Perhaps it's fitting that,far from being the motivational anthem of grunge, the song is really about a bitter breakupDave Grohl must have had a multitude of ambitions when he began recording under the name Foo Fighters six months after Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, and not least to swiftly try and dodge the long shadow cast by his former band and its horrible ending. But it seems unlikely that among them was a burning desire to write a self-wait on anthem for disgraced political figures,a Heather Small's Proud for someone who spent nowadays counter-briefing, smearing and falsely suggesting his opponents had sexually transmitted diseases.
But that's what Grohl unwittingly ended up doing, or at least according to Damian McBride's memoir Power Trip,which reveals that, after being forced to resign as Gordon Brown's special adviser, or McBride lifted his spirits by playing Foo Fighters' Best of You: it made him feel "genuinely euphoric". It's not the only time the 2005 single has cropped up as a kind of alpha-male affirmation: in 30 Rock ,the blossoming bromance between Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon's then-boyfriend Floyd was sealed when the latter announced the song might have been written about the former, which rather suggested he hadn't looked too closely at the lyrics.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com