Monkey Gone to Heaven

The song's cryptic lyrics which many have tried to interpret are, according to the band, meant to be surreal and meaningless, built around the title. A common speculation is that the song takes an environmentalist stance.

The first single from Doolittle, this song received lots of accolades from the music press, including from Rolling Stone magazine, which named it the #5 single of 1989 and later listed it as #410 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The Doolittle album made many "best of" lists, but the Pixies went on hiatus after touring to promote the album, and never achieved great commercial success.

Regarding the number part of the song, Frank Black said in an interview with The Alternative Press: "It's a reference from what I understand to be Hebrew numerology, and I don't know a lot about it or any of it really. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th. I didn't go to the library and figure it out." So how accurate was Black? The 6 and 7 parts are on target; the devil is 6 because 666 is the number of the Beast, and God is 7 because that's the heavenly number (there are many 7s in the Revelation: world created in seven days, etc.). 5 for man is a bit of a stretch. Traditionally Greek and Hebrew numbers all applied to a letter (Alpha =1, Beta =2 etc). Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. And in the Bible numbers have a meaning for instance 5 = grace, 6 = spiritual imperfection, 7 = spiritual perfection and 8 =resurrection. An example is in Greek, the name of Jesus is spelled I H S O U S (iota, eta, sigma, omicron, upsilon, sigma). Substituting in the Greek numeral system the equivalent numerical values to each letter in the name of Jesus and adding them up, the total is 888. Also there are 8 examples of resurrection in the Bible.