October 22nd, 2007
17. Operation Ivy, "Officer"
In 1987, a Maximum RocknRoll compilation introduced the first two songs ever recorded by the young Bay Area band Operation Ivy. Op Ivy went on to become a ska-punk legend—as well as launching the far more successful Rancid—and those early tracks still pack an uppercut. But "Officer" is more than just some punk-rock temper tantrum; besides screaming against the strong-arm excesses and psychological shortcomings of certain members of the law enforcement community, singer Jesse Michaels ends the song on an up note: "Tough guy asshole, do what you can / Whatever you destroy, we'll create again."
A student film set to Officer
18. Killdozer, "The Pig Was Cool"
Leave it to the crudely perverse band Killdozer to write a song about a relatively nice cop—even if "The Pig Was Cool" drips with sarcasm and menace. "Jammin' the Foghat on my eight-track / with a case of malt liquor and a bong in back," growls Michael Gerald through a mudslide of rotted distortion. "From out of nowhere came the man in blue / I thought we were busted, but the pig was cool." Turns out Gerald and the merciful officer went to school together—and later in the song, a different simpatico policeman even shares a joint with him. Cue the Bad Lieutenant montage.
19. Charley Patton, "Tom Rushen"
Early Delta bluesman Charley Patton was, as R. Crumb described him, "a rambler, a shiftless no-good who lived off women and passed his time in total idleness." So it's not surprising that over and over in his songs, he talks about encounters with the law, and especially repeated variations on a theme of the Prohibition-era cops coming to either take Patton's illegal liquor away or toss him in the clink for public drunkenness. (See: "High Sheriff Blues," "Revenue Man Blues," "Whiskey Distillery," etc.) A lot of these songs mention specific details from Patton's life—the title character of "Tom Rushen" was the sheriff of Marigold, Mississippi—but they tend to follow the same basic pattern: Patton's just trying to ease his worried mind with a little liquor ("It's boozy booze, now, Lord, to cure these blues"), but the white police force clamps down hard on him, often brutally ("If they see you with a bottle, they will almost break your neck"). It's not hard to imagine that Patton would have an instant sympathy with a lot of the gangsta rap created nearly a century after his heyday.
20. Leonard Bernstein And Stephen Sondheim, "Gee, Officer Krupke"
After being chewed out by Officer Krupke for wanton criminal acts (loitering), street toughs The Jets retaliate by singing an upbeat, scathing retaliation for their way of life—after he leaves. They blame society and their upbringing for becoming juvenile delinquents, from the plausible unwanted child of pot-smoking parents to the impossibly fucked-up product of a house fraught with domestic abuse, a communist grandfather, cross-dressing siblings, and a grandmother who "pushes tea." The Jets can point fingers all they want, but it's a safe bet fewer of them and their rival gang, The Sharks, would have died in a knife fight—no matter how elegantly choreographed it may be—had Officer Krupke been around to intervene.
Those were simpler times… Or were they?
21. Isaac Hayes "Theme From Shaft"
Though it's nearly three minutes into the song before the first line of lyrics is delivered, that build-up and the opening stanza sum up Shaft perfectly: "Who's the black private dick / That's a sex machine to all the chicks?" Why, that'd be Shaft, of course. There isn't much need for lyrics, though, as the effortless cool of Shaft is conveyed perfectly via the now-famous ocean of wah, tambourine, and slick orchestral strings. As a cop, Shaft is a man of action—which always speak louder than words—but as the song unfolds, he's seen either intensely wandering with purpose or just lost in Harlem before arriving at a decidedly non-badass destination: a shoe shine parlor.
Slow-motion Isaac in the studio
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3
- Comments