Southbound Pachyderm
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| “Southbound Pachyderm” | |||||
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| Single by Primus from the album Tales from the Punchbowl |
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| Released | 1995 | ||||
| Genre | Alternative rock Funk metal Alternative Metal |
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| Length | 6:22 | ||||
| Label | Interscope Records | ||||
| Writer(s) | Claypool/LaLonde/Alexander | ||||
| Producer | Primus | ||||
| Primus singles chronology | |||||
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"Southbound Pachyderm" was a track from the Primus album Tales from the Punchbowl. The song is dominated by Larry LaLonde's guitar playing and a repeating bass line by Les Claypool. The song is over 6 minutes long, as instrumental jamming dominates the end of it. The sound of the song also bears a striking resemblance to that of Tool.
The song is actually a protest song against poaching in Africa, the band specifically addressing pachyderms("pachyderm" is another word for elephant.), as they seem to be more "common targets" for poachers. It is also a direct reference to the 1977 album Animals by one of Primus' main influences, Pink Floyd.
Another interpretation of the song is about the proliferation of airplanes; The lyrics create many metaphors such as: "they take to the sky," "they're filling the sky," and references to how implausible it would be that man could fly.
[edit] Music Video
The song was released as the second single of the Punchbowl album. The music video featured poachers trying to hunt down elephants that were being protected by a group of natives. In the end the elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses escaped. (The elephants had separate airplane-like wings on their backs, the rhinos had helicopter propellers on their backs, and the hippos piled into a dirigible.) Primus themselves only appeared a few times in the video, on the poacher's TV set. It was the band's first fully-Claymation video of several to come.
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