“Monkey Gone to Heaven”:
The Pixies Song That Taught Alternative Rock How to Make Apocalypse Catchy
The Pixies Song That Taught Alternative Rock How to Make Apocalypse Catchy
“A corrosive, compelling meditation on God and garbage” — that’s how Rolling Stone critic David Fricke described Pixies’ “Monkey Gone to Heaven” back in 1989. More than three decades later, this three-minute indie anthem still rattles brains and eardrums.
The mix of biblical symbolism, environmental warning, and Pixies’ signature quiet-loud dynamics turned out to be weirdly durable. So why does a track about a monkey that went to heaven still resonate in 2025? Let’s dig into it — with a cocky smirk and a serious lens.
Their debut album Surfer Rosa (1988) shocked the British indie scene with its raw energy and unconventional production from Steve Albini
In 1989, alternative rock was getting ready to burst out of the underground, and Pixies were on the front line of that quiet revolution. The Boston four-piece — Charles Thompson (frontman known as Black Francis), Kim Deal (bass), Joey Santiago (guitar), and David Lovering (drums) — had already made a splash in the UK by then.
But on their second album, Doolittle (1989), Pixies stepped toward a more “polished” sound with producer Gil Norton. That didn’t mean they lost their weirdness — it just got repackaged in a slightly more accessible form.
“Monkey Gone to Heaven” became the first single from Doolittle and Pixies’ first release on a major label (they signed to Elektra at the end
of 1988). For American listeners, it was basically Pixies’ debut on wider radio — and it set the tone right away: the track climbed to #5 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. In the UK, where the band already had a cult following, the single also entered the national chart, peaking at #60. The timing was symbolic too — just days before the single’s release, the Exxon Valdez oil spill hit Alaska in March 1989. The song’s themes suddenly lined up with the headlines, and it felt like Pixies had tuned into the global anxiety frequency. You could say the late ’80s were a moment of truth: alternative rock was closing in on the mainstream, environmental issues were heading to front pages, and Pixies were standing right at the crossroads — one foot in punk’s underground, the other on the doorstep of the coming grunge era.
It’s also important to understand where Pixies were as a band. Doolittle crashed into the UK Top 10, and in the US it became their first gold record. But the band still looked like a very odd bird: songs about surreal horrors wrapped in sticky melodies. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” fits this moment perfectly. It’s a track where Pixies’ punk soul collides with unexpected elements — from string instruments to biblical references — and all of it comes out on a major label clearly aiming at a wider audience. Culturally, 1989 was the year the glossy ’80s started to crack: lacquered hard rock and synth-pop were giving way to ripped jeans, grunge roughness, and existential questions. With their eclectic style, Pixies arrived right on time. No surprise critics were ecstatic about “Monkey Gone to Heaven” — NME put it on their list of the year’s best singles, and Melody Maker went further and named it the #1 single of 1989.
of 1988). For American listeners, it was basically Pixies’ debut on wider radio — and it set the tone right away: the track climbed to #5 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. In the UK, where the band already had a cult following, the single also entered the national chart, peaking at #60. The timing was symbolic too — just days before the single’s release, the Exxon Valdez oil spill hit Alaska in March 1989. The song’s themes suddenly lined up with the headlines, and it felt like Pixies had tuned into the global anxiety frequency. You could say the late ’80s were a moment of truth: alternative rock was closing in on the mainstream, environmental issues were heading to front pages, and Pixies were standing right at the crossroads — one foot in punk’s underground, the other on the doorstep of the coming grunge era.
It’s also important to understand where Pixies were as a band. Doolittle crashed into the UK Top 10, and in the US it became their first gold record. But the band still looked like a very odd bird: songs about surreal horrors wrapped in sticky melodies. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” fits this moment perfectly. It’s a track where Pixies’ punk soul collides with unexpected elements — from string instruments to biblical references — and all of it comes out on a major label clearly aiming at a wider audience. Culturally, 1989 was the year the glossy ’80s started to crack: lacquered hard rock and synth-pop were giving way to ripped jeans, grunge roughness, and existential questions. With their eclectic style, Pixies arrived right on time. No surprise critics were ecstatic about “Monkey Gone to Heaven” — NME put it on their list of the year’s best singles, and Melody Maker went further and named it the #1 single of 1989.
On first listen, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” sounds almost simple: steady rhythm, melodic bass, long ringing guitar chords. But Pixies wouldn’t be Pixies without twists. The song opens quietly: a couple of scratchy guitar chords give way to Kim Deal’s springy bass line and Lovering’s straight, unfussy beat. Francis sings the first lines almost in a whisper, leaving space between them — in those moments you only hear bass and drums, like the song itself is holding its breath. Joey Santiago’s lead guitar stays silent through the verses, which creates a sense of emptiness and tension. By the end of the second verse, a cello slips in underneath, doubling the bass line and giving the sound a dark, ominous weight. And yes, a cello — Pixies brought in classical players for the first time: two cellists and two violinists to color their noisy music with a new shade.
A rock band with a string quartet is a bold move, but in “Monkey Gone to Heaven” it works. In the chorus, when Francis and Deal chant the mysterious mantra “This monkey’s gone to heaven,” two violins weave a thin melody in the background while Santiago hammers away on a single note, drilling it into your skull. The sound is grimy and elevated at the same time: guitar distortion crashing against almost heavenly strings. NME, in its usual snarky way, wrote that all the “clever bastards” were now mixing strings with grunge guitars, and Pixies were no exception — growling vocals, sci-fi lyrics, and a lava flow of guitars burning “a new hole where your ears used to be.” In other words: it hits hard.
The dynamics are a ride of their own. After the restrained verses comes a bridge where Santiago plays a short, reflective solo — the calm before the storm. And then the storm hits: Black Francis shifts from controlled singing to a full-on scream. He spits out numbers and words like a crazed street preacher: “If man is five… then the devil is six… then God is seven!” — and when he yells “seven!”, guitars and drums blow up, Francis screaming like he’s trying to outshout the apocalypse. That classic Pixies quiet-loud trick later became a template for a whole generation of alternative bands. Here, it gives the track its emotional arc: from brooding to catharsis. The final chorus, with its repeated “This monkey’s gone to heaven,” no longer sounds peaceful — it’s desperate. The strings get louder, pushing the whole thing toward an almost epic climax. The song ends suddenly, leaving the listener with chills — like you just woke up from a short dream about the end of the world.
The dynamics are a ride of their own. After the restrained verses comes a bridge where Santiago plays a short, reflective solo — the calm before the storm. And then the storm hits: Black Francis shifts from controlled singing to a full-on scream. He spits out numbers and words like a crazed street preacher: “If man is five… then the devil is six… then God is seven!” — and when he yells “seven!”, guitars and drums blow up, Francis screaming like he’s trying to outshout the apocalypse. That classic Pixies quiet-loud trick later became a template for a whole generation of alternative bands. Here, it gives the track its emotional arc: from brooding to catharsis. The final chorus, with its repeated “This monkey’s gone to heaven,” no longer sounds peaceful — it’s desperate. The strings get louder, pushing the whole thing toward an almost epic climax. The song ends suddenly, leaving the listener with chills — like you just woke up from a short dream about the end of the world.
For all that drama, the melody sticks instantly.
The bass line is simple, almost cozy, the guitar sets a warm
D-major tone, and Francis/Deal harmonies in the chorus give it a slight pop feel. Maybe that’s why “Monkey Gone to Heaven” became one of Pixies’ most “accessible” songs — the darkness doesn’t hit right away; it sneaks in while you’re already humming about a monkey in heaven. That split personality — sweet and harsh, melodic and dissonant — is what makes the track unique. Pixies could’ve played it fast and noisy, like a straight punk banger, but instead they chose a mid-tempo, left some air in the arrangement, and added touches more typical of art rock. The result feels outside of time: back then and now it’s hard to find another song that combines punk drive, classical instruments, and such a sticky chorus in one three-minute package.
The bass line is simple, almost cozy, the guitar sets a warm
D-major tone, and Francis/Deal harmonies in the chorus give it a slight pop feel. Maybe that’s why “Monkey Gone to Heaven” became one of Pixies’ most “accessible” songs — the darkness doesn’t hit right away; it sneaks in while you’re already humming about a monkey in heaven. That split personality — sweet and harsh, melodic and dissonant — is what makes the track unique. Pixies could’ve played it fast and noisy, like a straight punk banger, but instead they chose a mid-tempo, left some air in the arrangement, and added touches more typical of art rock. The result feels outside of time: back then and now it’s hard to find another song that combines punk drive, classical instruments, and such a sticky chorus in one three-minute package.
If the sound of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” doesn’t grab you right away, the words do. “This monkey’s gone to heaven” — what is that even about? Black Francis is famous for surreal, cryptic lyrics, but here he’s more direct than usual. The main theme is environmental anxiety. By the late ’80s, humanity was seriously bumping into the consequences of its industrial binge: ozone holes, toxic waste, polluted oceans. Francis soaked up those era’s fears and filtered them through biblical and mythological imagery.
The first line introduces a character: “There was a guy / an underwater guy who controlled the sea.” A modern-day Neptune. But he dies instantly: “Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey.” That isn’t just horror-movie nonsense — it’s pulled straight from reality. In 1988, New Jersey’s shoreline was buried under medical waste, syringes, and trash — the media dubbed it the “syringe tide.” Francis took that story and mythologized it: the ancient sea god Neptune poisoned by human waste. “A man dying from garbage in New Jersey water — that’s me mythologizing the situation. In my imagination, Neptune is dying from pollution,” he explained in an interview. So the first verse is basically an apocalyptic fairy tale about how humans killed God (the ruler of the seas) with their own garbage. Not bad for a song under three minutes.
In the second verse, the gaze goes upward: “There’s a hole in the sky.” That’s a direct nod to the ozone hole, a huge topic at the time. The lyrics go on: “And the ground’s not cold, and if the ground’s not cold / Everything is gonna burn, we’ll all take turns, I’ll get mine too.” A pretty grim forecast: because of the hole in the sky, we’re headed toward global warming and burning earth. In 1989 you’d more likely hear this kind of language in scientific reports, not rock songs — but Francis shoved it right into a track and added a chilling “I’ll get mine too,” admitting no one escapes payback. Other artists were starting to sing about the ozone layer too — from Public Enemy to Neil Young — but Pixies did it their way, with a “creature in the sky” getting “sucked into a hole.” Again, myth over plain exposition: you can picture some angel or god being vacuumed out of the sky by what we’ve done. The pattern is clear: the sea god is dead, now some sky creature is gone too.
Then comes the famous number chant. “If man is 5, then the devil is 6, then God is 7…” Those lines sound just as cryptic in English as in Russian. Francis spins that childlike counting rhyme over a wall of guitars and screaming. Where do the numbers come from? In interviews he said someone told him about a kind of Hebrew numerology where man is often represented by 5, Satan by 6, and God by 7. He never dug deep into the theology: “I wasn’t rummaging in libraries — someone just told me.”
Basically, that section is more about sound than doctrine — Francis admitted he wanted a rhyme for “heaven.” “Devil is six, God is seven” rhymes perfectly with “heaven,” like a twisted nursery rhyme. He played with that echo and with archetypal numbers, adding another layer of mystery. You end up with this weird little count-off where, after all the disasters, the human quietly acknowledges: yeah, we’re fives in the cosmic hierarchy, the devil’s a six, God’s a seven — and the monkey? The monkey went to heaven.
The monkey image is central, even though it only appears in that one line, “This monkey’s gone to heaven.” What monkey? Symbolically, it’s not hard to read: monkeys are our closest relatives, primates we supposedly evolved from. In a way, the monkey in the song is the human — but stripped of any divine aura, just an animal that dies and maybe ends up in heaven with a silly halo over its head. Writer Ben Sisario argued that after the “heavenly” and “underwater” beings are wiped out, all that’s left is our base nature — the monkey with a dumb halo, a symbol of the fall. Francis himself has said he picked a monkey on purpose: humans relate more to monkeys than to fish or birds; they’re our evolutionary kin. So the “monkey” is us — mortal sinners who think we’re gods while we’re really just sending the world, and ourselves, straight to heaven in the worst way.
For all the darkness, Pixies keep some irony in the lyrics. Taken out of context, the line “this monkey’s gone to heaven” almost sounds funny — and that’s not accidental. Joey Santiago remembers Francis playing him the early version of the song one morning and laughing at the line “If man is five…” — “He was laughing then… it was really funny.” You can feel that black humor in the track: like someone is singing a children’s song about the end of the world. Later, Francis said he didn’t want to turn it into a sermon — “it’s told without an agenda and with minimal pomposity, just mixing biblical imagery with a kiddie rhyme.” That’s probably why “Monkey Gone to Heaven” never slides into preachiness. It scares you and smirks at you at the same time. You get God and the devil assigned numbers, the ocean as a “big organic toilet” (his own phrase for the waste-soaked sea), and a monkey with a ridiculous halo.
Taboos? Back then, ecology wasn’t exactly a hot rock-song topic — Pixies were among the first in the alternative world to sing about global warming this bluntly. Psychology? More like a collective existential dread: the song asks where humans sit in the universe, delivers a pretty brutal answer, and then turns it into a dark joke. It’s no wonder listeners still argue whether the song is pessimistic or secretly hopeful. As one critic put it, “the weirdness of the lyrics only adds to its appeal” — riddles stick longer than slogans.
If Pixies are known for anything, it’s for how deeply they influenced the next wave of alternative rock. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is a perfect case study, even though it never became a huge hit outside of music-nerd circles. Within a few years of its release, echoes of this track were everywhere. The most famous case, of course, is Nirvana. In late 1993, Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone: “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. Basically, I was trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit… when I first heard the Pixies, I was so impressed that I thought I should be in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics — when the verses are quiet and soft, and then the chorus is loud and hard.” He was talking about “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the anthem of the ’90s. So the main inspiration for that song was Pixies’ style, and especially that quiet-loud-quiet formula they used so effectively in “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and a bunch of other tracks. The irony: “Teen Spirit” became the megahit Pixies themselves never had — but without them, it might never have existed. Cobain even slipped a little “hello” to his heroes onto the Nevermind artwork: on the back cover, among the collage of images, there’s a photo of a toy monkey with wings (a childhood toy of his), credited in the booklet as “Monkey Photo – Kurdt Kobain.” Many fans saw that winged monkey as a nod to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” — Cobain winking at the initiated by putting a haloed monkey into the most iconic cover art of the ’90s. Either way, the line is clear: without Pixies, the ’90s alt-rock revolution would’ve sounded very different.
And it didn’t stop with Nirvana. Pretty much the whole early ’90s alternative wave — from Smashing Pumpkins to Radiohead — absorbed Pixies’ lessons. That ability to mash melody with noise, introspection with absurdity, art with chaos, became the hallmark of “smart” guitar rock in the ’90s. When Radiohead recorded “Creep” in 1992, guitarist Jonny Greenwood famously slammed those sudden distorted chords into the chorus — a move very much in the spirit of Pixies’ jarring loud bursts. Weezer, when they broke through in 1994, built whole songs on the contrast between quiet verses and explosive choruses — like they were following a playbook Francis and company wrote years earlier.
“Monkey Gone to Heaven” also smuggled in another avant-garde idea that later became trendy: blending rock with classical instruments. Today, nobody blinks at strings in an indie track, but in 1989 it was edgy. When the song came out, NME snarked about its “lush but unobtrusive strings” wrapping the song and moving the band into a “new sphere of arrangement.” For Pixies, bringing in cellos was an experiment sparked by a random moment — legend has it Gil Norton saw Kim Deal messing around with a piano’s strings and thought, why not hire a string quartet? The experiment worked. Later, strings became part of the alt-rock and grunge toolkit — think of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” with its cello on Nevermind. Pixies weren’t the first rock band to use classical instruments, but they showed that even a wild song about a monkey in heaven could carry violins and cellos without losing bite.
Sometimes the cultural footprint of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” pops up in completely unexpected places. The title gets quoted everywhere — from environmental op-eds to art shows. A few years ago in Vancouver, a curiosity shop opened called “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven,” selling a surreal mix of art objects and taxidermy. For a store full of mounted animals and insects in glass cases, a Pixies song about a dead monkey in heaven is almost too perfect. The phrase and the song also pop up in film and TV. The track is used in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), where John Cusack’s character revisits his high-school past to the music of his youth — Pixies included. As for covers, bands have been taking stabs at “Monkey Gone to Heaven” for years: post-hardcore outfit Far recorded their version, hardcore band Gulch covered it, and it’s a staple on “best of the ’80s” tribute comps. The “man is 5, devil is 6” line gets quoted and parodied constantly — sometimes in shows, sometimes in memes, like “if X is 5 then Y is 6,” a wink only music nerds catch.
Then there’s the visual legacy. The artwork for Doolittle — with its haloed monkey and the numbers 5-6-7 — became a full-on alternative culture icon. Designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Simon Larbalestier built a surreal, instantly recognizable visual world for Pixies, and the “Monkey Gone to Heaven” imagery is a key part of it. That sepia collage with a monkey and golden-ratio grids, Oliver said, was directly inspired by the lyrics: “five, six, seven — monkey goes to heaven.” It turned out so strong that its influence seeped into tons of ’90s alternative covers — many of them copied the same mystical, worn-analog aesthetic. As Magnet magazine pointed out, Oliver’s work for Pixies basically changed the rules for rock album design. Posters in the early ’90s suddenly filled up with monkeys, angels, strange numbers — sometimes as direct references, sometimes as spiritual descendants of that original monkey.
And yes, the song even left a mark on fashion. In the late ’80s, bands like Pixies openly rejected the glossy dress code: no big hair, no Lycra. They went onstage in worn-out jeans, stretched-out T-shirts, and battered sneakers. Their look said: we are the opposite of ’80s glam. Black Francis, a round-faced guy in a shapeless shirt, and Kim Deal, a rock girl with zero glamour, became new role models for kids who were sick of MTV sheen. A couple of years later, that look under the name “grunge” blew up in the fashion industry — remember Marc Jacobs’ 1993 Perry Ellis collection with models styled like they were heading to a dingy club, not a runway.
Pixies weren’t sitting in front-row seats at fashion shows, but they were part of the culture that made that shift happen. Being messy suddenly became cool. Shirts with a monkey skull (a nod to “Bone Machine”) or the Doolittle cover turned into subtle status symbols. Today you can easily spot a teenager in a Pixies tee — maybe they’ve never heard the band, but that logo still signals a certain aesthetic. That’s how ’80s counterculture got absorbed into the mainstream: first Pixies sang about garbage and God, and years later their symbols are sold in malls. The most elegant revenge alternative rock could ask for.
And finally, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is just a great track. Time-tested. Good music doesn’t care how old you are. A 20-year-old music nerd in 2025 can get from it the same thing someone got in 1989: the feeling of being plugged into something bigger than a three-minute song. A small legend you inherit instead of just “discovering new stuff.” If a song still feels relevant 36 years later, that’s what we call
a classic.
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The first line introduces a character: “There was a guy / an underwater guy who controlled the sea.” A modern-day Neptune. But he dies instantly: “Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey.” That isn’t just horror-movie nonsense — it’s pulled straight from reality. In 1988, New Jersey’s shoreline was buried under medical waste, syringes, and trash — the media dubbed it the “syringe tide.” Francis took that story and mythologized it: the ancient sea god Neptune poisoned by human waste. “A man dying from garbage in New Jersey water — that’s me mythologizing the situation. In my imagination, Neptune is dying from pollution,” he explained in an interview. So the first verse is basically an apocalyptic fairy tale about how humans killed God (the ruler of the seas) with their own garbage. Not bad for a song under three minutes.
In the second verse, the gaze goes upward: “There’s a hole in the sky.” That’s a direct nod to the ozone hole, a huge topic at the time. The lyrics go on: “And the ground’s not cold, and if the ground’s not cold / Everything is gonna burn, we’ll all take turns, I’ll get mine too.” A pretty grim forecast: because of the hole in the sky, we’re headed toward global warming and burning earth. In 1989 you’d more likely hear this kind of language in scientific reports, not rock songs — but Francis shoved it right into a track and added a chilling “I’ll get mine too,” admitting no one escapes payback. Other artists were starting to sing about the ozone layer too — from Public Enemy to Neil Young — but Pixies did it their way, with a “creature in the sky” getting “sucked into a hole.” Again, myth over plain exposition: you can picture some angel or god being vacuumed out of the sky by what we’ve done. The pattern is clear: the sea god is dead, now some sky creature is gone too.
Then comes the famous number chant. “If man is 5, then the devil is 6, then God is 7…” Those lines sound just as cryptic in English as in Russian. Francis spins that childlike counting rhyme over a wall of guitars and screaming. Where do the numbers come from? In interviews he said someone told him about a kind of Hebrew numerology where man is often represented by 5, Satan by 6, and God by 7. He never dug deep into the theology: “I wasn’t rummaging in libraries — someone just told me.”
Basically, that section is more about sound than doctrine — Francis admitted he wanted a rhyme for “heaven.” “Devil is six, God is seven” rhymes perfectly with “heaven,” like a twisted nursery rhyme. He played with that echo and with archetypal numbers, adding another layer of mystery. You end up with this weird little count-off where, after all the disasters, the human quietly acknowledges: yeah, we’re fives in the cosmic hierarchy, the devil’s a six, God’s a seven — and the monkey? The monkey went to heaven.
The monkey image is central, even though it only appears in that one line, “This monkey’s gone to heaven.” What monkey? Symbolically, it’s not hard to read: monkeys are our closest relatives, primates we supposedly evolved from. In a way, the monkey in the song is the human — but stripped of any divine aura, just an animal that dies and maybe ends up in heaven with a silly halo over its head. Writer Ben Sisario argued that after the “heavenly” and “underwater” beings are wiped out, all that’s left is our base nature — the monkey with a dumb halo, a symbol of the fall. Francis himself has said he picked a monkey on purpose: humans relate more to monkeys than to fish or birds; they’re our evolutionary kin. So the “monkey” is us — mortal sinners who think we’re gods while we’re really just sending the world, and ourselves, straight to heaven in the worst way.
For all the darkness, Pixies keep some irony in the lyrics. Taken out of context, the line “this monkey’s gone to heaven” almost sounds funny — and that’s not accidental. Joey Santiago remembers Francis playing him the early version of the song one morning and laughing at the line “If man is five…” — “He was laughing then… it was really funny.” You can feel that black humor in the track: like someone is singing a children’s song about the end of the world. Later, Francis said he didn’t want to turn it into a sermon — “it’s told without an agenda and with minimal pomposity, just mixing biblical imagery with a kiddie rhyme.” That’s probably why “Monkey Gone to Heaven” never slides into preachiness. It scares you and smirks at you at the same time. You get God and the devil assigned numbers, the ocean as a “big organic toilet” (his own phrase for the waste-soaked sea), and a monkey with a ridiculous halo.
Taboos? Back then, ecology wasn’t exactly a hot rock-song topic — Pixies were among the first in the alternative world to sing about global warming this bluntly. Psychology? More like a collective existential dread: the song asks where humans sit in the universe, delivers a pretty brutal answer, and then turns it into a dark joke. It’s no wonder listeners still argue whether the song is pessimistic or secretly hopeful. As one critic put it, “the weirdness of the lyrics only adds to its appeal” — riddles stick longer than slogans.
If Pixies are known for anything, it’s for how deeply they influenced the next wave of alternative rock. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is a perfect case study, even though it never became a huge hit outside of music-nerd circles. Within a few years of its release, echoes of this track were everywhere. The most famous case, of course, is Nirvana. In late 1993, Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone: “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. Basically, I was trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit… when I first heard the Pixies, I was so impressed that I thought I should be in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics — when the verses are quiet and soft, and then the chorus is loud and hard.” He was talking about “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the anthem of the ’90s. So the main inspiration for that song was Pixies’ style, and especially that quiet-loud-quiet formula they used so effectively in “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and a bunch of other tracks. The irony: “Teen Spirit” became the megahit Pixies themselves never had — but without them, it might never have existed. Cobain even slipped a little “hello” to his heroes onto the Nevermind artwork: on the back cover, among the collage of images, there’s a photo of a toy monkey with wings (a childhood toy of his), credited in the booklet as “Monkey Photo – Kurdt Kobain.” Many fans saw that winged monkey as a nod to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” — Cobain winking at the initiated by putting a haloed monkey into the most iconic cover art of the ’90s. Either way, the line is clear: without Pixies, the ’90s alt-rock revolution would’ve sounded very different.
And it didn’t stop with Nirvana. Pretty much the whole early ’90s alternative wave — from Smashing Pumpkins to Radiohead — absorbed Pixies’ lessons. That ability to mash melody with noise, introspection with absurdity, art with chaos, became the hallmark of “smart” guitar rock in the ’90s. When Radiohead recorded “Creep” in 1992, guitarist Jonny Greenwood famously slammed those sudden distorted chords into the chorus — a move very much in the spirit of Pixies’ jarring loud bursts. Weezer, when they broke through in 1994, built whole songs on the contrast between quiet verses and explosive choruses — like they were following a playbook Francis and company wrote years earlier.
“Monkey Gone to Heaven” also smuggled in another avant-garde idea that later became trendy: blending rock with classical instruments. Today, nobody blinks at strings in an indie track, but in 1989 it was edgy. When the song came out, NME snarked about its “lush but unobtrusive strings” wrapping the song and moving the band into a “new sphere of arrangement.” For Pixies, bringing in cellos was an experiment sparked by a random moment — legend has it Gil Norton saw Kim Deal messing around with a piano’s strings and thought, why not hire a string quartet? The experiment worked. Later, strings became part of the alt-rock and grunge toolkit — think of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” with its cello on Nevermind. Pixies weren’t the first rock band to use classical instruments, but they showed that even a wild song about a monkey in heaven could carry violins and cellos without losing bite.
Sometimes the cultural footprint of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” pops up in completely unexpected places. The title gets quoted everywhere — from environmental op-eds to art shows. A few years ago in Vancouver, a curiosity shop opened called “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven,” selling a surreal mix of art objects and taxidermy. For a store full of mounted animals and insects in glass cases, a Pixies song about a dead monkey in heaven is almost too perfect. The phrase and the song also pop up in film and TV. The track is used in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), where John Cusack’s character revisits his high-school past to the music of his youth — Pixies included. As for covers, bands have been taking stabs at “Monkey Gone to Heaven” for years: post-hardcore outfit Far recorded their version, hardcore band Gulch covered it, and it’s a staple on “best of the ’80s” tribute comps. The “man is 5, devil is 6” line gets quoted and parodied constantly — sometimes in shows, sometimes in memes, like “if X is 5 then Y is 6,” a wink only music nerds catch.
Then there’s the visual legacy. The artwork for Doolittle — with its haloed monkey and the numbers 5-6-7 — became a full-on alternative culture icon. Designer Vaughan Oliver and photographer Simon Larbalestier built a surreal, instantly recognizable visual world for Pixies, and the “Monkey Gone to Heaven” imagery is a key part of it. That sepia collage with a monkey and golden-ratio grids, Oliver said, was directly inspired by the lyrics: “five, six, seven — monkey goes to heaven.” It turned out so strong that its influence seeped into tons of ’90s alternative covers — many of them copied the same mystical, worn-analog aesthetic. As Magnet magazine pointed out, Oliver’s work for Pixies basically changed the rules for rock album design. Posters in the early ’90s suddenly filled up with monkeys, angels, strange numbers — sometimes as direct references, sometimes as spiritual descendants of that original monkey.
And yes, the song even left a mark on fashion. In the late ’80s, bands like Pixies openly rejected the glossy dress code: no big hair, no Lycra. They went onstage in worn-out jeans, stretched-out T-shirts, and battered sneakers. Their look said: we are the opposite of ’80s glam. Black Francis, a round-faced guy in a shapeless shirt, and Kim Deal, a rock girl with zero glamour, became new role models for kids who were sick of MTV sheen. A couple of years later, that look under the name “grunge” blew up in the fashion industry — remember Marc Jacobs’ 1993 Perry Ellis collection with models styled like they were heading to a dingy club, not a runway.
Pixies weren’t sitting in front-row seats at fashion shows, but they were part of the culture that made that shift happen. Being messy suddenly became cool. Shirts with a monkey skull (a nod to “Bone Machine”) or the Doolittle cover turned into subtle status symbols. Today you can easily spot a teenager in a Pixies tee — maybe they’ve never heard the band, but that logo still signals a certain aesthetic. That’s how ’80s counterculture got absorbed into the mainstream: first Pixies sang about garbage and God, and years later their symbols are sold in malls. The most elegant revenge alternative rock could ask for.
And finally, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is just a great track. Time-tested. Good music doesn’t care how old you are. A 20-year-old music nerd in 2025 can get from it the same thing someone got in 1989: the feeling of being plugged into something bigger than a three-minute song. A small legend you inherit instead of just “discovering new stuff.” If a song still feels relevant 36 years later, that’s what we call
a classic.
Listen further:
- Pixies – Doolittle (1989). The full context for “Monkey Gone to Heaven” —
- from the piercing opener “Debaser” to the pop-leaning “Here Comes Your Man” and feral bursts like “Tame.” The record that kicked off a new era of alternative rock.
- Pixies – “Where Is My Mind?” (1988). Another cult Pixies track (from Surfer Rosa) that got a second life thanks to Fight Club. A dreamy, unsettling anthem of alienation that basically closed out the ’90s. A perfect example of how Pixies made weirdness universally loved.
- Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991). The “perfect pop song” that Pixies helped inspire. Listen to the contrast between the quiet verse and the exploding chorus — Cobain openly admitted he was “ripping off the Pixies,” and the world is still grateful. After this track, alternative music was never the same.
- The Breeders – Last Splash (1993). Kim Deal’s post-Pixies project. If you want more female vocals and raw indie swagger, this album — with its hit “Cannonball” — shows a different way the Pixies spirit evolved through the ’90s. Kim brought melody and ragged charm into Pixies; in The Breeders, that energy is front and center.
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