Anger. It's everyones
guilty pleasure of an emotion. We all love being angry sometimes. Crikey why is
everyone doing things wrong but I’m doing everything right?! So this week I’m
listing the 10 angriest songs in music. I am aware that the majority of
Screamo, Death Metal, Hardcore, Post-Hardcore, Metalcore, Grindcore, and even
the Earth’s Core can be rather on the temper tantrum side; so to make sure this
top 10 covers all of the genres of the music kaleidoscope, I’ve in fact generally
over looked a lot of those particular genres of music. I’m contradicting myself already with that
last statement and it’s only the first bloody paragraph, what am I going to do
next, expose myself as a closet racist and demand a recount of the 2012 US
Presidential election even though Obama clearly won by a country mile? Nah I’m not
Donald Duck Trump. I mean he is a Golf Course building, Scottish Landscape
ruining, comb-over virtuoso tee-total pervert. He is also very rich and a lot
more successful than I’ll ever be. But yet I’m still somehow very glad that I
am not him.
10) Nirvana:
Scentless Apprentice
Ok you have to set the scene for this song first. Based on
one of Cobain’s favourite books, Perfume:
The Story of a Murderer, its about a dude who had no scent but had
incredible smell, and after being marginalised for his freakish nature, becomes
a ‘scent apprentice’ (what next scent police) and becomes murderous,
revengeful, etc, etc. Cobain liked the novel and apparently saw a bit of
himself in the isolated lad, and what resulted was Cobain writing an incredibly
aggressive song where he repeatedly screams incredibly loudly each chorus
“ahhhhhhh… Go Away. Go Away”, very, very loud. It ties in very well with the
mood and direction of In Utero, where
Cobain was sick of the commercialisation of Nirvana and wanted to make an
un-commercial record as possible, and Scentless
Apprentice appears to be the song from the album where he lets his
screaming frustration out the most.
9) Neil Young (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young):
Ohio
Yeh here’s the first protest-against-authority song. Get
used to it bitch. There’s plenty more where that came from. If you’re not
pissed off about getting dumped or cheated on your next port of call in the
angry song racket is against ‘the system, man’. Luckily this is an absolute
blinder of a tune. In response to the killings of four students at Kent State
University protesting the Vietnam War by the Ohio National Guard, Neil Young
decided to take stock of the situation and write a gripping and powerful tune
all about the injustice of their deaths and the war itself, and Young’s band
mate David Crosby’s screams of “why” at the end of the song are so powerful it
sends chills down your spine, the anger and grief clear throughout the song.
The song really soaks in the anti-Vietnam feeling at the time, and the naming
of Nixon in the song, and the “tin soldiers” of the Ohio National Guard was a
strong move at the time, and is one of the most profound and powerful political
protest songs of all time.
8) M.O.P:
Cold As Ice
Hmmm. From Neil Young to M.O.P. Didn’t think they would ever be mentioned in the same sentence. But blimey these guys were angry. No-one has ever really
understood at why or for whom they had such a distinct rage for. They were
never famous enough for anyone to care. But this song throughout is a manifesto
of violent and aggressive rage, delivered in a ferocious manner over Foreigner’s
Cold As Ice, and often rather bluntly
informs the listener that they should not be messed with as they are rather
verse at fighting people, that they own weaponry which may hurt and kill potential
challengers, and are rather good at the old Rap game, even managing to perform
“Lyrical heatwaves that’ll keep your brain warm”. Highlights include the lyrics
“When deliverin these M.O.P. tactics, I’ll bury you bastards I custom make
caskets”, “You gon’ fuck around and get blast”, and also complains that the
music public believed that their name stood for “mop” rather than “Mash Out
Posse”. I’ll remember that next time; I don’t want to be left in a casket by
Mop. I mean Mash Out Posse.
7) Queen:
Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)
This song from A Night
At the Opera is a furious alleged tirade at Queen’s ex-manager Norman
Sheffield, who is believed to have abused his role and mistreated the band
whilst their manager. It never made a direct reference to Sheffield but it was
enough for him to sue the band. Freddie was clearly rather pissed off and
bitter about their past manager, and rather than opting for the imaginative and
still baffling lyrical imagery used in Bohemiam
Rhapsody, instead goes for the blunt approach of telling Sheffield exactly
what he thought of him, with lines such as “do you feel like suicide (I think
you should)”, declaring him “a dog with a disease”, and is “a sewer rat
decaying in a cesspool of pride”. At the end of the song Mercury makes it clear
that if Sheffield became unemployed and “null and void” it would make him
“happy”. It is probably one of the best ‘fuck you’ songs ever written, as most
other such songs don’t include a Brian May guitar solo.
6) Eamon:
(Fuck It) I Don’t Want You Back
Shakespeare V Eamon. Who’s the best? Let’s see. One is a
playwriting genius who wrote 37 plays, the other has the Guinness World Record
for the most swear words in one song with 33. One wrote beautiful Sonnets about
the wonders of falling in love, the other about how his girlfriend “even gave
me head”. One followed King Lear up with Macbeth. The other followed up his
breakthrough single with ‘I Love Them Ho's (Ho-Wop)’. Hmmm I think Shakespeare
just about wins. Eamon did manage to make a lot of money from a song of which
half the lyrics are bleeped out, which is an achievement in itself. He’s now a male
prostitute.
5) N.W.A:
Fuck Tha Police
The Cops. It’s a classic innocence to experience paradox.
When you’re young you think they’re the good guys. They’ll keep you safe.
They’re heroic. When you grow up however you realise they are corrupt, violent,
majorly abusive of their own power, and unfortunately at times racist. This is
the ultimate attack on la policia (sounds so much better in Spanish), openly
attacking the police in America for deliberately discriminating against Black
people in America, and even advocates violence towards the Po, “A sucka in a
uniform waitin' to get shot/by me”, and “I'm a sniper with a hell of a scope/Takin
out a cop or two, they can't cope with me”. I don’t advocate violence towards
anyone. But what I do advocate is listening to N.W.A. One of the finest Hip Hop
groups of all time.
4) Eminem:
Kim
There are a few contenders by Eminem that could be included
in this list, such as Cleaning Out My
Closet and The Way I am. But this
one is an absolute blood bath. It’s a bit like one of those voice messages that
Mel Gibson would leave his girlfriend when he’s pissed off, then regret it the
next day when someone hands the recording to the press. Eminem, as he does have
a record deal, decided to record and release his intense anger towards
ex-girlfriend Kim as a song, and went way too far in his anger and hatred
towards the mother of his child, spewing out a fantasy of where he murders her,
going especially graphic by slitting her throat and saying “Bleed, bitch!
Bleed!” He’s clearly not too happy with his ex-spouse, its just a shame he had
to release such a hate-filled graphic description of how he would murder her,
rather than just blank her in the post-office. They later got re-married.
Wonder if that song was played for the first dance.
3) 2Pac:
Hit Em’ Up
When he wanted to be, 2Pac was an intelligent poet, a clever
commentator on living a life of poverty, the hardships women face in society,
the absurd nature of fame, and what spirituality meant to him. However, he could occasionally
also be a sophomoric thug who just spouted pure vile. This song is
unfortunately one of the latter, fuelling the East V West Coast, Biggie Smalls
V 2Pac Hip Hop Rivalry of the mid-1990’s, at first many seeing as a gimmick of
the record bosses, but unfortunately eventually spiralling out of control and leading
both being shot to death. The song is pure hatred, the hate being directed
specifically towards Biggie Smalls, bragging about how he’s fucked his wife,
how he deserves to die, and how he copies his style, and also other rappers
2Pac has decided are in alliance with the ‘East Side’, going as far as making
fun about the fact that Prodigy from Mobb Deep has sickle-cell anemia. Give me Dear Mama or Ghetto Gospel over this any day.
2) Sex Pistols:
God Save the Queen
The effect this song had and the legacy it created means it is likely to
always go down as the ultimate protest song. At a time of nationwide patriotic feeling and celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in 1977, Johnny Rotten's lyrics represented the anger and pain that the working class people in Britain had felt for so long, anger and pain that had been supressed so greatly in the media. This song exposed the fury and frustration with ranting
about how there is “no future” for the working-class in Britain, and equating the Queen’s reign as a
“fascist regime.” It got zero radio airplay as it was banned by the BBC and the
Independent Broadcasting Authority, yet still managed to get to number two in the
charts… many believe it actually got to number one, but the BBC deliberately
rigged the charts so it could never be number one as it would cause too much
offense. Whether it was a symbol or representation of the Punk Movement or not is up for debate, however no one can deny
its success in sending a powerful message of the frustration and disgruntlement of
the working class within British society, and a shivering effect of which no
protest song before or since has ever had.
1) Rage Against the Machine:
Killing in the Name
Don’t roll your eyes. Of course it was going to be number
one on this list. The 2009 UK Christmas number one (thank you anti-Cowell/real
music fan power) is pure rage, and repeatedly shouting Fuck You I won’t do what you tell me 16 times at the end of a song
probably means you're slightly unhappy, and this case in particular with ‘the
system’. It’s the song that’s always covered by long-haired teenagers at end of
year school assemblies or proms, and they always have to change the swear word
to something embarrassing like “no way I won’t do what you tell me” or “shut up
I won’t do what you tell me” or “Why how dare you, I won’t do what you tell
me”. As a song it’s the most cherished
anti-establishment song that will ever exist. The song, which contains few lyrics,
cleverly captures the anger that the band feel about the way that America is being run, and
everything about it is amazing; whether it be the opening Bassline and Drop D
guitar, the cymbal solo going on while Zach Da La Roche is saying “Fuck you I
wont do what you tell me”, or Tom Morello’s, (who is an incredible guitarist)
solo 2/3rds of the way through the song. This epitomises the angry song. It
universally means a lot to Rock music fans. It also means that forever in the
history of popular music, songs like Cliff Richards Mistletoe and Wine and Bing Crosby’s White Christmas will stand hand-in-hand with all the other
Christmas numbers that your Nan enjoys, an anti-establishment song that uses
the word ‘fuck’ more times than when Vanilla Ice came to the realisation that
his whole career has been a joke, being a Christmas classic of the past.
