10 classic rock songs made as an act of revenge
Most great songs come from a place of intense emotion. Even though some songwriters could write tunes about mundanities like their breakfast choices, other artists can only manufacture the perfect melody when they sing what’s in their hearts. Sometimes it might be heartfelt, but artists like Oasis and Alanis Morissette occasionally made tracks that were written out of spite.
Regardless of where they came from, each track features a narrator who has been done wrong by someone in the past. One example is a figure who has left their heart in a million pieces, while another caused reputation damage and an ego bruise. Instead of confronting their nemesis directly, each track is a revenge letter, written as a petty way to get back at their rival.
It’s also important to remember some of the subjects behind these diss tracks have real names, and each of them wouldn’t take kindly to their reputations being dragged through the mud every time they were played on the radio.
Luckily, each artist was able to make amends with their musical targets (supposedly) and preferred to leave their anger in the performance instead of using it to lash out. Every time they play the tracks live, though, these musicians inhabit the same emotions they felt the moment they were done wrong.
10 classic rock songs made as an act of revenge
‘2112’ – Rush
From the start, Rush were not a band for everybody. For all of the great music they could make together, fans might not have been looking for tracks that had multiple time signature changes and inspired tales of fantasy. Some of those naysayers happened to work at Rush’s label, and their decision to make ‘2112’ was a bit of a troll on the part of the group.
Throughout Rush’s first few releases, the label had always been pushing them to make more commercial material, which they loathed. Instead of handing in what the label thought was a hit record, Rush made a 20-minute opening track with a story about being put down by authorities who weren’t letting them stray from the norm. In essence, Rush wrote a track as a middle finger to their label and completely got away with it.
While the label might not have liked seeing themselves being compared to the High Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, the fans connected with the story. As a way to stand up for the underdogs, the cult following for Rush began on this album, carrying them through their prog years up until their major commercial success in the ‘80s with albums like Moving Pictures. It just goes to show how much an artist can do when they don’t do what they’re told.
‘Back to School’ – Deftones
As Deftones began making the album White Pony, they started to get really jaded about the nu-metal wave. Although acts like Limp Bizkit may have sold a bunch of records, the atmospheric sound of Deftones didn’t really resonate the same way as anthems about celebrating one’s own machismo. Every label in the late 1990s wanted their own Limp Bizkit, though, and Chino Moreno put all of his frustration into song.
After handing in the finished album to their label, some of Deftones’ A&R team thought they didn’t have a hit to tie the whole track list together. Thinking that they didn’t know what they were talking about, Moreno decided to mess with his bosses by making a throwaway tune that was just the final track, ‘Pink Maggit’, if a nu-metal band had gotten their hands on it. It might have been a funny joke, but it quickly went over everyone’s heads.
Instead of laughing at it, the label was ecstatic and pushed it out as a new single, even making a music video for ‘Back to School’ in the same vein as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The version of White Pony that exists today doesn’t even allow fans to hear a version of the record without the corporate single that the label wanted.
‘You Oughta Know’ – Alanis Morissette
Heartbreak is a topic which bleeds into every genre. Everyone falls in and out of love, and there are going to be those few people wanting payback for the heartache they felt. Alanis Morissette was no different, but her version of getting back at her boyfriend was to write the most horrifying revenge story ever told.
After having a falling out with Dave Coulier from Full House, Morissette was out for blood on the single ‘You Oughta Know’. Instead of lashing out from the first word, Morissette plays it cool, calm and collected, waiting for the chorus to strike. As the story unfolds, fans get the gory details of their sexual exploits as well as Morissette throwing in subtle jabs at the woman who’s taking her place.
The backing musicians, Flea and Dave Navarro from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, give the track some teeth, almost doing the dirty work before Morissette can go off. There’s no telling what Coulier did to provoke Morissette to lash out like this, but if any other person has cut things off with a songwriter, run while there’s still time before a tune like this is written.
‘Mechanix’ – Megadeth
The story behind Dave Mustaine’s expulsion from Metallica has been well-documented. After spending most of their time in a UHaul trailer to the other side of the US, Mustaine overstayed his welcome at friends’ houses and drank his way out of the group. Mustaine was given a bus ticket back home the minute he arrived, leaving him to stir in anger for those long hours.
Shortly after getting back home, Mustaine formed Megadeth as a way to get back at Metallica for kicking him out. That didn’t stop Metallica from using some of Mustaine’s material, co-opting his licks for classics like ‘The Four Horsemen’ and ‘Jump In the Fire’ off their debut album Kill Em All. Then again, since they were Mustaine’s riffs, he could use them too.
On Megadeth’s debut album, Mustaine re-wrote ‘The Four Horsemen’ into ‘Mechanix’, playing the same song note for note with different lyrics. Almost as a way to one-up his competition, Mustaine also kicked up the tempo, making the whole thing sound twice as fast as the Metallica original. Whereas most other artists would just write a diss track, Mustaine was ready for war and was going to use Metallica’s first tracks as his weapons.
‘Street Fighting Man’ – Oasis
The Gallagher brothers never denied being indebted to the world of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, all while having a punk attitude behind their delivery. The worship may have been put on a little thick, but their predecessors didn’t exactly feel the same about them.
During the promotion cycle for Be Here Now, Oasis were shown the beginnings of a documentary covering their early years. At the beginning of the clip, The Rolling Stones were asked what they thought of them, to which Keith Richards replied that the Manchester group were nothing compared to The Stones. Seething with anger, Liam’s first move was to challenge his heroes to scrap live on the radio, but Noel had a different idea in mind. Since the B-sides sessions for Be Here Now weren’t finished yet, Noel went in to make tracks for ‘All Around the World’ and threw on a cover of ‘Street Fighting Man’ to anger Richards.
‘Idiot Wind’ – Bob Dylan
After going through a lengthy breakup with his first wife, Sara, Dylan was struggling during the process of making Blood On The Tracks as he tried to figure himself out. Although he might like to weigh his options up o every one of his stories, ‘Idiot Wind’ is the one song where Dylan lets himself be the jaded ex.
Sprawling across nine minutes, this track is practically Dylan venting poetically about all of the tough issues that he had with his lover. From the lies that she tells her friends after the breakup to how broken he’s felt in her hands for years. The real kicker comes in the chorus, where Dylan wonders if his old flame still remembers how to breathe because of how much turmoil she caused him.
Dylan wasn’t going to take the wrap for the entire breakup, but he seems to come to his senses towards the end of the song. Instead of spending time laying into her, Dylan assesses the situation and realises that they are both at fault, each an idiot in their own unique way. This might not have been the closure that Dylan was looking for, but this kind of conclusion is the closest he could get to airing both sides of the story.
‘Sweet Emotion’ – Aerosmith
For as close as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry came across onstage, it didn’t tell the whole story. As much as they might have made iconic tracks for Aerosmith like ‘Walk This Way’, Tyler and Perry were always at war with each other, debating over what should be brought up in the mix or Tyler wailing at Perry to turn his amps down. If there was one thing that put a wedge between them in Tyler’s mind, though, it would have to be Perry’s wife, Elyssa.
In the early days of ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’, Tyler talked about wanting to be one collective unit that paid their dues together, which didn’t sit well with Perry. Oftentimes, Perry would find himself hanging out with his girlfriend away from the group, which drove Tyler up the wall. Confrontation wasn’t an issue, but Tyler figured the next best thing was to immortalise Elyssa in a song to make her get the picture.
Although ‘Sweet Emotion’ relies on its psychedelic sound most of the track, Tyler’s verses are all about the little things that annoy him about Elyssa. If this tune is any indication, Aerosmith’s backstage meetings may as well have been a soap opera.
‘Go Your Own Way’ – Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was an album infamously fuelled by revenge. Although each couple in the group were going through their own struggles, the songwriters documented their pain in each track, making tunes that were used as emotional documents rather than compositions. While most took the dignified approach in their lyrics, Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t willing to hold back on ‘Go Your Own Way’.
After a fairly nasty breakup with Stevie Nicks, Buckingham penned this tune about his trust issues with her. Despite Nicks letting him off easy with her track, ‘Dreams’, Buckingham paints himself as the victim in this scenario, willing to give the world to his old flame but her refusing to take it every single time. In essence, the title of the track may as well be the phrase ‘well fuck you too’ written in big block letters on the track listing.
The especially cutting line happens towards the end of the second verse, where Buckingham claims that shacking up with other men is all Nicks really wants to do, which greatly hurt his bandmate.
‘Life on Mars?’ – David Bowie
Contrary to popular belief, there was a time when David Bowie was an average person. Before ‘Major Tom’ crash-landed on the planet, Bowie was making humble folk tracks that were centred around the psychedelic movement of the ‘60s. During his many months of poverty, though, he made his living as a songwriter until Frank Sinatra got involved.
One of Bowie’s many menial pre-fame jobs was writing lyrics to melodies in other languages to then turn into English hits. Of the many tracks was a track that Bowie would eventually turn into ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love’. Though Bowie admitted that the lyric was dreadful, he was gutted when he was shot down by the company that wanted to use it. Then out of the blue, Bowie heard his tune on the radio, except it had been changed to Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, with Paul Anka writing different words and gifting it to ‘Ol Blue Eyes’.
Bowie held onto that anger for a little while, waiting for just the right moment to get his revenge. By the time he was bending gender and genre, Bowie nicked the chords from ‘My Way’ and reshaped it into ‘Life on Mars?’, telling the story of a man feeling out of time and wondering if there’s a place where he fits in that’s outside of his current planet. Although Bowie was always his own artist, he did know how to repay the lift…with a cheeky ‘For Frankie’ listed on the back cover of the album Hunky Dory.
‘How Do You Sleep?’ – John Lennon
The end of The Beatles was incredibly ugly. After the business ventures at Apple Corps went sour, most of the ‘Fab Four’ went in separate directions, with Paul McCartney getting tied up in lawsuits against his former bandmates. McCartney needed to blow off steam in his solo career, but John Lennon wasn’t that happy with what he heard on his writing partner’s album, RAM.
On the opening track ‘Too Many People’, Macca wrote about people that were preaching practices, which Lennon took as an attack on his and Yoko Ono’s peaceful protests. Since ‘The Cute One’ cast the first stone, ‘The Intellectual One’ was about to strike back with something more pointed on his next album. Although Imagine is fairly mellow from back to front, ‘How Do You Sleep’ is one long diss track towards Lennon’s former partner, thinking that everything McCartney ever did was write ‘Yesterday’.
The writing sessions apparently got so bad that Ringo Starr, who drummed on the track, had to play the moderator and told Lennon not to be so harsh on his old friend. While Lennon and McCartney would make amends and even rekindle their friendship before Lennon’s passing in 1980, this was an indicator of just far they had drifted apart over those few months.
