When thinking back on my how I first viewed pop music, I first listened to the quick catchy melodies and repetition of phrases and blindly allowed them to enter my auditory cortex without any filter of substance or honesty. This is why I know all the lyrics to “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Ice Ice Baby”, no matter how many brain cells I have strategically killed. I was fortunate though to have an older brother who guided me away from that into things much more controversial to my fragile mind. Bands like Tool, Megadeth, Pantera became all the rage in our shared bedroom, and while I consider them some of my favorite bands to this day, a part of me still yearned for the quick fix of a well written pop song, but with a bit more nutritional value.
And then MTV played “21st Century Digital Boy” a song about alienation and the effect of consumerism on the traditional nuclear family. I went out to the local music store that weekend and purchased “Stranger Than Fiction”, my first Bad Religion album. What happened after would forever change how I listened and judged music. Dr. Graffin and Mr. Brett had crafted an album of remarkable pop songs filled with intelligently constructed critiques of blind acceptance and conformity (Inner Logic) and the casually accepted contracts that govern our friendships (The Handshake) to the poignant comparison of disease, crippling addiction and physical affliction to a co-dependent relationship (Infected). And then you listen to the song that titles the album. A great song concept filled out with great lyrics, truth is stranger than fiction. The most imaginative writers in the world couldn’t write a story that would come close to touching the story of the homeless family down the street “eating crackers like thanksgiving”, or the absurdity of comparing good and evil by how much you can fit in one place (How many angels can you fit on a match?).
This sounds like pretty heavy stuff for a pop album, but therein lays the rub. Punk music as a genre is very similar to the blues in the regards that anyone can pick up a guitar learn three chords and say they can play it. This is true, but only a select few can revel in the constraints, creating benchmarks while defining a genre. Bad Religion can pack a song full of the heaviest lyrical contents, and grab anyone’s attention by smothering it in melodic hook after hook, connected by a beautifully layered harmonies comprised mostly of ooh’s and ahh’s. They are masters of stripping a pop song down to its beautiful exposed skeleton.
R.R.
