“Party At Ground Zero” by Fishbone

"Party at Ground Zero" comes off Fishbone's self-titled 1985 EP for Columbia, a ska punk tear written by John Norwood Fisher, Kendall Jones and Angelo Moore. It started out as a demo called "Pink Vapor Stew", which can be heard on the Fishbone 101 compilation.

Spin's John Leland heard it as big band swing hot-rodded and sent racing over a manic rhythm, the sort of thing Count Basie might have cut if he had grown a mohawk and caught the ska bug, and he figured it was off and running within a couple of bars.

The video matched the song's nerve. Henry Selick, who would go on to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas, made it as a nod to The Masque of the Red Death, with Death pulling off his mask and setting off a nuclear blast, and stills from it ended up on the cover of the 12-inch single. The band also played the song in the movie The Tripper, and it turned up in the 1994 film Camp Nowhere.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.