Greatest Songs: #20

Pursuant to Yesterday's entry, Here's the first song on my list of the 20 greatest from my lifetime and my collection:

The Exploited - "Race Against Time" (1984) (From Don't Forget the Chaos)

Mid-80's offering from one of several loud, laddish mohawk bands of that era, most of which I've never bothered with. The Exploited, best known for squeezing a whole song out of three words ("Sex and Violence"), squeezed a ferocious, nightmareish groove onto this particular track, rendering it heavy and fast without descending into the unlistenably distorted, brutal wankery for which so many hardcore bands are justly derided. It's the perfect kind of song to get you going in the morning when you'd really rather not, and to keep you awake when you're zipping up the NJ Turnpike at 9 pm on a Friday, trying to make the city before the evening is all gone.


Some might complain that you can't understand the lyrics, which is true, but which is also irrelevant. I'm not going to pick songs for a deftly-rendered bon mot snuck in at the end of a stanza. 90% of pop lyrics are banal, 5% are unintelligible, and 4% are so esoteric as to contain no meaning worth exploring. Sure that remaining 1% are great, but to me, they're an occasional bonus, not a criterion. So Wattie's shouting about some Race Against Time, and lacks the consonants to make anything else clearer. So what? The song itself is racing, letting up only at its abrupt end. Racing in the song, racing in the lyrics. What else do you need?