The greatest lyrics that Dave Grohl had ever heard: “Total insanity”
Dave Grohl was usually the last person to say that people needed to pay attention to his lyrics.
He was no Bob Dylan by any stretch, and since he was taking a lot of his lessons from what he had learned in Nirvana, it’s not like Kurt Cobain was known to be the most comprehensible vocalist of all time. All those songs were more about how the music made them feel at the end of the day, but Grohl knew that there were some true wordsmiths out there when he started forming the basis of Foo Fighters.
If we’re talking about the grunge canon alone, there are people like Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell who were already reaching for something a bit deeper than the average rock and roll song. They wanted to write stories or more cerebral takes on rock and roll, and Grohl figured that he could try his hand at writing and figure out what the tunes meant later when he made that first official Foo Fighters record.
But it’s not like he didn’t grow into a great songwriter later. ‘Friend of a Friend’ took years before it was ready to be recorded, but facing a body blow like losing Taylor Hawkins, a song like ‘Rescued’ from But Here We Are has some of the greatest kind of self-reflection that he has ever done in a song. Not all musicians have to suffer for their art, though, and the greatest punk bands Grohl had ever heard could get their point across by making the angriest music they could whenever the amplifiers got turned on.
The Clash were never trying to be the greatest musicians in the world, but Joe Strummer was the one forcing everyone to pay attention whenever talking about his political agenda. The same could be said for John Lydon writing odes to self-destruction and frustration, and for someone who had the DC hardcore scene happening in his backyard as he was growing up, Grohl was still ready to fly the flag of politics whenever he saw someone who aligned with his beliefs out in the wild.
Ian MacKaye was his hero in terms of personal politics, but Atari Teenage Riot had absolutely everything that he was looking for. There was no shortage of bands that were about making music sound as abrasive as possible in the 1990s, but you could feel the band’s vitriol towards fascism in just about everything they played, and Grohl was happy to go along for the ride when he heard the song ‘Sick to Death’.
He had dealt with fighting against oppression his entire life, and he was ready to stand behind everything they did when he heard them in the late 1990s, saying, “Anyone looking for the new punk should look no further. This has just about the greatest lyrics I’ve heard in years, total attitude, total commitment, total insanity. If I was 13, I’d dream about a band like ATR. I think they’re gonna be huge.”
The song isn’t exactly the cleanest recording ever made, and the vocals can be a little bit abrasive for someone who only thinks about punk in terms of Green Day, but you can definitely hear what Grohl sees in it. He was in love with the kind of dissonant punk bands that he toured with back in the days of Scream, and even if he was looking for a melody every time he wrote a song, it’s hard not to get an adrenaline rush and want to jump into a pit the minute that the tune starts.
Atari Teenage Riot wasn’t going to be the same kind of music that Grohl placed next to his Beatle records or anything, but there’s something about it that feels like home for any aspiring musician. Despite the whole thing sounding like it’s on the verge of chaos at every second, it does capture the spirit of playing music with your friends whenever that count-off starts.
