Debaser

Harmonically, 'Debaser' is deliberate in its austerity — a I–IV–V in D major executed almost entirely through power chords. The song's force comes from dynamics and performance rather than harmonic invention, and that calculation proved enormously influential: a generation of alternative rock bands took the same lesson and ran with it.

Black Francis wrote 'Debaser' after watching Un Chien Andalou twice — by his own admission with an enthusiast's eye rather than any scholarly method. He wanted to capture the film's transgressive imagery, particularly the razor-and-eyeball scene, and coined the title as a deliberate attempt to introduce 'debaser' — meaning one who debases — into the lexicon. The earliest draft contained the line 'Shed, Apollonia!', a reference to a scene in Purple Rain, before Francis replaced it with 'un chien andalusia'.

Written by Black Francis as a fevered tribute to Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 Buñuel–Dalí surrealist film, 'Debaser' opens Doolittle with a blast of distortion and oblique literary reference. Its loud-quiet dynamic and Francis's yelped vocal helped define the template a generation of 90s bands would borrow. First an album track in 1989, it reached No. 23 on the UK Singles Chart when released as a promotional single in 1997.