Religion!

Kazzy 31 Comments

(Hold your shorts, Jaybird.  This is a music post.)

(Disclaimer: When I first approached the rest of the MD crew about participating in our Wednesday music post series, I did so with trepidation.  As I said to the guys at the time, I understand very little about music.  If someone were to say to me, “Did you hear how he went off-beat there during the second verse with his whammy bar to achieve a double sticcato?” I’d respond along the lines of, “You mean when he went, ‘Deet-der-der-deet-deet’ on the guitar-thingy?”  Similarly, if someone were to attempt to explain to me how the musical stylings of the Who can be traced back to obscure blues legend Crazy Legs Limburgh whose influence lives on in the melodic stylings of Lady Gag, I’d probably be thinking about what a profound influence the Monkeys had on the Beatles.  So, you might not learn much here.  You might think the music I discuss is crap.  You might find my discussion of it banal and tepid.  But, hopefully it connects with you on a more visceral level, on the way music interacts with our lives.  And, if not, it’ll be Nickelback posts from here on out.)

The other day, I was driving in the car when a promotion for a local concert came on the radio.  In the background of the advertisement I could hear I song I instantly recognized as familiar but could not remember its name or artist.  As the commercial progressed, they mentioned the name of the headlining act.  It was unfamiliar.  “I don’t think that’s the name of the band playing the song,” I thought.  They then noted that the headlining act was a Godsmack tribute band.  “That’s who it was!  Godsmack!” I thought.  “Wait… There are Godsmack tribute bands??? And they’re still touring?!?!?!”  Apparently, they are playing as part of Paganfest, a curiously named concert that I doubt holds much interest for me.

However, as I sat there, listening to the familiar angst of Godsmack and pondering a music festival apparently celebrating paganism, I started of thinking about other bands I listened to back when Godsmack was big, specifically those that seemed to have a curious relationship with faith and religion.  I then remembered Bad Religion, a group that got a good amount of airplay on my CD player during college and which might have been the first band I listened to that I had never heard on the radio.

So here’s some Bad Religion.

It’s funny how a few bars of a Godsmack song can take me back to my sophomore year dorm room.

Kazzy

One man. Two boys. Twelve kids.

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31 Comments

  1. I never listened to Godsmack, because their name was a ripped-off from an Alice in Chains song. I assumed they were an Alice in Chains clone. Whether I was missing a quality band or not, I have no idea.

    • I was never big into Godsmack (but I also never listened to very much). I, too, had heard that their name was from the AIC song, and that it was a tribute. I always preferred AIC.

      Bad Religion is quality stuff.

      • I liked Godsmack enough when they came out, but that was when the whole rock/rap thing was going on and I was the target demo. I can’t say that I’ve thought of this since they left the limelight, hence recognizing the song but being unable to place it. It seemed that every single one of their songs, at some point in time, included the lead singer yelling, “GO AWAY!”

        But I liked all the Bad Religion stuff I heard and should probably revisit them. I think I moved away from them primarily because I moved away from driving for a few years in college and that was the primary time I listened.

        • I moved away from driving for a few years in college

          I think you mispelled “D U I” 😉

  2. i like how bad religion is now four guidance counselors. (i mean that sincerely, they’ve aged pretty well)

      • Bad religion doesn’t hold a candle to the descendants

        • Entirely possible.

          Are they the ones that go “Deeter-deeter-deet-deet” or “Doo-doo-deeter-doot-doo”?

        • Descendents, Meatmen, DRI, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys…good times, good times.

          I have to say, I’d be more likely to listen to Descendents today than most of those others (though you gotta drag out the DK’s once in a while), so I probably must agree.

          • I can listen to so little punk these days, I can almost narrow it down by specific years in specific scenes, New York ’73-’76, English up til about ’79, L.A about ’78-’81. There are some exceptions, and in a lot of ways I am really moving toward the Nuggets era.
            Cleavland ’70-’76 has been heavy on my radar lately.
            Bad Religion just always sounds the same, which is the problem that I always had with hardcore. MDC, DRI, etc., cool when you’re 15-16, but get some nuance already.

  3. When I think of dorm room music I think of these (well, these and Bob Marley’s inescapable Legend):

    http://youtu.be/5HtUnubXAO4

    http://youtu.be/L7-zRWai5yY

    http://youtu.be/RTWSSCYUD4E

    http://youtu.be/bF15A7_yz80

    When I look at the dates, I see they all were out a little bit prior to my sophomore year, but this was pre-internet, so they probably took awhile to reach the backwater where we were.

    I still listen to the last two tracks on occasion, but I hadn’t heard the first two in years; I couldn’t even remember their names, had to play the tracks.

    • Fugazi, along with the Foo Fighters, are bands that I still knee-jerk associate with very different genres of music, because the Fugees were first in my consciousness among them and I tend to (stupidly) associate bands with similar sounding names. At this point, the Foo Fighers have largely overcome this, but I had to skip ahead on the Fugazi song to figure out whether I should be expecting rap/hip-hop/R&B or rock.

      It was rock.

    • I estimate that I listened to those last two approximately gazillion times in two years of dorm living.

      In fact, I think 13 Songs may have been the only CD my freshman-year roommate owned.

      • And in my first apartment after 2 years of dorm living, it was the album with this and this that my roommate played incessantly. That and Sublime. He really, really liked Sublime.

        • Did they ever find the body? I assume “no”, since you appear to have internet access.

          • There was a period when he and I, who were good friends it should be noted, would play “dueling stereos” because I would get really, really tired of listening to Nowell tell me that daddy had a new .45, so I’d blare the Kyuss CD that my brother had given me, and which my roommate absolutely hated. Ah, good times.

          • Who cares if they found the body? Are you not familiar with the concept of “justifiable homicide”?

        • I had a roommate frosh year who played mostly 90s rap. Which was cool. Except when he’d rewind a song 10 seconds to replay a particular lyric he liked.

          Sophomore year, it was Bruce, all day, everyday. Fortunately, he was in the bedroom next to mine and mostly used headphones, owing to his abject fear of the rest of us.
          Junior year was quiet.
          Senior year was Dropkick Murphys (before they got big), really hardcore punk, and DMX.

          • One of my roommates, who I loved to death (and still keep in touch with) would always get on kicks where it was just one band for him, all the time.

            Even if you LIKE the Police, or U2, or REM, or Radiohead (and I generally did, and do, just fine), it’s just not right to force your roommates to listen to the same band over and over. Drove the other two of us nuts.

            And good lord, when it was Pearl Jam or Spin Doctors or Michael Jackson or something else I DIDN’T like…GAAHHHH

          • If either of my roommates, at any point, had gone on a Spin Doctors kick, I would be in prison right now for sure.

            I worked really hard on my roommate’s musical tastes during my sophomore and junior year of college, and had some influence, but not enough. When I got a tiny little studio apartment all to myself my senior year, one of the best things about it was that the only music played in it was my music. And no one complained about me listening to Screenwriter’s Blues too much (if there are any Soul Coughing fans in these parts, Doughty, as a big fish you too the former bandmates whom he’s spent most of his post-SC career trashing, is rerecording a bunch of the Soul Coughing material, if you hadn’t heard).

          • I think the thing I disliked about Sublime the most wasn’t the music but the way people talked about them. They were the ultimate band for “Man, their first album was awesome, but then they sold out” talk. It was even worse than the common “They were good on Bleach, but they sold out with Nevermind.”

          • man sublime was just the worst.

            Lime was only slightly better.

          • I did not have a roommate in college. No, I was stupid, so I had a wife.

            Her idea of good music was Maroon 5, Three Doors Down, and the like.

            She is my ex-wife now. I will let you draw your own conclusions.

          • I browbeat my college roommate into enjoying They Might Be Giants. For which he is eternally grateful. I’m not sure he’s grateful enough to forgive me for the country music, though.

  4. I finally got around to getting a copy of Steven Wilson’s new album, The Raven That Refused to Sing. I recommend it very highly if you are into the sort of thing he does.

    Here is the title track: http://youtu.be/n8sLcvWG1M4

  5. Everybody owns music, not just the people who know all the words to use.

    This is an awesome post and I hope you post more of them.

    • Thanks!
      [plays celebratory air guitar grossly out of tune]

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