The terrible thing about having a day job is that it bleeds into everything else you do around it. My last work week was the worst combination of boring and frustrating, which leaves one feeling high-strung about nothing in particular.
The good thing about having a day job is, of course, not starving to death under Capitalism. Some weeks even that feels kind of equivocal.
I do most of my mood-listening in the morning and on my commute to work. Lately, I’ve been gravitating towards, for lack of a better descriptor, “wish someone would try me” music. Brash, angry, rageful pump-up music.
While the heyday of the the rage song was in the early 2000s, I’m happy to report that it seems to be making a bit of a resurgence. Wet Leg’s “catch these fists” is a sterling example, combining riot girl sensibilities and jumpy guitar hooks with charming threats of physical violence.
It’s just also a serviceable indie club banger, which I’m always down for.
“Zerospace” by Kidney Thieves might be my original entrypoint into a love of rage songs. If you align the biographical and psychological elements of the era for me, it’s not hard to see why. “Bodies” by Drowning Pool (an objectively terrible and unimaginative example of the genre) had been released the year before. Kidneythieves came along a year later and gave all the goth and industrial kids an answer so that we, too, could could have a soundtrack to our hormonal anger, while still feeling cool and avant garde.
Plus it’s got some truly sick guitars and Free Dominguez’s wrathful, cathartic delivery of the lines “Said I was an afterthought you'd bring along / Well who you after now, bitch? Run, motherfucker, run”.
Of course, because this is a personal psychological category, its contents are more or less arbitrary. While most rage songs promise violence or at least a good rumble, others are just pure, angry disdain. The Lillingtons, a vastly underrated punk band from rural Wyoming, provide an object example. “All I Hear is Static” is a classic, punchy punk track about the universal sensation of having to deal with other people’s bullshit.
Now I just have to avoid the temptation to start playing it in meetings.