"Flagpole Sitta" is a song by American rock band Harvey Danger from their 1997 debut album, Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? It was met with critical and commercial success, peaking at #38 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #3 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Lead singer Sean Nelson says the title of the song was inspired by the 1930 Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers, which features a discussion about the pole sitting fad of the 1920s. The band was inspired to spell "sitter" as "sitta" by the Pavement song "Fame Throwa" and the N.W.A album Straight Outta Compton.
“[The Song] manages to snag some sort of zeitgeist experience,” Nelson says. “I think it’s a really true version of what it felt like to be alive, at least in Seattle when I actually wrote it. The ironic remove and the innate suspicion of both the mainstream culture and the alternative culture, and the yearning to be part of something, but not being able to get around that suspicion and the self-loathing. And then the ‘bah-bahs’ are just also the joy of being alive. It resonates with a frame of mind that turns out to be more universal than I would’ve thought. It’s both really upbeat and kind of savage and snarky at the same time.”
