Anger is an Energy

Eleven songs about rage and frustration:

1. Killing Joke: Struggle
Jaz Coleman has been pissed off longer than a lot of people have been alive. Killing Joke was one of the original, great postpunk bands of the early 80s -- and they're still making ferociously effective music today. This particular slice of sunshine comes from their 1990 comeback Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions - which is tough to beat as an album title - and despite being about as powerhouse an adrenaline-pumper as I've ever heard, and despite the apocalyptic tone of the lyrics and Geordie's vicious, obtuse chording and Martin Atkins' relentless drumming... the song actually transforms rage and frustration into something empowering.

2. Drown: Beautiful
There's a unique form of anger that comes with betrayal -- an implacable, white-hot rage that burns through everything you ever thought of as pure and beautiful and leaves it smouldering, blackened, ruined beyond repair. Few bands ever captured that experience more fully than Drown... and this song is about as angry as it gets.

3. Whipping Boy: We Don't Need Nobody Else
When a relationship is poisoned on both ends, the results can spill over into jealousy, rage... and violence. A truly disturbing song from a brilliant and largely forgotten band.

4. American Music Club: Wish The World Away
There's a thin line between frustration and desperation. Predictably, it's territory that Eitzel knows intimately. The fact that it's probably the rockin'est song AMC ever produced doesn't hurt, either.

5. Jawbreaker: Accident Prone
Back in the old school days of the mid/late 90s, before "emo" became a dirty word, Blake Schwarzenbach produced some of the most astonishingly thoughtful, literate and powerful music in the sad and strange world of "alternative rock." When Dear You was released, it was decried as a major label sellout by the vast majority of self-righteous indie kids, and Jawbreaker died a sad death shortly thereafter (although Schwartzenbach went on to make some interesting music with Jets to Brazil). But they left behind this gem of an album, which offers a handful of tremendous songs -- including "Accident Prone," which uses a car accident as an especially apt metaphor for the emotional damage of a relationship falling apart. "What's the closest you can come" Schwarzenbach asks, "to an almost total wreck, and still walk away... all limbs intact?"

The Walken sound sample near the end pushes it completely over the top. I can't get enough of this song.

6. Joy Division: Twenty Four Hours
When the rage turns inward... bad things happen. Ian Curtis is the patron saint of this truth. And while "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "She's Lost Control" are more well-known, I've always felt that this song crystallized the Joy Division experience better than any other: the intractable feeling of knowing that happiness isn't terribly far away... paralleled with the knowledge that it will always be just beyond your reach.

Just for one moment
I thought I'd found my way
Destiny unfolded
I watched it slip away...

You hear the way Curtis' voice cracks near the end of the line, and then the band suddenly surges forward in rage and sadness... and the knowledge of how the Curtis story ends suddenly seems too obvious, too appropriate, too clearly the only way this story would ever end.

7. Rites of Spring: Drink Deep
As someone noted recently (upon getting his AARP card), Dylan Thomas once suggested that we "Not go gentle into that good night" but instead "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Joseph Heller reiterated the idea in Catch-22 with Snowden's shattering secret: "Freshness was all." That same idea - the fundamental existentialist concept that what we have, see and experience every day is all that there ultimately is, so make the most of it - is at the heart of Rites of Spring's brilliant "Drink Deep." Guy Piccioto later went on to bigger and (arguably) better things with Fugazi... but he captured something energized and terrified and wondrous here.

8. Rollins Band: Just Like You
10:56 of Rollins doing anger, just the way you like it. I met Rollins once at an album signing in a tiny record shop in Dublin (Ireland, not East Bay), right after The End of Silence came out. When I handed him my newly-purchased cassette (this was 1991), he wrote, "Play loud. Rollins." When I told him that playing it loud was exactly what I'd intended to do, he told me, "It sounds better that way." As always, Rollins was right. It saddens me now to think that there's a whole generation that only knows him from goofy cable shows or one very (intentionally) funny video and song... and that has no real idea of what he represents. Get In The Van should be required reading.

The scream at the end of this song tells you everything you need to know. Screamo kids... this is what real anger sounds like.

9. Afghan Whigs: Debonair
Remember these guys? America's spiritual cousins to Whipping Boy... Greg Dulli knew (and still knows) how to make your skin crawl like no one else. The only thing he hates more than the entire world and everything in it is himself -- and God love him, he doesn't blink once as he details exactly what's going through his head. It was a tossup between this and "My Curse," an incredible song in which Marcy Mays from Scrawl takes Dulli's words and self-loathing to really incredible places... but I decided to go with the song that brings me back to a strange and wondrous time I like to call 1993-94.

10. Kill Hannah: The Songs That Saved My Life
Because, deep in our hearts, there's a place where we're all angry, misunderstood 16-year olds. And the angry, misunderstood 16-year old in me sounds a lot like this.

11. Scud Mountain Boys: Grudge Fuck
Partially because it's a phenomenal title for a song... partially because it's a phenomenal song, period. Joe Pernice recently rerecorded this on the Pernice Bros. Live A Little -- but I prefer the original in all its bitter, lovely desperation.

Anger isn't always loud, or fast. Sometimes it's slow and... uh... pernicious. (Look it up! It works!) And while this kind of rage might go down sweet and easy, it's the bitter aftertaste that really makes it memorable.

Comments

[jonniker]

You know, the more I think about it, the more I dislike Ian Curtis. I honestly don't think he ever had any intention of being happy, given his fascination with misery and death. People like that make me very angry (how ironic!)

Also, I haven't thought about the Afghan Whigs since 1994. Wow.

[TwoBusy]

The ironic thing about your comment lies in the fact that when I went to a Whigs concert waaaay back in the day, as they were starting "Debonair" Dulli prefaced the first time change by screaming, "New Order rules!"

I think they played a cover of "Blue Monday" later on in the show.

[Mr. Big Dubya]

May the road rise with you.

Always been a big fan of Killing Joke.

I've never really had a need for angry music - I've always been so happy listening to Depeche Mode, The Cure, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy - all upbeat, up-tempo stuff.

[TwoBusy]

Bingo! For correctly identifying the source of this post title, Big Dub wins a 50" Panasonic Plas... oh, wait. He already has one. Never mind.

Glad to hear you're a charter member of the "A Life Less Lived" club. Can I presume you have the Projekt website bookmarked?

[The Velvet Blog]

OK, "that's not funny but it's a joke" is bugging me--what's that from? I'd swear it's from something on my iPod...

[The Velvet Blog]

Oh, wait--American Music Club?

[TwoBusy]

Song #4 on this post, in fact.

[The Velvet Blog]

Aha! I didn't go through all the links yet.

I just listened to that album last week.

[claire]

Oh, i love Rollins.. He's so self-deprecating, which i always find terribly charming - which probably says something sad about me, but you know. We were actually watching one of his spoken-word dvds the other night.. i love listening to him talk and have been meaning to read the book. i'm pretty sure its in the house somewhere.

[TwoBusy]

I went to a Rollins spoken word performance a few hours after the album signing -- it was incredible. He spoke for what must have been a solid 2-2.5 hours, telling hysterical stories about his family and his insane hatred of U2 and his love for Thin Lizzy (this was in Dublin, remember, so there was a reason for all the Irish music references) and then he finally started talking about his best friend Joe, and all these crazy things they did together, and then one of his stories - which, again, was hysterically funny - turned into the story of his best friend Joe getting shot to death while Rollins was standing literally 3 feet away.

If you want to take a big room full of drunken young Irishmen (and American students) from rollicking laughter to stunned, hear-a-pin-drop silence in the space of three minutes... that's the way to do it.

[claire]

I believe it. We have a couple of his spoken word cds and his stories are always amazing. The ones from his Black Flag days are usually a lot like the one about Joe. I vaguely remember one about someone falling off a cliff to his death.
It was hysterical up until the end where the audience at the recorded show is completely silent. Must be great live.