Happy Music Makes Me Angry

...and angry music makes me happy

Jul 15, 2023

I hate happy music. Happy music does not make me happy. I don’t want some happy-ass happy-go-lucky happy guy (it’s almost always a guy) trying to make me happy with his happy music.

I know, there’s no point in putting negative energy into things that I prefer to avoid. Hate’s a strong word, and really, “hate” implies that I’m actively hating, when really, I can’t be bothered.

I don’t hate much at all, unless it happens to come up, which it does when it comes to happy music. I hate that shit.

Happy music is all major keys, or chords or whatever the technical term is. It’s light and fluffy and bouncy and airy and bright. It’s got humming and whistling and Caribbean drums and nursery rhymes for lyrics. Happy music is too easy. It’s sweet….like cotton candy, soda pop, and cheap chocolate bars. Filler. Kids stuff.

I want fuel. Going to Graceland? Not a fucking chance. I can name that tune in less than a second, and before that even happens, my hand darts out to slap the off switch. Not having it, no thanks, no way. The thing is, I’m actually pretty fucking happy, I really am. I’m overjoyed, really, most of the time these days (not that it’s really possible to be over-joyed, now, is it?). Even so, that doesn’t make me want to listen to happy music.

One thing I’ve heard from every other writer that I known is show, don’t tell—and although I’m sure I’m guilty myself of telling more than I’d like to—and all rules are made to be ignored—it feels to me that happy music is trying too hard to tell me something instead of just showing me. Of course, there’s other bad music out there, but what I’m getting around to saying here is that happy music is objectively bad music.

There’s no big secret to what makes music actually good. What makes music good is making me feel something. I don’t need some singer-songwriter to soothe my achy-breaky heart. I want passion, lust, and heat. I want that anger. I wanna beat the drums so hard they break. I want the guitar-god’s fingers to bleed. I want to hear the singer’s heart coming out her throat.

Most of all what I want and get from music is energy.

Happy music doesn’t make me want to dance—it makes me sick to the stomach. Happy music does make me angry, but not angry enough. Mostly it just makes me… disgusted. My shoulders get tense, my ears get hot, my face screws up into a scowl—and I hit that fast-forward button as fast as I can reach it.

I do not, ever again, want to hear how fucking Starship “built this city” on “rock and roll”—and DO NOT try to play me that fucking Pumped Up Kicks song. I fucking HATE that song more than almost anything else I’ve ever heard—although, as you may or may not know, it’s actually not a happy song at all. Apparently it’s about getting “inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid,” a kid with a gun, a kid who might be on his way to shoot up a school—or himself. The thing is, the song sounds like a fucking jingle—and, it turns out that the guy who wrote it, wrote it while he was working as—you guessed it—a “commercial jingle writer.” Jesus Christ. A fucking jingle writer just should not be allowed to write music. I mean, he can do whatever he wants, and the song was a fucking hit, but that guy, whoever he is, is off my list forever. He’s not getting in my ears after making the single, top, most absolutely worst happy song produced in recent years. I just hate how it sounds. Fuck that song.

Ever been to a punk show at a small club, or a real rock concert? For a Frisco kid like me, the places I remember best are the Farm, where I saw punk bands like Black Flag, the Cow Palace, which was big enough to host big touring bands like Judas Priest—and a little bar on Haight Street called Nightbreak where friends’ bands like Gasm and Touch Me Hooker used to play. I didn’t get to see Black Sabbath live in Paris in 1970 (because I was only just born), or, because it would have been too expensive, the Chili Peppers out touring this year—all grown-up nice sober dads, just like Dave Grohl.

Same thing either way—I can still feel the press of bodies. The heat. The adrenaline. I can smell the sweat, the long hair, the grass, the beer. Back in the day it was steel toes or Chucks, Bens and black leather. The place is moving because you are moving. You can’t help it. The buzz is there in the buzzsaw howl of the guitars, in the thwack and thump of the drums. Fuckin’ magic. It’s not a daytime show, never. It’s dark out, and it’s dark inside, except for the lights on the stage. Everyone in the place is one-hundred percent alive. Something is rising up inside, a powerful, dark, don’t-fuck-with-me energy—in the best way. Don’t fuck with me doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like you—although I might very well not.

I don’t like everyone, and my honest hope is that not everyone likes me. Read The Courage To Be Disliked if you still think it’s a good idea for everyone to like you. I think that’s what those happy-music types are drunk on. They aim to please, and they like to play out on sunny days in the park, when everything is warm and bright and soft. Gee, what a nice day! Everybody spread out on the grass, keeping a respectful distance from each other, quietly enjoying some mellow singer-songwriter doing his thing about the sweetness of the sun and life and love and soft cheese and sweet wine, swaying gently with the breeze and the breezy tune—just floating along. Something else is rising up inside here, a… gentle, light, welcoming, huggy sort of unspecifically happy vibe that makes me wanna puke.

That’s not what I want or need from music. Not right now. Not when I’m living how I want to live—and not when I’m writing, or running, or driving, or fucking. Anger gets a bad rap. I want that anger inside—it’s energy. Life force. I don’t mean rage or violence—although there is a rare place for that, anyone who knows me knows that’s not my plot. Iggy knows—what I need is pure raw power. I don’t need some lullaby. I need fight or flight, or fuck and feel. I want motivation, courage, and inspiration. Call it angry or call it energy, call it wild, loud or raw or call it what it is, because it’s alive, motherfucker!

I want music that gives me fighting breath. I want music that makes me reach inside and grip your beating heart, tear it out, bite into it and taste it. The blood is dripping down my chin and I’m smiling right back at you, you happy little fucker.

Happy music makes me angry—but not nearly enough to matter. Nice only gets you so far, and like happy, it’s insipid. It’s just not interesting. On the other hand, what might seem like angry music makes me happy as a fucking clam.

I grew up rocking out to KISS, Aerosmith, AC/DC and Van Halen. This is what used to be called hard rock. Black Sabbath came in those early years as well, and Sabbath was so fucking hard that they were heavy, like the music was made of metal. That’s where “metal” came from, see, although Sabbath is not a metal band, and it was with other bands like Judas Priest and Motorhead—and then Metallica, of course, that the term solidified and stuck.

My favorite bar in the neighborhood where I grew up in San Francisco had a fifty-cent pool table and a jukebox that—as I will always remember it—only played Thin Lizzy. There were other records in there, but the box was fixed so that when you stepped up and punched the buttons, it was always them wild-eyed Irish boys who came out the speakers with their youthful, joyful, soulful, tough and loving swagger. Somehow, from way over there, from Ireland, they absorbed and transmitted the lonely sound of the West too, the cowboy sound, and the lonesome cowboy ethic. Fuckin’ sweet genius that he was, Phil Lynott, sleeping sound in the ground, bless him and all the rest.

The guys in Metallica are just few years older than me, and they’re from the Bay Area. They used to play house parties in the Sunset. Older friends of mine knew them and girls I know dated them. I didn’t listen to Metallica much in my youth, but I’d count them among my favorites now. That said, there’s a lot of what falls into metal that I don’t really go for because it’s too fast, too screamy, too shitty, or just not my cup of tea, y’know? There’s also some very, very happy hard rock, like Van Halen, which I love (as long as we’re talking about Diamond Dave-era VH), and happy metal like Mötley Crüe, which I hated as a kid for not being hard enough, but have since come to like more, especially songs like Looks That Kill and Girls, Girls, Girls. VH and Crüe both came up on the Strip like all the rest, and, as the story goes, the guys who would become Crüe saw Van Halen play and wanted to rock like that, but they saw the (New York) Dolls too, dug the glam angle and figured it would hit well with the chicks.

They weren’t wrong, but I can’t really say I’m a fan, because fuck glam, fuck hair metal, and fuck a lot of other things like pop metal, whatever that is, and thrash, actually, and death metal too, and most of all, bullshit joke bands like, ugh, Twisted Sister. I didn’t grow up talking about “metal.” Metal didn’t exist yet. I grew up with rock, and that’s still what I want. I want to fucking rock.

I remember reading that Stephen King writes to “AC/DC, Slayer, Sabbath, and Motorhead.” The title of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning album was, it turns out, in actual fact, inspired by a line in King’s novel The Stand. I didn’t get it from King, but he and I seem to share a taste for heavy, dark, loud, and fast music—and not just for how it sounds, but for how it makes me feel, for how it makes me think, for how it goes with exercise and running—and for how it goes with writing. As it happens, a song from that very album is playing right this very second, as I write these words.

I remember a mix tape I made for a road trip with my old buddy Des that included another song from that LP that we played on the way up to meet some girls at U of O in Eugene, Oregon in 1988. He wore acid wash, neon sunglasses, and bleached hair, listened to euro-trash, and I’m still not sure exactly what he made of Seek & Destroy, but along with making this thing now called metal their own, that song shows how Metallica invented the metal sound of crunch. Distorted, compressed, over-amplified electric guitar, sure they were shredding but it was more crushing, crunching, marching. The sound of horses, of course, that was the fantasy leftover from boyhood D&D games.

In reality, for us, it was the sound of being out in the city at night, on skateboards or motorcycles. Pushing with my right foot or twisting the throttle with my right hand, carving corners, bombing hills, dancing and weaving between pedestrians and cars, their time stopped and ours rolling and diving, flying through the night, on our way from a party in some dark hallway to go buy more beer, and get to the top of a hill so we could ride down the other side.

For me, still to this day, Black Sabbath is some of the happiest music you can find, and Metallica is very, very happy music. Van Halen is the happiest music ever, and always makes me feel like I’m thirteen again and life is perfect, even though it wasn’t. The Scorpions, my god, I fucking love the Scorps—their German accents, the lyrics so primitive because they didn’t speak much English, albums like Lovedrive and Virgin Killer and songs like Another Piece of Meat.

Which reminds me of something else. All this heavy music—almost all of it is love songs. Some of them are nasty and rough, but if you bother to listen closely, that “piece of meat” was what she said to the guy after the show—and in the next song on the album (Always Somewhere), the protagonist, pronoun: he, laments “I call your number, the line ain’t free. I’d like to tell you, ‘Come to me.’” I got it from the start. They’re all love songs. These guys need women, they want a woman so bad it hurts—and enough to write an album full of songs about it. That’s how much they care, baby, and I’m just the same.

Now that we’re talking about a different kind of happy music, the angry kind that actually makes me happy, it’s fair to say that anything “black” is happy music. If I go to Black in my music library, of course I get Sabbath, but also The Black Angels, The Black Crowes, Black Flag, The Black Keys, Black Mountain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and, most recently, Black Pumas, which aren’t rock at all but quite fairly described as “psychedelic soul”—funky, trippy, sweet and fun but much more than just plain, boring-ass happy.

Now, the Misfits aren’t Black like that, and I don’t go for black metal, nor the nonsense that probably gets called horror-core or some other some-such ridiculous thing, but the Misfits sure turned some sweet, happy tunes: I Turned Into a Martian, Mommy Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight, Die, Die My Darling and Green Hell all come to mind, not to mention the song Bullet, happily reminding us that “Texas is the reason that the president’s dead,” which you can’t really argue with. The guys in Metallica—especially their original bass player Cliff Burton—liked the Glenn Danzig’s songs enough that they included three of them—more from anyone else but Lemmy—on their double album of covers called Garage Inc., which happens to be one of their greatest albums.

Like rock and metal, punk started small and grew many arms and legs. If you want to dig around while you read, check out this thing called Music Map, a super cool visualization of just “The Genealogy of and History of Popular Music Genres.” I dig a lot of original punk—the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Undertones, The Jam—and Patti Smith is punk as fuck, for sure. Post-punk and new wave give a lot too, and often just the right kind of slower, darkly melodic groove that I really love, from bands like the Police, Joy Division, Television, and Gang of Four. As with rock and metal, I’m not much for the ultra-fast thrash or even original hardcore like Black Flag and the DK’s and such, much respect, but I don’t really sit down and listen to that stuff, whereas bands that evolved mostly from punk like Sonic Youth and, much later, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs get tons of airtime. Their noise makes me happy.

A band called X deserves special mention. Generally considered their own brand of punk, and lying at the intersection of LA punk, rockabilly, Americana/alt-country, folk-punk, and what’s sometimes called desert music, X is a wild gift indeed, not happy music at all, and more than any band from my home state of northern California, captures an important part of the sound of my youth along with the Pasadena-grown, backyard bar-b-que, frisbee-hucking, OP shorts and Vuarnet-wearing Van Halen brothers.

X makes me happy, even though it’s also the sound track to a particularly dark time—age sixteen, sniffing speed wasn’t strong enough and so we started smoking it, blue rocks bubbling on aluminum foil and the harsh chemical smoke sucked in with a chaser of cheap, warm gin. Some truly good shit for the developing teenage brain and body, for sure. X is fronted and, as I imagine it (ask Flea, he’d know—and read his book while you’re at it), named for front-woman Exene Cervenka, and there’s a legion of other women who make music that gets me fired up. Everyone from Karen O’s band (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth to the Donnas, L7 (you made my shit list), Joan Jett, CSS (which stands for “Cansei de Ser Sexy,” which is Brazilian Portuguese for I’m Tired of Being Sexy. I know, right?), PJ Harvey, Chrissie Hynde’s band (and make no mistake, it was her fucking band) the Pretenders, Liz Phair, Bikini Kill, the Wilson sisters of Heart, Debbie Harry’s Blondie. There was never any doubt about whether women can rock—for fuck’s sake, just look at the evidence.

There is one artist—just one, for now, because that’s not what this is about—much of whose music sounds quite overtly happy that I will make an exception for: David Byrne, and the Talking Heads. I’d say that Byrne is just about as much of a unique, pioneering creative wizard as Prince or Bowie, and also embodies so much creative energy that he transcends much of gender and whatever else you might imagine of who he is from the outside. Some of their music might sound happy, but all of these three are in a league of their own, and together, and definitely on the right side of happy.

There’s a lot I’ve left out: Agent Orange, the Avengers, Iggy, the Saints, Johnny Thunders, the U.K. Subs, two obscure and closely related bands from Tennessee called Apollo Up! and Forget Cassettes, and worlds of much newer music that started for me with my first girlfriend playing the Violent Femmes and the Cure, and leading to Joy Division, Massive Attack, Radiohead, and many others. Not to mention all the rap and hip hop, Ice Cube and especially Biggie, rest his silly fat ass, his big beautiful lips, and his slick rick tongue, he was another one that died way too young. I was driving across the Bay Bridge in my Scout on my way back to Oakland from the City, and I almost had to stop the truck right in the middle of the fucking highway when I heard him rhyme sweata with money getta. Big was the man—and he was just a kid, just like me.

Damn. Now that’s some happy music.