Avant-comedy with Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, Michael Nyman, and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. As record collectors, we’re often digging through the bins for the best in music. Who performed […]
‘Crazy Clown Time’: An Election-Day Dirge from David Lynch on His Birthday

A worldwide group meditation will occur at noon PST
To say that 2025 is off to a shitty start would be an understatement. You don’t even need examples. In times like this, music freaks face a choice: Chase buoyant, blissful, joyous sounds to lift the spirit out of the muck, or seek understanding, redemption and commiseration in darker tones, music written by similarly desperate artists working to understand how to harness fear, anger, chaos, despair, bafflement, confusion, frustration, and sadness to create art. Still others somehow mix all this insanity together into one freakout dirge. For example, the utterly wild video for David Lynch’s 2011 song “Crazy Clown Time.”
Directed by Lynch and starring a bunch of messed up white kids getting f-ed up in a backyard, “Crazy Clown Time” runs a relentless 7 minutes and captures sequences of debauched (semi-NSFW) partying that are equal parts violent, grotesque and sexually charged. Terrible things happen for no discernible reason. A dude sets his mohawk on fire. Another pours beer onto the back of a shirtless woman named Sally. “Pauly had a red shirt,” mutters Lynch. “Suzy, she ripped off her shirt completely.” Enter another reveler. “Buddy screamed so loud he spit/We all ran around the backyard.”
Then Lynch goes into the “chorus,” such that it is. “It was crazy clown time! It was crazy clown time!”
On this, the first day of a four-year term in which a crazy clown and his drunken, morally bankrupt, drug-addled posse take control of the government, we don’t have much hope that things will be getting better on a national level. But we can control our psyches, and we can channel the myriad emotions that will no doubt overwhelm us into community building, into self-care, into strong relationships, into passion, and love. We must stay vigilant and fight against complacency.

To that end, Lynch’s children have invited us all “to join in a worldwide group meditation at noon PST for ten minutes to celebrate his legacy. Spread LOVE & send positivity into our universe.”
That’s our mission for the next four years.