“DOA” occupies an odd place in Foo Fighters’ oeuvre. Despite being a Gold-selling single and a Top 10 Modern Rock radio hit in 2005 (and that back when Modern Rock radio still meant something), one that moreover helped their big, self-consciously important double-album In Your Honor go platinum^[1]And that shortly before streaming cratered CD sales completely and no band would ever go platinum again., “DOA” has to date not appeared on either of the band’s Best Of collections: namely, Greatest Hits (2009) and The Essential Foo Fighters (2022).^[2]And yes, “DOA” is on the accompanying Live DVD, but seriously, no one watched the bonus discs even when people still bought CDs. The band sharply cut back on playing it live after the 2000s, and have apparently not performed it once since 2015–and even that last time was only after a concerted fan request campaign. That is, “DOA” is both a certified hit and a confirmed fan-favorite, yet Foo Fighters have curiously memory-holed it.

All-knowing Wikipedia insinuates that the reason why they quit performing “DOA” is because “The band claimed it was the hardest song from In Your Honor to play live”, but that claim 1) still doesn’t explain its elision from their various Greatest Hits compilations (it could have easily replaced one of the two forgettable “bonus tracks” on the 2009 collection); and 2) frankly still feels like a cop-out explanation. The 4/4 time, mid-tempo “DOA” isn’t prog rock; it has no tricky time-signature changes or syncopated rhythms or what have you, and adheres quite faithfully to the traditional Pop song structure of verse-chorus-bridge.^[3]It’s not an outlier to their typical style like, say, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was for the Boomtown Rats in 1979. “DOA” is definitely not more technically difficult than “Everlong” (at least if my memories of playing the latter on Guitar Hero are to be believed), nor does it differ much in basic formula from, say, “My Hero” or “Long Road to Ruin” (released 12 years apart yet still sounding like they come from the same CD), and it has to be easier on Dave Grohl’s larynx than “Best of You” (where he basically screams nonstop the entire song)–all of which remain Foo Fighters live staples to this day, not to mention feature on both Greatest Hits collections.

An intentionally-simplistic band like the Ramones could maybe get away with complaining if one of their own songs was too hard for them to play—as Johnny Ramone purportedly did with the arpeggios on “Pet Semetary”—but Kurt Cobain hired Dave Grohl as Nirvana’s drummer 15 years earlier specifically for his technical proficiency, and “DOA” does not stretch the abilities of actually skilled musicians. (And even if it really is trickier than it sounds, the Ramones still never left “Pet Semetary” off their Greatest Hits collections.) The quiet vanishing act of “DOA”—an otherwise uncontroversial Rock anthem that fits in comfortably with the rest of Foo Fighter’s repertoire—is a low-key mystery.

We can of course only speculate as to why the band has left “DOA” behind…but I have my hunches, that it has nothing to do with the semi-complex guitar arrangements, and everything to do with the actual lyrics. By way of comparison, Nick Cave has stated in interviews that his 1988 signature song “The Mercy Seat”—about a death row inmate getting strapped into the electric chair as he defiantly repeats the mantra “I’m not afraid to die”—is very much a product of his relative youth. “Before I was able to write things like, ‘I’m not afraid to die’,” he explained not 10 years later in 1995, “And kids come up to me and say, ‘Hey, that line means so much to me’. And I have to sort of say I don’t feel that way any more. I don’t feel as cocky about death as I used to. I wake up in mad panics about death approaching.” Another 30+ years have passed since that interview, so I can only assume his “mad panics” about his looming mortality have only grown more acute since then.

”DOA,” too–the medical term for “Dead On Arrival”–is also about the inexorable march of mortality. “It’s a shame we have to die my dear/no one’s getting out of here alive,” Dave Grohl belts out in the anthemic, singalong chorus, “What a way to go, but have no fear/No one’s getting out of here alive.” Written at the height of the Iraq war and the immediate aftermath of 9/11^[4]In Your Honor was reportedly named for presidential candidate and decorated-veteran John Kerry, whom Dave Grohl campaigned for unsuccessfully in ‘04 in protest of the Iraqi invasion, and whose war … Continue reading, the song is a reminder to fear not the end, because one way or another we’re all gonna die anyways. Whether by war or terrorist attack, whether by execution as in the Nick Cave song or suicide like his ex-band leader Kurt Cobain^[5]“Bet your life there’s something killing you,” sings Dave Grohl., whether by cancer or car-crash or overdose or just plain old age, no one’s getting out of here alive indeed.^[6]Elijah and John the Revelator and the Three Nephites, I hope I don’t need to remind you, are very much the radical exceptions to this rule. LDS uber-scholar Hugh Nibley, in his 1955 parable of the eschatological man, argues that we are all in the position of the terminal patient doomed to die even in the best of circumstances, and both “DOA” and “The Mercy Seat” are possessed of a similar sentiment. The full name of our church that Russel M. Nelson spent his entire presidency emphasizing, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is supposed to be a constant reminder that we are to live our lives as though the world were about to end, because it is, even if just on an individual level; every day is the last day for someone. To quote Prince Hamlet, “The readiness is all.”

Now, both Nick Cave and Dave Grohl wrote their best-known ready-to-die anthems at the ages of 31 and 34 respectively; that is, right in that early-30s range when you begin to really feel your youth slip away, but before middle-age hits you like a ton of bricks to force the issue. Your early-30s are perhaps the last age at which anyone can still write a defiant anthem about your own encroaching mortality, now that it is peeking over the horizon but is not quite yet upon you. But then once it is upon you, the defiance departs, and your confidence vanishes. I suspect that Dave Grohl, like Nick Cave, became less and less cavalier about his mortality as he shifted into middle-age as well; hence why (unlike Nick Cave) he lost all interest in performing, let alone preserving, that song anymore. The difference of course is that Nick Cave has continued to sing “The Mercy Seat” down to the present day—still fearlessly facing down the great and final fact to the bitter end—while Foo Fighters have quietly let “DOA” fall to the wayside. (Though it perhaps helps that “DOA” did not become Foo Fighters’ signature song the same way “The Mercy Seat” became for Nick Cave; they didn’t have to keep singing it anymore, so they didn’t.)

But then on the other hand, Dave Grohl had seen his previous bandmate Kurt Cobain refuse to even wait till middle-age for death to hunt him down, but recklessly ran out to meet it while he was still way-too-young himself; hence, I can see why Grohl perhaps lost all appetite to meditate upon the theme further as he aged. (His drummer Taylor Hawkins dying of a sudden drug-overdose in 2022 has likely not made him any more keen to revisit the theme, either.) You don’t need to keep reminding yourself that we’re all “Dead On Arrival” when the fact of death increasingly surrounds you at all times.

***

Once in grad school (when I was the same age as Cobain was when he called it), I was in a class on 19th-century American literature, wherein we discussed Herman Melville’s classic 1853 short-story “Bartelby, The Scrivener,” about a legal copyist who one day begins to neglect his work with a simple “I would prefer not to”, as he instead stares out an office-window at a brick wall till he quite literally starves to death. The narrator, who was also the titular Bartelby’s immediate supervisor, tracks down the man’s previous employers, and finds out that Bartelby used to work in the dead letter’s department of the Post Office, wherein he would consign letters without findable addresses to the furnace. My class discussed the evergreen mystery as to why this biographical detail would have driven Bartelby to such a slow-motion suicide.

It was I who finally piped in with, “Maybe Bartelby just finally realized that we’re all dead letters on the way to the furnace.” The room suddenly got real quiet, all our intellectual chattering and posturing fell silent, and everyone gazed down blankly at the table, depressed. “April is the cruelest month indeed,” said the professor. “What’d I say?” I asked in all innocence.

It by no mean proves that religion is true (only the Holy Ghost can do that), but one possible defense of religion I have found is that it makes the great and final fact just a touch less terrifying. You can face it just a little more directly, maybe even take it less seriously (at least, as long as you seriously believe, and aren’t just faking it), such that you can discuss death just a little more cavalierly. Nick Cave once sang softly in 1997, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” but that still indicates that he at least believes in some sort of God, almost in spite of himself, which perhaps helps the fact of his looming end go down just a little easier. Dave Grohl I’m not sure believes in any sort of God, or ever even thought much about it, one way or another; certainly he’s never sung about it. One can again only speculate, but such perhaps is one lonely reason for why Nick Cave has still been able to sing “The Mercy Seat” down to the present day, all while the much-more-massive “DOA”—my personal favorite Foo Fighters song—has passed into uncomfortable silence.