1. Black Flag, "Police Story"
Greg Ginn is apparently a terrible person, and if this song is based on true incidents, I fear that the police may have been right to club him. But guys like Ginn are why we separate the art from the artist, and an example of how great artists can confront the horrors of reality.
2. Body Count, "Body Count"
Not as blunt or as infamous as "Cop Killer," but also less excessive. Ice-T's messages about police brutality seem to get more important every day, though I'm not sure he would have kept the song's anti-gun control stance had he foreseen the NRA's role in getting his music banned.
3. The Clash, "Police on My Back"
The Clash's third-most-famous cover of a song about fighting law enforcement got stranded in the middle of Sandinista!, but no one who ever made it to side four ever forgot how it turned the original's garage-rock riff into an urgent siren, diffusing all claims that the band had gone soft. And yes, it was written by Eddy Grant, who was only a few years away from "Electric Avenue."
4. Dead Kennedys, "Police Truck"
Chris Rock recently told Rolling Stone, "Comedy rots. Trading Places is a perfect movie, just unbelievably good. But there are other comedies, not nearly as old as Trading Places, that just have references and things in them that aren't funny five years later. And rap's got a lot of that." He could have added the Dead Kennedys to that comparison. Jello Biafra's Anita Bryant jokes might not be funny anymore, but this one of the Dead Kennedy's unfortunately timeless messages.
5. Fugazi, "Great Cop"
Anyone who's heard the Ice Cream-Eating Motherfucker story knows that the guys in Fugazi are more like cops than outlaws. With that in mind, they must have known that nothing could shut down a punk kid like the couplet "I look for wires when I'm talking to you/You'd make a great cop."
6. Le Tigre, "Bang! Bang!"
A Brooklyn dance-punk tirade against NYPD tactics is practically a given in 2014, but the terrifyingly infectious "Bang! Bang!" arrived in 2001 on the heels of the Amadou Diallo shooting. Guess where Kathleen Hanna stops counting.
7. Living Colour, "41 Shots (American Skin)"
Bruce Springsteen has written better songs about policemen (most of them on Nebraska), but none as direct as this 2000 ballad, also inspired by Diallo, which sparked a boycott of Springsteen's music from New York's biggest police union before the song was even officially released. My favorite version is Living Colour's, only performed live but an emotional peak of their transcendent shows.
8. Mudhoney, "Hate the Police"
Originally by the Dicks, though I like Mudhoney's more fleshed-out, hi-fi version (and if you didn't think anything could be less fleshed-out or hi-fi than Mudhoney, listen). Somewhat like the Rolling Stones updating Robert Johnson's songs, Mudhoney gave "Hate the Police" a more robust reading that was still dishonorably scuzzy.
9. Operation Ivy, "Officer"
Of course the world's biggest Clash fans would have a song about the police on their first 7", but lest you think these guys were living in punk's past, "Officer" offered alternatives to hardcore nihilism and punk anarchy--"Tough guy asshole do what you can/Whatever you destroy we'll create it again."
10. Rage Against the Machine, "Killing in the Name"
The immortal riff. This song is so great that we loved Rage Against the Machine for imitating it 40 more times. Morello's Drop D progressions will outlive all of us, and while no one with a high school education would call Zack de la Rocha poetic, his message here is just as relevant 20 years later.
Showing posts with label operation ivy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label operation ivy. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Album of the Day: Pantera, Cowboys from Hell
A friend stated yesterday (coincidentally or not, on the 8th anniversary of Dimebag Darrell's murder) that glam-era Pantera was better than the Cowboys in Hell (sic) years. With the band's '80s embarrassments still safely out of print, I'm sure that it's hip to say that they're Pantera's best records. But it's also completely wrong.
The "Cowboys from Hell" title is almost ubiquitous with Pantera now, for good reason. How many modern musicians get honorific nicknames? There isn't anything quite up to the Killer, the Boss or the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. The Cowboys from Hell might be as close as we've gotten. A lesser band wouldn't be able to make that title stick, or even sound cool, but Pantera were experts at the implausible.
22 years on, Cowboys from Hell still gives a charge. It's not nearly Pantera's best record, and it's distractingly frontloaded when it plays out. But in some ways Cowboys captures them at their peak. Phil Anselmo delivers some of the most versatile metal vocals in recorded history here, hitting the high notes like the scion of Rob Halford. He's worlds away for the self-consciously macho growler he'd become. Hearing Vinnie Paul's drumming in 1990 must have been like hearing Eddie Van Halen in 1978--his musicianship would reshape metal, if enough folks could figure out what he was doing, learn it and put their own variation on it. Groove metal has been run into the ground in 2012, with Paul's current band at fault in part, but still no one employs a bass drum and a crash cymbal quite like him. That's why some folks can still sit through 30 seconds of a Hellyeah song.
Every metalhead knows at least two songs from Cowboys from Hell--the title track and "Cemetery Gates." The latter gets played at Dimebag tributes every year, especially on December 8, but even without the boneyard-inspired lyrics it serves as arguably Dime's best memorial. If anyone has an isolated guitar track, please post it in the comments section.
I was surprised to find out today that it's Pantera's longest song, at a short seven minutes (how many Led Zeppelin and Metallica songs are longer than seven minutes? I can't keep track.) If another band has stumbled upon that chorus riff, they probably would have drawn it out for the entire song.
Still, my favorite song from Cowboys from Hell is "Primal Concrete Sledge." Outside of a sole Poison Idea cover, Pantera's punk influences are nearly inaudible. More likely, they raised themselves to the Skynyrd and KISS records that hardcore kids turned up their noses at. Yet some of those faster and shorter concepts seeped through to Pantera, or at least enough for them to unleash blistering songs like this one. Phil Anselmo even calls it "a song of unity" in the video here, thousands of miles away (both musically and graphically) from Operation Ivy. Here's Pantera in 1991 at Monsters of Rock in Moscow, possibly hastening the crumble of the Soviet Union.
The "Cowboys from Hell" title is almost ubiquitous with Pantera now, for good reason. How many modern musicians get honorific nicknames? There isn't anything quite up to the Killer, the Boss or the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. The Cowboys from Hell might be as close as we've gotten. A lesser band wouldn't be able to make that title stick, or even sound cool, but Pantera were experts at the implausible.
22 years on, Cowboys from Hell still gives a charge. It's not nearly Pantera's best record, and it's distractingly frontloaded when it plays out. But in some ways Cowboys captures them at their peak. Phil Anselmo delivers some of the most versatile metal vocals in recorded history here, hitting the high notes like the scion of Rob Halford. He's worlds away for the self-consciously macho growler he'd become. Hearing Vinnie Paul's drumming in 1990 must have been like hearing Eddie Van Halen in 1978--his musicianship would reshape metal, if enough folks could figure out what he was doing, learn it and put their own variation on it. Groove metal has been run into the ground in 2012, with Paul's current band at fault in part, but still no one employs a bass drum and a crash cymbal quite like him. That's why some folks can still sit through 30 seconds of a Hellyeah song.
Every metalhead knows at least two songs from Cowboys from Hell--the title track and "Cemetery Gates." The latter gets played at Dimebag tributes every year, especially on December 8, but even without the boneyard-inspired lyrics it serves as arguably Dime's best memorial. If anyone has an isolated guitar track, please post it in the comments section.
I was surprised to find out today that it's Pantera's longest song, at a short seven minutes (how many Led Zeppelin and Metallica songs are longer than seven minutes? I can't keep track.) If another band has stumbled upon that chorus riff, they probably would have drawn it out for the entire song.
Still, my favorite song from Cowboys from Hell is "Primal Concrete Sledge." Outside of a sole Poison Idea cover, Pantera's punk influences are nearly inaudible. More likely, they raised themselves to the Skynyrd and KISS records that hardcore kids turned up their noses at. Yet some of those faster and shorter concepts seeped through to Pantera, or at least enough for them to unleash blistering songs like this one. Phil Anselmo even calls it "a song of unity" in the video here, thousands of miles away (both musically and graphically) from Operation Ivy. Here's Pantera in 1991 at Monsters of Rock in Moscow, possibly hastening the crumble of the Soviet Union.
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