Best lyrics EVER!!!
Ok everyone, I'm breaking my typical mode temporarily and getting interesting.
I just want to share some fabulous rock lyrics that I discovered listening to satellite radio. The sheer volume of 70s and 80s hard rock allusions makes me want to weep with joy. Now, I liked Soundgarden and Pearl Jam (at least their first album) and a few other grunge bands, but all that stuff about "killing" metal in the early 90s just turned out to be plain wrong. Those 90s bands are essentially history, and the hard rockers are stronger than ever before. Here's to nostalgia and unabashed dumbness, I guess! But wait -- maybe 90s nostalgia will bring THOSE bands back again... Anyway, the great thing about nostalgia is it lets you love genres of music that may have in their day seemed opposed -- time heals all petty aesthetic rifts, at least it does for me. Still, got to appreciate the wonderfully sneering quality of the followign lyrics:
American Hair Band
Yeah, well I've been up and been down, town to town with several bands,
Then tortured for ten long years by critics, agents and the A&R man, and some bandwagon fans.
It's time to stand up, fight back, be proud and once again be free,
So if you want a piece of me, come and get it!
Kurt Cobain is gone but I'm back
Wearing leather pants and a backwards hat
Guitars slung low
Where the down boys go
The night trains back so on with the show
I'm Metal HealthAnd dressed to thrill
I'm an SMF with the looks that kill
I rocked and rolled, n' long hair is back
And I grew up, singing Strutter, And Back, in Black
I'm going back to eighty-nine I went Platinum zero times
You're in the jungle sweet child o'mine
I want another piece of that cherry pie
Chorus #1: (Oooooohhhhhh)They call 'em hairbands
Leather jacket in black
Throw your hands in the air
Yeah we're bringing it back
N' Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil again
And Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil my friend
So Say (Shout, Shout) never letting it end and say
(Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout) yeah…(Bad Medicine)
I like Old Van Halen and Hanoi Rocks
Black n' Blue and Britny Fox
Guns n' Roses, Motley Crue
When Def Leppard rocked and Skid Row ruled
Yeah, Ratt went round n' round
Rocking out in Boston, get loud in Chi-town
Vandenberg, Priest, Dok-ken, Kix
Throwing Faster Pussycat in the mix (P-P-P-P-P-Pussycat)
Give me L.A. Guns & The Dangerous Toys
Quiet Riot, Bang Tango & Bullet Boys
Love Johnny Crash grunge bands are trash
I like C.C. DeVille, Mick Mars, and Slash
Chorus: #2Breakdown:Yeah, I saw your grunge band, staring at your shoes on stage, wearing that dirty flannel shirt, when you gonna learn dirtball, you just can't f**k with Twisted Sister. "What are you going to do with your life"?
I'm an American hairband
Watch me rock
You can raise your hands
Or you can suck my c**k
Heavy Metal God
I'm a Pin-up boyI'm the singer from Tuff not Pretty Boy Floyd
Super loud and Super wild
Sebastian Bach is youth gone wild
Diamond Dave and Nikki Sixx
I wanna see Tommy Lee back spinning those sticks
Up all night, gonna sleep all day
I love girls; girls, girls and I love L.A.
I won't waste my breath, but here's a clue
Give Pearl Jam & Eddie a big f**k you
Who cares about Weezer and the Screeming Trees
When we got White Lion
And of course the Sleeze Beez
If you wanna rock n' roll then read my lips
Let's shout it out loud
For a band named KISS
Chorus: (Oooooohhhhhh)They call 'em hairbands
Wearing leather and black
So throw your hands in the air
Now we're bringing it back
N' Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil again
And Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil my friend
So Say (Shout, Shout) never letting it end and say (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout) yeah,
I'm a hairband wanted dead or alive
Singing (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)
I wanna rock n' roll in the still of the night
Say (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)
Gonna take you down to the Paradise city
And (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)Everybody let's sing talk dirty to me
I just want to share some fabulous rock lyrics that I discovered listening to satellite radio. The sheer volume of 70s and 80s hard rock allusions makes me want to weep with joy. Now, I liked Soundgarden and Pearl Jam (at least their first album) and a few other grunge bands, but all that stuff about "killing" metal in the early 90s just turned out to be plain wrong. Those 90s bands are essentially history, and the hard rockers are stronger than ever before. Here's to nostalgia and unabashed dumbness, I guess! But wait -- maybe 90s nostalgia will bring THOSE bands back again... Anyway, the great thing about nostalgia is it lets you love genres of music that may have in their day seemed opposed -- time heals all petty aesthetic rifts, at least it does for me. Still, got to appreciate the wonderfully sneering quality of the followign lyrics:
American Hair Band
Yeah, well I've been up and been down, town to town with several bands,
Then tortured for ten long years by critics, agents and the A&R man, and some bandwagon fans.
It's time to stand up, fight back, be proud and once again be free,
So if you want a piece of me, come and get it!
Kurt Cobain is gone but I'm back
Wearing leather pants and a backwards hat
Guitars slung low
Where the down boys go
The night trains back so on with the show
I'm Metal HealthAnd dressed to thrill
I'm an SMF with the looks that kill
I rocked and rolled, n' long hair is back
And I grew up, singing Strutter, And Back, in Black
I'm going back to eighty-nine I went Platinum zero times
You're in the jungle sweet child o'mine
I want another piece of that cherry pie
Chorus #1: (Oooooohhhhhh)They call 'em hairbands
Leather jacket in black
Throw your hands in the air
Yeah we're bringing it back
N' Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil again
And Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil my friend
So Say (Shout, Shout) never letting it end and say
(Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout) yeah…(Bad Medicine)
I like Old Van Halen and Hanoi Rocks
Black n' Blue and Britny Fox
Guns n' Roses, Motley Crue
When Def Leppard rocked and Skid Row ruled
Yeah, Ratt went round n' round
Rocking out in Boston, get loud in Chi-town
Vandenberg, Priest, Dok-ken, Kix
Throwing Faster Pussycat in the mix (P-P-P-P-P-Pussycat)
Give me L.A. Guns & The Dangerous Toys
Quiet Riot, Bang Tango & Bullet Boys
Love Johnny Crash grunge bands are trash
I like C.C. DeVille, Mick Mars, and Slash
Chorus: #2Breakdown:Yeah, I saw your grunge band, staring at your shoes on stage, wearing that dirty flannel shirt, when you gonna learn dirtball, you just can't f**k with Twisted Sister. "What are you going to do with your life"?
I'm an American hairband
Watch me rock
You can raise your hands
Or you can suck my c**k
Heavy Metal God
I'm a Pin-up boyI'm the singer from Tuff not Pretty Boy Floyd
Super loud and Super wild
Sebastian Bach is youth gone wild
Diamond Dave and Nikki Sixx
I wanna see Tommy Lee back spinning those sticks
Up all night, gonna sleep all day
I love girls; girls, girls and I love L.A.
I won't waste my breath, but here's a clue
Give Pearl Jam & Eddie a big f**k you
Who cares about Weezer and the Screeming Trees
When we got White Lion
And of course the Sleeze Beez
If you wanna rock n' roll then read my lips
Let's shout it out loud
For a band named KISS
Chorus: (Oooooohhhhhh)They call 'em hairbands
Wearing leather and black
So throw your hands in the air
Now we're bringing it back
N' Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil again
And Say (Shout, Shout) At the Devil my friend
So Say (Shout, Shout) never letting it end and say (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout) yeah,
I'm a hairband wanted dead or alive
Singing (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)
I wanna rock n' roll in the still of the night
Say (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)
Gonna take you down to the Paradise city
And (Shout, Shout, Shout, Shout)Everybody let's sing talk dirty to me
posted by Mark Meritt at 3:47 PM
19 Comments:
\m/
-Adam
What does that little symbol mean?? Who is Adam?
You know, Sebastian Bach plays a recurring character on Gilmore Girls... the upside is he's the best part of the episode when he's on.
Oh yeah, I forgot to sign my name. Duh.
Beth
These lyrics crack me up. But I am surprised you haven't gotten more hate mail for posting lyrics that denigrate Kurt Cobain (and you thought MY blog was going to get you in trouble?)
:-)
Ok, wait, I missed Beth's comment! Sebastian Bach is on Gilmore Girls?? That makes me want to watch it. What is his character all about?
One of the main characters on the show (Laine) is in a band an Sebastian Bach is the guitar player. His character is sort of a steriotypical hairband rocker, but he is really funny. He has great comic timing.
My favorite line of his so far:
"the first thing I'm gonna do when we get home [from touring] is hug my kids, put on Harry Potter, and take my wife to bed." Awesome.
Beth
I don't hate Kurt Cobain, though I think he's less important as the putative deep thinker/artist he was made out to be and more important as someone with great songwriting instincts. I think his real genius was for popularizing a form of music not widely appreciated (though it also led to Gavin Rossdale and his unforgivable band Bush -- sorry Bush fans; perhaps I need to interrogate my OWN extreme reaction to that band -- what does it say about ME?).
I really did get very tired of the Cobain hagiography, though. Rock critics and journalists immediately tried to make him some kind of saint or genius, which I had a problem with, but I guess it's nothing new. So, I guess I object less to Kurt Cobain than to the "Kurt Cobain industry" that grew up around him after his death.
Also,
I found the whole "anit-rock star" thing associated with 90s music often just plain disingenuous. They wanted to be rock stars as much as anyone from the 80s -- they just didn't say as much -- and they just didn't put as much effort into guitar leads and hairstyles :-)
As the person on this list who is likely most attuned to grunge (and especially its antecedents in the 80s indie scene), I take it upon myself to present the "counterpoint" to Dr. Meritt's "point."
Agreed on Cobain's significance--he was no genius and was in many ways a depressingly damaged and immature person, though seemingly with a basically good heart. That being said, his songs did do what no one else in America had managed before him--combine genuinely raw emotion with unbelievably catchy melodies and hooks in a hard-rock format that was simple and inviting enough to make it onto radio and the charts. Kudos for that--for making America ready to embrace punk...or something like it.
I really can't tell how the grunge guys felt about rock stardom, though I think it's unfair and an oversimplification to say that they wanted to be celebrities as much as, say, Gene Simmons. To the extent that the subject is worth discussing at all, the "leaders" of the grunge thing did seem to have a sincere ambivalence (at best) toward commercial success...though there's a lot about even that statement that is over-general and sloppy. I.e., and as only one example, Chris Cornell never shied away from the spotlight, underscoring the reality that the musicians lumped together as "grunge" were hardly a homogenous bunch and should be taken individually if at all.
Further, as Kim Thayil so pithily put it, there was only one grunge band in Seattle, and that was Mudhoney...and they never had to worry about fame. The entire notion of "grunge" was a spurious media conceit from the beginning. The anti-celebrity theme that was latched onto and slavishly Xeroxed by every hard rock band dreaming of fame in the mid-90s really only ever characterized Cobain and Eddie Vedder--both of whom were, I think, genuinely distrustful of stardom. Now, you can also argue that both were quite petulant and intermittently annoying, and I'd agree with that, but I suspect that feeling grew out of a heartfelt sense that rock is capable of being a life-changing force and that the hedonism and superficiality of hair-rock--however ironic or self-aware--is a cheapening of what music can do, say, be, etc., and at the end of the day I basically share that feeling--hence my completely humorless approach to music. Oh, well...
I know I've already deviated too far from by "boring" agenda, but Michael's last post was too thoughtful and interesting to keep me from going back into meaningful territory.
Thinking back on some of the bands Michael mentioned (Mudhoney and even Pearl Jam), one does have to recognize that many of those guys really did practice what they (or others) preached. Some people find Eddie Vedder annoying (I'm not one of them; I still like early Pearl Jam -- just couldn't get into the later stuff, but I don't have a strong negative opinion of it either), but Pearl Jam really did avoid succumbing to traps other bands avoided.
Also, as folks like Deb and Dave can remember, in the early 90s I LOVED what "grunge" (you're right, Michael -- a wholly unsatisfactory generalization, but I'll use it) was doing, and the last thing I wanted to listen to was late 80s metal (which -- perhaps like "grunge" later -- became more and more commodified and homogenized, etc.). Interestingly, I think these things work in cycles; grunge -- whatever it was -- was a response to excesses of hard rock and perhaps a return to its "purer" roots (I know grunge is often seen as a form of "punk," and that is certainly its dominant influence, but I always saw at least some of it as a melding of punk/alternative/indie styles with pre-glam hard rock styles like that of Sabbath. Actually, take a listen back to Mother Love Bone and Guns and Roses together -- or even imagine the first Pearl Jam album with Axl singing... not that far off in some ways).
To get back on track, and flesh out a little more thoughtfully what I humorously and brashly tossed off originally, my real beef -- to the extent that I have one -- is not so much with "grunge" or 90s musicians (who I think did what they did as a response to what was going on in the industry) as with critics. It is certainly NOT with fans of the music. If anything, I think the fans are the most important as transmitters and makers of what popular music is. In some ways, I guess I suspect there's something problematical about critics/journalists creating icons that stand for not being icons. I'm a little confused about what I think because while I think people should write about rock music and culture and that studying pop culture is as important as studying high culture -- ah, here it is I guess -- I'm very nervous about "high/low" or "art/trash" distinctions within studies of popular culture -- and I think some of the ways in which Cobain has been canonized smack of that to me. More to come...this is too long already
Ok, a pause.
But such distinctions might be useful, right? I mean, there definitely is a difference between what, say, Nirvana was doing and what, say, Tesla or Whitesnake (who I don't really like -- see, I can't help making my own value judgments! D'oh!) were doing.
But I guess I don't want to see it as a difference in quality (I see it more as a difference in kind of intent), and I think rock critics often do. I think it can't be argued that a lot of hard rock/metal bands don't fare well when one examines their lyrics or musical dynamics for depth or interiority. On the other hand, and here I strongly recommend Robert Walser's book on metal (Running with the Devil), if you look at hard rock less in terms of individual "works of art" and more as a sort of symbolic system or semiotic complex in which styles (musical and otherwise) are seen in relation to other and as meaningful acts, I think even seemingly trashy and superficial bands begin to seem much more interesting, playing out on the level of gesture, body, and social interaction some fascinating -- if unconscius and often disturbing -- making of meaning.
But in the end, I can't sit down in my chair and listen thoughtfully to "Strutter" (I have to be up and shaking my fist or playing); in that context the song may even irritate me. But I can sit down with, listen to, and be moved by "All Apologies." Maybe that is the key difference and is exactly one of the things Michael pointed out.
Hi there,
I just looked back at my last two comments, and there were really confusing errors in them. For instance, I meant to say that Pearl Jam avoided problems that other bands FAILED to avoid.
And Michael, I'm thinking about "humorless" attitudes toward music, as you call it. I think for me humor has become kind of a crutch -- sometimes I use humor to engage in practices that I don't feel quite right about. What frightens me about myself is I can't always tell when I'M being humorous/ironic/etc. anymore. I wonder if it's possible to start digging something ironically and get trapped in your own ACT! :-) Feel like that's what happens to me sometimes.
"I wonder if it's possible to start digging something ironically and get trapped in your own ACT!"
I'll say this--I began saying "dude" ironically in my senior year of high school and it managed to hang on in my lexicon for, uh...well, a long time. Ultimately it doesn't matter REALLY--I didn't become a bone-headed frat guy by saying "dude" a lot--but I think it is entirely possible to become inured to what once irked us about ostensibly-loathsome cultural tics that we pick up intially at arm's-length and only for a hoot. What's the significance? Search me...
Michael,
That was my experience with "right on" when I lived in Santa Barbara. I thought it sounded so ridiculous -- like everyone hung out with Shaggy and Scooby riding the Mystery Machine. But soon enough I started saying it -- and still do from time to time.
I vowed I would never use the word "cool." I actually said "neat" and "neat-o." I still do, but I have allowed myself to say "cool" too many times since then.
huh. what's your objection to "cool," Sarah? i know all of these matters are incredibly subjective, but i've never had any trouble with "cool" and find it kind of fascinating as the Chuck Taylor of slang words--it's about the only one that has pretty much never gone out of fashion at any point in the last 50 or 60 years--despite intense competion from a nearly-endless list of rivals (cf. bitchin', rad, wicked, mint, sweet, excellent, fresh, def, dope, phat, gnarly, awesome, the shit, etc., etc., etc.).
Those lyrics - what Mark posted - were A-MAZING, n'kay? Just like, wow. Wow. I don't know what the symbol means Sarah but I do know <3 is supposed to represent a heart. The kids have all these newfangled symbols these days. My guilty pleasure word is "sweet," also initially used self-referentially but now occasionally sincere.
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