It’s one of the most incendiary opening tracks to an album ever recorded. A four-note bass groove, a blast of guitar noise that slams into a swinging, adrenalized surf riff… and then just as things couldn’t get any more exciting, Black Francis starts screaming:
“Got me a movie I WANT YOU TO KNOW / Slicing up eyeballs I WANT YOU TO KNOW / Girl you’re so groovy I WANT YOU TO KNOW / Don’t know about you / But I am un chien Andalusia…”
Debaser is not just the first song on the Pixies’ 1989 album Doolittle: it is a statement of belief and a declaration of intent. It’s a blast of pure energy directly inspired by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s surrealist 1929 film Un Chien Andalou, distilling that film’s revolutionary, unsettling spirit into two minutes and fifty-two seconds of raw, distorted brilliance.
Of course, the Pixies had been surreal and unsettling from the start. Debut EP Come on Pilgrim (released in 1987) and Doolittle’s preceding LP Surfer Rosa both combined delicate melodies with wild noise and violent, disturbing lyrical themes. But it is in Debaser that all those elements came together in – harmony seems the wrong word – but… harmony.
Frontman Black Francis had been captivated by Un Chien Andalou since first seeing it as a student in the early 80s. The film, created by Dali and Buñuel as a rejection of narrative convention and bourgeois morality, was wilfully provocative and wildly scandalous. There’s no plot, no dialogue, and no clear meaning—just a sequence of surreal, jarring images: ants crawling from a hand, rotting donkeys in pianos… and, most shockingly, a moment when a man takes a razor blade to his wife’s eyeball. Francis channelled this chaos into Debaser, using the song not just to reference the film, but to capture its spirit.
The title itself is a manifesto. Francis once explained that he wanted to “debase moral standards,” echoing the film’s original intent… but it’s more than that. It’s not just about debasement, it’s subtler: to follow a lyric as raw and explicit as “Slicing up eyeballs” with “Girl you’re so groovy” somehow captures a tenderness (and a hipness) amidst the horror. And it’s that line that remains central to the song: colliding noise and chaos and surrealist imagery with something like love.
In the end, Debaser isn’t just a song about a film. If Un Chien Andalou is about what art can do when it refuses to behave, then Debaser is about what pop music can do when it both celebrates and subverts its own rules. It’s a salvo aimed at convention, and the perfect opening for one of the most influential albums ever made (listen to that bass riff again – and then listen to the opening of Smells Like Teen Spirit).
And, perhaps even more strangely, it’s an absolute banger. Girl, you’re so groovy.