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about this song
This Elton John/Bernie Taupin composition is about a massacre in a New York restaurant, which results in summary justice by a hail of police bullets - "you danced in death like a marionette on the vengeance of the law." When "Ticking" was first recorded, the phenomenon of indiscriminate mass shootings was fairly rare in the United States, the worst being the University of Texas Clock Tower Massacre which was perpetrated by undergraduate and former marine Charles Whitman in August 1966.