What the song is about
There is no ambiguity to preserve here. The lyrics are written from the perspective of a troubled and delusional young person with homicidal thoughts, and the chorus is that person addressing his intended victims: they had better run, better run, outrun his gun and move faster than his bullet.
Mark Foster has explained the intent repeatedly and at length. To CNN:
I wrote "Pumped Up Kicks" when I began to read about the growing trend in teenage mental illness. I wanted to understand the psychology behind it because it was foreign to me. It was terrifying how mental illness among youth had skyrocketed in the last decade. I was scared to see where the pattern was headed if we didn't start changing the way we were bringing up the next generation.
His stated method was to "get inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid" in order to bring attention to youth gun violence — which he attributes to "lack of family, lack of love, and isolation." He has described the song as an observation about something happening in youth culture rather than an invention, and judged it to have worked on its own terms: "I think people are talking about it, and it's become a point of conversation, which I think is a really healthy thing."
It is worth being clear about what the song does and does not do. It does not endorse the narrator, and it does not explain him either. It simply occupies him for three minutes and leaves the listener holding that.
What "pumped up kicks" means
"Kicks" is American slang for shoes. "Pumped up kicks" refers specifically to Reebok Pumps — the expensive basketball trainers with the inflatable tongue that were the status shoe of Foster's school years.
That is the detail that makes the chorus land. The narrator is not addressing a general "you". He is addressing the kids with the good shoes: the ones with money, the ones who were never short of anything, the ones who — the song implies without saying — did not have to think about him at all. The whole social architecture of a school is in that one product name.
Why it sounds so cheerful
The music came first, and it is upbeat, and Foster meant it to be. His description of the intent is unusually blunt about the cynicism involved: "It's a 'fuck you' song to the hipsters in a way — but it's a song the hipsters are going to want to dance to."
That is the trap and it is loaded deliberately. Jeffery Berg of Frontier Psychiatrist described the ordinary experience of the record: "I was so engrossed with the cheery melody of its chorus that it took me a few listens to discover that the lyrics suggest dark, Columbine revenge."
Almost everyone has that experience, which means almost everyone has, at some point, cheerfully sung along to a threat to shoot their classmates. The song's argument about how easily this subject gets absorbed into background noise is made on the listener rather than to them — and it has been proved several billion times over on radio, in shops and at parties ever since.
For broadcast on MTV and MTVu, the words "gun" and "bullet" were removed. It is hard to think of a neater demonstration of the point: the song was made playable by deleting the two words that said what it was about.
Why the band cares about this
The subject is closer to the group than the song's breeziness suggests.
Foster was bullied in high school. And bassist Cubbie Fink has a cousin who survived the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 — she was in the library when it happened. Fink flew out to be with her the day after:
She was actually in the library when everything went down, so I actually flew out to be with her the day after it happened and experienced the trauma surrounding it and saw how affected she was by it. She is as close as a sister, so obviously, it affected me deeply. So to be able to have a song to create a platform to talk about this stuff has been good for us.
That is the answer to the most common objection to the song — that it is glib about something it has no stake in. The band's stake is direct, and their position has been consistent since before the record was a hit.
The Robert question
Because the song opens with a line about Robert having a quick hand, it has often been claimed that it refers to Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people at the Westroads Mall in Omaha in 2007.
The band's publicist denied this outright: "This is completely false. The character name in the song is just a coincidence."
Take that as the only sourced statement on the matter. Foster has always described the narrator as a composite drawn from reading about a trend, not a portrait of one identifiable person, and no member of the band has ever named a real shooter as the subject.
The video, and the one they shelved
The official video, directed by Josef Geiger, is essentially a tour diary: the band playing venues around California in the run-up to their first international dates in Australia, cut with them playing frisbee and surfing. Parts were shot at the University of California, Riverside, the site of their first official show.
What is interesting is the video that does not exist. A different video had been planned and partly filmed, in a parking lot at 2131 Humboldt Street in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. It was shelved for being too dark for the song — and Geiger was asked instead to cut something from his road footage showing the band living through the hype around them.
So the record's public face was decided by a judgement that a video matching the lyric would be unbearable, and a video contradicting it would be fine. The song's whole subject is that exact preference.
The video has since passed 1.1 billion views.
Directed by Josef Geiger — the official video on the band's channel. A darker version was filmed and shelved.
How it got everywhere
The song's route to the charts was unusually slow and entirely bottom-up, which matters because it means no label decided this record should be a hit.
Foster posted it on his website as a free download in early 2010. Nylon used it in an online advertising campaign, blogs picked it up, and it went viral before the band had a deal — or, at first, a manager. Foster's own account of that moment, when he contacted Brent Kredel at Monotone: "Everyone is calling me and e-mailing me — what do I do? Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys?" Kredel's summary: "He went from the guy who couldn't get a hold of anyone to being the guy who had hundreds of e-mails in his inbox."
From there: a licence for an episode of Entourage in July 2010, early radio on Sirius XM's Alt Nation and Australia's Triple J, a first US terrestrial play on the University of Maryland's WMUC in November, a residency at The Echo in Los Angeles in January 2011 that had hundreds of people outside by the third night, then KROQ and the alternative stations, then the Hot 100 at number 96 in May 2011 — and eventually number three, and number one in Australia.
Critics were largely won over. Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone praised its "slinky groove, misty guitar flange and delicious astral-wimp vocals"; Jon Pareles in The New York Times called it "a pop ditty with dazed, dweeby vocals and a handclapping chorus that warns, 'You better run, better run, outrun my gun.'" The Guardian's Michael Hann was the notable holdout, finding it "as irresistible as it is infuriating".
Fifteen years on, the song occupies a strange position: one of the most recognisable pop records of the 2010s, and one that a great many of the people who can sing it have never once heard.