“I like spooky stuff. I was very much into the horror genre.”
— Buck Dharma, referring to
"(Don't Fear) The Reaper".
"(Don't Fear) The Reaper".Blue Öyster Cult is well-known for incorporating science fiction and occultist themes into their lyrical content. It should come as no surprise that many of their songs are horrifying.
- "Astronomy"'s other-worldly Lovecraftian setting of the Four Winds Bar, standing under strange skies outside space and time, where people from this world suddenly find themselves with no hint as to whether they were able to get back again.
- "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from Agents of Fortune is a commonly used shorthand for establishing an ominous feel in horror movies and TV shows (in addition to being a stoner anthem, but that's a whole other trope). It influenced novelist Stephen King to write his famous apocalyptic 1978 novel, The Stand. Why does it have this effect on so many people? Because it's damn unsettling, that's why. The music sounds eerily serene, almost like it could have been written by The Byrds - but it's about the inevitability of death and the transcendence of love. The eponymous "Reaper" features prominently.
- "Golden Age Of Leather", from Spectres. In which an upbeat surf-music theme and vocal harmonies reminiscent of The Beach Boys allows a story to unfold, of old Hell's Angels deciding to go out with one last gang-rape followed by a battle to the death. And at the end, a desert sandstorm rolls over the corpses and swallows them up.
- "Joan Crawford" from Fire of Unknown Origin depicts a New York City in rioting chaos, as Joan Crawford's zombified corpse claws its way out of the Earth to get its final revenge against Christina.
- "Christiinaaaaaaaaaaaa... Mother's hommmmmeeeee!"
- The first album has the standout track "Then Came The Last Days Of May" which can best be described as stealth country music played by heavy rockers. The theme is one not usually covered by C&W: three buddies set out, with a guide they mistakenly think they can trust, to cross the Mexican border via a desolate desert so as to buy drugs. in the desert, their guide murders all three to steal the drugs money. The song is from the point of view of the last man to die, in the manner of a lonely cowboy on the frontier.
- "Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl)" (from their second LP Tyranny and Mutation) seems to have one of the oddest titles ever, and it actually sounds sort of upbeat... until you realize that it's about a New Orleans hoodoo queen who uses quicklime to dispose of the corpses of her rivals.
- "Harvest Moon" seems rather tame, until the ending reveals that a mysterious entity, referred to only as "some evil", comes every harvest moon to disappear the townspeople of a village.
- "Screams in the Night" (from the self-titled first LP) is about the infamous Kitty Genovese murder in New York, where, allegedly, hundreds of people saw or heard the murder but did not intervene. One of the witnesses was keyboard player Allen Lanier - who had only just moved into an apartment overlooking, and within listening distance of, the murder scene.
- "The Shadow of California" from The Revölution by Night has Word Salad Lyrics, but it can be read as a chapter of demon-possessed Hell's Angels on their way to do the bidding of their master in Los Angeles. Alternatively, "the shadow" can be read as resurgent fascism/Nazism which is rising in America's most populated state. ( a clover-leaf junction has four arms and the swastika is "a symbol of good luck").
- "I Am the Storm!", from Mirrors, charts a Stalker with a Crush who has let his doomed obsession tip over into violent insanity as he contemplates what he'd like to see happen to the object of his spurned affections.
- "Unknown Tongue", the final track from Cultösaurus Erectus, is about a young girl who partakes in ritualistic self-cutting for what seems to be religious reasons ("a crucifix above her head"). Two things make it especially unnerving: the fact that she tastes the blood, and the fact that it ends with her going to school the next morning like an ordinary schoolgirl, as if to juxtapose her banal everyday life with the disturbed behavior she exhibits at night. There is also the association with stigmata, the Wounds of Christ, that religious tradition assures us can be visited on a particularly pious believer as a blessing from God. There is a hint in the song that Margaret's piety and desire for the Stigmata is helped along by her father's razor.
- "Workshop of the Telescopes" is the penultimate track from the band's self-titled debut album, and it's so cryptic as to evade basic comprehension. What it does do well is create a very eerie atmosphere, described perfectly by late band manager and frequent lyricist Sandy Pearlman:
- "It's really what I call a gothic technology song . . . It has kind of a Frankenstein's laboratory, techno-gothic take on how things would be transformed, and what the transformative mechanism would be."
