When we finally got high-speed internet at our house, I spent my allotted hour of screen time searching for movie clips on YouTube. Among them I found a supercut of T-Rex chase scenes set to an infectious Eurodance song: “Move Your Dead Bones” by Dr. Reanimator.

The T-rex video has been lost to time and no doubt copyright infringement, but blessed be the YouTube user who has since uploaded a 4K version of something even better: the song’s original music video.

I must implore you to watch this thing. Imagine the video for “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” shot on a shoestring budget directed by a Guillermo Del Toro wannabe. Now stop imagining and let the hilarity overtake your eyeballs.

According to the credits, the song is written and produced by Jordi Cubino, Spanish pop singer turned movie score composer, and performed by “Dr. Reanimator,” a figure who no one can identify. Is it the guy in the video? He has no other songs or performances credited to his stage name. Some theorize it is Jordi himself, but he left his singing career behind a few years prior to the song’s release in the end credits of the b-movie “Beyond Re-Animator.” I tried to contact Jordi to get some answers, and he understandably made no reply. He’s gone on to do some respectable work, and this bouncy little track off a movie few remember is likely not what he wants to be known for.

The song had a second life in the early furry internet forums, when a popular artist reanimated a video of fandom characters once dead dancing in unison. The animation made its way to YouTube where it would eventually alert me to the existence of furries.

It begins with a voice that wouldn’t feel out of place blaring through the speakers of a haunted house themed rollercoaster while a child behind you ralphs into his mother’s lap. The synth and drum machine take control, and we’re in real Darude: Sandstorm territory. The command, “Reanimate your feet,” is actually an amazing line. The whole song, save the unstoppable hook, could be summarized in those three words. It sets the scene: the dregs of an interminable dance party, sweaty and sloshed, and anticipating tomorrow’s hangover, the Sunday scaries sneaking into bed with you, all this dismissed with one simple demand. Get out there and dance once more.

It will not shock you to learn I don’t spend much time in clubs or on dance floors, I’m sure, but in another world, this song would end the hazy nights with the same rejuvenating power of Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” or any Britney Spears track at Emo Nite. It’s simple, it’s syrup, it’s exactly the kind of easy thing to which you can grab your friend by the elbows and spin around teen-movie style in complete resplendent joy.

We are alive, for now, let’s enjoy it.

The pre-chorus is just as hype, declaring,

This was still one year before Oprah’s iconic, “You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” That parallel structure has always held sway. You! You! You! Everyone.

Who is the good doctor addressing? The living? Are we just the not yet dead? The dead to be? The future exes? What is this freedom? Life? Or death?

What will we be owed when we are no longer?

Do the dead desire life? Are they nostalgic for it? No one can say, since there isn’t anybody to ask, only our interpretations and projections.

In most representations only the living truly desire reanimation, resurrection. Another moment with the lost loved one. A chance to say goodbye, make peace, move on. The dead usually suffer more because of this desire. Coming back is painful, often unwanted. The dead must sleep—exhausting labor, this dying business. To lose control of one’s body after death is a phenomenon feared across cultures. In his book on Vaporwave, Tanner uses the phrase “babbling corpse.” He refers to bots, spam, various digital bodies that regurgitate sameness and simulacra, which connects to our analog fears of the undead.

Stan Lee’s estate recently reached a deal to license the late comic pioneer’s likeness in various film and media. He lives on, not just in our hearts, but our wallets too.

I know I’m not the only one disturbed by the trend of naked necropolitics.

Recently, the Israeli Occupation Forces shot and killed the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank, then attacked her funeral procession, beating mourners and pallbearers, and disrupting every possible dignity for the dead. At one point, the mourners dropped her casket, which had been draped in the Palestinian flag—the supposed spark for the IOF’s crackdown.

To rob the grieving of the dead is an unspeakable act, long held in contempt, appearing in the oral traditions of the Haudenosaunee, the Homeric Epics, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe. We know that disturbing the dead is wrong.

Those in power know: the dead are powerful. Part of this power comes from now being unreachable, beyond our knowing and control. The powerful also know the dead cannot speak for themselves, and will try to make puppets of rigor mortis. Make chickens out of dinosaurs. The dead must be defended, much as the living must be defended from undesired death.

American pundits peddle bowdlerized zombies of radicals-past in propaganda that would make those mythical martyrs sick. Watch them celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.: the ever patient nonviolent “Good One,” and bury eternally the same man who castigated “The White Moderate” and called for capitalism’s dissolution. The same man the FBI sent hate mail encouraging and advocating for his suicide.

In The Hours Have Lost Their Clocks, Tanner neither condemns nostalgia beneath nor venerates it above other emotions. Nostalgia, he writes, must be reclaimed from those who would use it against us.

We must strive to live lives worth remembering beyond the narratives posthumously imposed. We are not yet fossils to be found contextless, featherless, eons from now. We must move our soon to be dead bones so hard that their memory will never reanimate a lie.

What random song would absolutely electrify you to hear in a club at the end of the night? What song do you want your friends to hear after you’re gone and remember you by?