Scott Walker / Bish Bosch / 2012
Epizootics!
menacing, darkly comic, hallucinatory
Epizootics! is a nearly fourteen-minute collage piece that buries a vision of urban decay and violence under layers of obsolete slang, grotesque body imagery, and historical pastiche. Walker never settles into a stable narrative voice or scene; instead he lets vocabulary itself do the work, stacking 1930s jive talk, colonial-era Hawaiian kitsch, and images of disease and excess until the song feels like a city choking on its own language.
urban decay and violence disease and contagion as metaphor colonialism and exoticized paradise excess, obesity, and the grotesque body language as costume or code historical pastiche (high art vs. street slang)
Who's speaking
The voice is unstable and shifts registers constantly -- sometimes a detached observer cataloguing a corrupted cityscape, sometimes a first-person figure boasting in gangster slang, occasionally an authorial aside (the hushed 'Shh' interludes). There's no single reliable narrator; the song behaves more like overheard fragments than a monologue, and the listener is left to assemble a scene rather than follow a speaker.
What happens
The song opens with a woman named in faux-exotic terms recoiling from a degraded tropical paradise, its flowers and leis described as rotting. From there the scene dissolves into an unnamed city of steam tables, bunkers, and crowds shoving each other on street corners -- a recurring image that functions as the song's chorus. A grotesquely obese figure appears to size up the narrator, who answers with tough-guy posturing. A strange, hushed digression imagines Michelangelo and Pope Julius II amid incense and dust. More slang-dense passages follow, full of violent slapstick and criminal argot, before the song loops back to its opening Hawaiian imagery, closing on the title of an old popular song about a flower, now rendered ironic.
How it's built
There's no conventional verse-chorus architecture; instead Walker uses a recurring refrain built on the phrase about people on corners pushing each other around as a structural anchor amid otherwise free-associative verses. Dynamic contrast does more organizing work than lyric form: loud, percussive slang passages alternate with hushed, spoken-word interludes marked by whispered interjections. The piece is circular rather than linear, opening and closing on related Hawaiian/paradise imagery, which gives an otherwise sprawling text a sense of frame.
Section by section
Opening verse
“frightened by Hawaiians”
The song begins with mock-exotic naming and a figure recoiling from a tropical setting that's immediately shown to be corrupted -- flowers rotting, idealized imagery curdling into something closer to decay. This sets up paradise-as-illusion as a frame for everything that follows.
City imagery / first refrain
The scene shifts to an unnamed, almost industrial city full of steam, rubber hoses, and crowds. The recurring image of people shoving one another on corners becomes the song's closest thing to a chorus, suggesting a social order reduced to friction and crowding rather than community.
The obese figure
“Thousand kilos simpy, forty stone send”
A grotesquely inflated body appears as a kind of judge or rival, 'weighing' the narrator. The exaggerated scale reads as satire of physical and perhaps economic excess, with the narrator responding in boastful, tough-guy slang that sounds almost like a street challenge.
Michelangelo interlude
The hushed shift to Pope Julius and Michelangelo, framed by whispered asides, briefly swaps street violence for art-historical pageantry. The juxtaposition implies continuity between gaudy modern squalor and the vanity of Renaissance patronage, both dressed up in different costumes of status.
Second refrain and violent slapstick
“touching like muggers”
The refrain returns with added menace, now naming figures like Scratch and Jesus among the corner crowd -- a flattening of sacred and profane into the same chaotic scrum. Mock apologies for physical violence that follow play the aggression for dark comedy rather than horror.
Closing turn
The song winds down through more clipped slang before returning to the Hawaiian/paradise vocabulary of the opening, closing on the title phrase of an old popular song about a flower. The return reframes the entire mid-section as a descent that circles back to its point of departure, now drained of sincerity.
Craft
- found language / slang collage
- Much of the lyric is built from period-specific African American jive vocabulary and underworld argot, used less for sense than for texture and rhythm, turning vocabulary itself into the song's real subject matter.
- grotesque imagery
- Decaying flowers, melting flesh, and a monstrously obese body being 'weighed' create a recurring body horror that stands in for moral or civic rot.
- juxtaposition
- The abrupt cut to Michelangelo and a Renaissance pope amid dust and incense sits jarringly against the surrounding slang-heavy street scenes, implying that exploitation and vanity look the same across centuries.
- refrain as anchor
- The repeated corner-pushing refrain gives the otherwise disintegrating structure a pulse, functioning almost like a chorus even though it never resolves into comfort.
- circular structure
- Returning to Hawaiian/paradise imagery at the close after opening there frames the whole sprawling middle section as a kind of fever-dream detour.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats Epizootics! as a meditation on contagion -- not literal disease, but the spread of corruption, violence, and spectacle through a culture, tracked via the mutation of its language. The title, referring to animal epidemics, suggests something infectious moving through a social body rather than an individual one. An alternative reading focuses less on social critique and more on pure formal pleasure: Walker assembling obsolete slang and grotesque imagery for its sound and rhythm, with meaning intentionally resistant to paraphrase. Both readings can coexist; the song seems to want to be experienced as much as decoded.
Context
Bish Bosch (2012) was the final album in an informal trilogy of late-career Walker records (with Tilt and The Drift) built on extreme vocal and instrumental minimalism, black humor, and densely allusive lyrics drawing on obscure historical and linguistic sources. Walker was known to research vocabulary extensively, and much of this song's slang appears to draw on mid-20th-century African American jive and underworld argot (terms associated with figures like Cab Calloway), combined with mock-Hawaiian kitsch. I don't have confirmed biographical detail on the writing of this specific track, so this contextual reading is inferential rather than documented.
Listen for
- the abrupt dynamic drop into the whispered Michelangelo passage
- the recurring corner-pushing refrain and how its instrumentation shifts each time it returns
- the percussive, almost rapped delivery of the slang-heavy verses versus the more melodic opening and closing sections
- the way Hawaiian imagery bookends the track, turning the final reference into something hollowed out
- any sudden orchestral stabs or silences used to punctuate violent imagery
About Scott Walker
Noel Scott Engel, better known by his stage name Scott Walker, was an American-British singer-songwriter, composer, and record producer. Walker was known for his emotive baritone voice and his unorthodox career path, which took him from being a teen pop icon in the 1960s to an avant-garde musician from the 1990s to his death.
1943 - 2019 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue