It was when my wife shoved the music player back across the table that I realized I needed to think harder about the tune I was playing for her.

"Pumped Up Kicks" has been hailed as the song — or at least a song — of the summer, although it first hit the charts in spring and is peaking now, in fall.

It is a perky pop ditty with just enough low-fi murkiness to make it hip. And its bright carousel of a chorus gets in your head and spins merrily around.

"Pumped Up Kicks" is also a song about a kid preparing to shoot his classmates at school.

"All the other kids with the pumped up kicks," says the chorus, "you'd better run, better run, outrun my gun … You'd bettter run, better run, faster than my bullet.

Maybe we're desensitized by the almost absurdly violent first-person-shooter video games so many kids spend their afternoons playing. Maybe naming the song after fancy sneakers instead of the weaponry creates enough emotional distance.

Or maybe we figure — as I initially did — that it's just pop music, and its ear-candy qualities trump whatever the point of view might be.

But after looking closely at the song's lyrics and listening to it many extra times, I have come to agree that this song is more deserving of a push away than the warm embrace it has mostly received.

I don't for a moment fear that my kids or yours are one ill-considered pop song away from going bad, but I'd just rather not have their environment include a school shooting treated with all the gravity of bubble-gum pop — with whistling!

"Pumped Up Kicks" has been very, very good to Foster the People, the L.A.-based trio who released it as their first single. From nowhere, they've gone to playing Lollapalooza this summer. They're on a mostly sold-out tour right now, scheduled to hit Chicago's Riviera Theatre Wednesday night. They'll play "Saturday Night Live" this coming weekend, with Ben Stiller hosting.

And the tune has been top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart since Aug. 27, No. 3 for the last five weeks. It's a nice story, almost.

Mark Foster, the group's Cleveland-bred frontman, did not respond to an e-mail request to address some of the questions raised by the song.

But in interviews, when the song's dark subject matter has been an issue, he's seemed able to satisfy questioners by referencing Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

He has said that he wrote the song because he's been troubled by school shootings, telling, for instance, NPR Music's "World Cafe" that he wondered "what would it be like to be inside of a kid's head that's a teenager and is basically losing his mind."

Yet, when that interview went up on the NPR website, the introductory text reduced the song to "a breezy summer jam with a subtly sinister edge."

I'm not sure what's subtle about "outrun my gun" — or the verse in which the protagonist appears to shoot his dad.

But acknowledging that the song is dark is about as far as most critics who have reviewed "Torches," Foster the People's debut album, have come to engaging with "Pumped Up Kicks."

I'll go further and say that while I will certainly stand up for Foster's right to try such a thing, and while I don't doubt his sincerity, his reach simply exceeds his grasp.

Foster is no Katy Perry, brazenly exploiting teen sexuality for the sake of "controversy." But you can't do "In Cold Blood" — even a Cliff's Notes version of "in Cold Blood" — in two cryptic verses and eight repeats of the chorus. There's just not enough information there.

You might argue that the tune's cheeriness is a symbol of just how far off the deep end this kid has gone. That would be a more reasonable interpretation, though, if Foster were more in control of his lyrics: if he were not, for instance, switching from third to first person in the few lines he's written or offering as the only possible bits of explanation for the shootings sneaker envy and the tidbit that "Daddy works a long day."

Contrast that with Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays," the 1980s hit about a school shooting that made the dark "reason" the girl gave into its title and chorus and artfully contrasted that with the people around her trying to find out why, really.

Popular music, to be sure, is full of murder songs, many of them classics: Johnny Cash "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." Robert Earl Keen's oft-recorded country rave-up "The Road Goes On Forever" tells of a drug dealer who shoots a cop so his girlfriend can get away. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" opens with a son confessing murder.

But these songs have consequence, both narrative and musical weight. Cash's character is in Folsom Prison at the time he sings, with a hard case of the blues. The Keen character, in the final verse, "is going to the chair." The "Bohemian Rhapsody" protagonist pours out his regret operatically.

"Pumped Up Kicks," by contrast, introduces its star as "a cowboy kid" with "a rolled cigarette hanging out (of) his mouth."

We don't know why he's planning to do what he does, only that the songs temporary narrator sees him as sort of glamorous. And, if we bother to think beyond the song's 4 minutes and 16 seconds, we know that he will bring a lifetime of agony to people who have done nothing to deserve it. That just doesn't feel very pop.

sajohnson@tribune.com

Twitter: @StevenKJohnson

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