What’s happened at Beaver Stadium is truly remarkable. It is surely the winning that started the fire, but in my nearly three decades of following Penn State sports, I have never seen a student section like this year’s. I would not have thought it could happen at Penn State … – ed.
PSU fans, players celebrate at lovefest with an electric beat:
“UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Sometime in 1998, a German DJ known in the electronic underground as Splank used his personal computer and a soundcard to experiment with some beats — an evil pattern of synch noise — not knowing at the time that this musical flow would, seven years later, cause one of America’s largest stadiums to move within its own concrete.
“Splank, in his bare studio, created a basic tune, both simple and contagious. He called the track ‘Kernkraft 400,’ though years later, hundreds of thousands of fans in a foreign country would mistakenly call it ‘Zombie Nation.’ Really, Zombie Nation was the name of Splank’s one-man electronica band. And Kernkraft 400 was his first breakthrough, an international club hit that chased Mariah Carey off the Billboard charts.
“Like all songs — and, like the Penn State football team that would later use the song as its anthem — the peak led to a downfall. Kernkraft 400 was soon anonymous, preserved only in the musical cemetery known as late-night laser bowling, and, basically, left for dead elsewhere.
“How to explain this scene, then, but as a resurrection? Eight days ago, Penn State played Wisconsin at Beaver Stadium, and 109,865 people — a good 20,000 of whom were students dressed in white, like zombies — pushed together, as if forming the many parts of one beast. Every time Kernkraft 400 pulsated through the speaker system, the stadium shook with noise. Some students stuffed Advil in their pockets, they would later admit, because the roar gave them headaches by halftime. Others, like Penn State junior Jeff Bast, had spent days camping outside in 40-degree temperatures, just for the chance at a front-row seat in college football’s wildest frenzy.
“Together, on third downs, the stadium waited. One mob of fans, so listless only a year ago, waited for the song it called Zombie Nation, a tribute to the reawakened dead. …”