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Music

Arson, Shoplifting and Poison Idea: Why The Crow Soundtrack Saved My Life

How Brandon Lee, Pantera and Prank Calls ruled my teenage years.

In 1994 I was living in a suburb outside of Dallas called Plano. I was 11 years old. I’m not going to spend too much time to describe Plano, it was just another new shitty suburb reminiscent of New Granada in Over the Edge. My best friend at the time was Jon Lawson, and his family was rich as fuck. Once a week I stayed over at his place, far away from the chaos that was my everyday home life. One such weekend his parents took us to the local Blockbuster to pick out a movie for what was sure to be another amazing Friday night filled with prank calls, pizza, and other pre-teen hijinks.

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Out of all the movies in the place, there was one that we locked eyes on off the muscle. We had heard about it a little around the playground. We heard someone died while making it and it was supposedly dark as fuck and chock full of tits, explosions, rampant profanity, drug use and other things a couple of 11-year-old boys could really get behind. The Crow went into his family’s VCR later that evening and we prepared for greatness. We got what we asked for.

Later that evening, John and I were picked up by local police for setting the entire field behind his folks house on fire. Initially planned to be a controlled fire, it quickly got away from us once we realized that our idea to duplicate the epic “lighting of the crow symbol” was a far greater undertaking then we had initially imagined. Thankfully nothing that bad got damaged and I’m still here to tell the tale. It was the first all out bad kid thing I have ever done. I was hooked.

Move forward a couple weeks and I’m in a Best Buy. There it is, the soundtrack, sandwiched between Hackers and Pulp Fiction. Chills run down my spine. I needed it, but alas I didn’t have any money and my dad wasn’t trying to buy me a present seeing as I had just burnt down half the neighborhood. SO I STOLE THAT MOTHERFUCKER. Now I’m a ginger and an ugly one at that. You know that awkward phase you had? Well I’m still in mine. I look like Angus’s best friend, thus making it extremely difficult to be sneaky. They always suspect the gingers, but fuck it, I did it anyway.

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That CD didn’t leave my discman for six months; cut after cut after cut just BANGERS. Lets take a minute and break it down some of it. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but I’m not made out of time, feel me?

“Burn”- The Cure

The song starts with some weird creepy haunted house vibes and then just crushes. It’s the sonic equivalent of your girlfriend throwing recently acquired (or painted) black roses that you bought her right back in your face. You can imagine yourself thrashing around “Eric” and “Shelly’s” apartment, going through the dark transition making you THE CROW. This is right about the time when Robert Smith was fence-walking between wearing plain black button downs and XXL hockey jerseys.

“Big Empty”- Stone Temple Pilots

I don’t condone drunk-driving. If you could perfectly plan where this song plays in its entirety starting with leaving the bar and ending with the breakdown just as you pull into the driveway, you’d know what its like to be in heaven, if only for a second. It’s the kind of song some emotional 90’s teenager used as lubricant to gaze into the eyes of his 16 year old girlfriend who works in the food court and isn’t trying to fuck him.

“Dead Souls” Nine Inch Nails

A large majority of the selections on this soundtrack are covers. This is Joy Divison cover. Obviously the NIN version is far superior. His voice is less whiney and when you close your eyes you don’t have to imagine him shimmying around some smoke filled club in Manchester looking like a fucking asshole.

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“The Badge”- Pantera

Pantera is from the great American city of Dallas, TX… McKinney, if you wanna be a dick about it. They play their songs at Dallas sporting events to hype up the crowd and “Dimebag” Darryl Abbott has a street named after him, oddly enough adjacent from the strip club he co owned with his brother Vinnie Paul.

Poison Idea are the greatest and most original hardcore band of all time. Like as in the history of the world. They were ugly, they were fat, and they were junkies, and they destroyed everyone's ears. I hate when hardcore bands cover each other, but when metal bands cover hardcore bands, its called “respect.” Not the mention they murder it. How great of a world do we live in where a rich, popular band full of junkies cover a song about hating cops written by a band full of poor junkies. Pantera probably got Jerry A high for at least a year on the royalty checks and from what I hear, that’s a lot of dope. Complete with

Taxi Driver

samples.

“Snakedriver” - Jesus and Mary Chain

I wish that all later J&MC sounded like this. Unfortunately it doesn’t, but luckily we have this document to when they did rip other than their 80’s era. How cool of a song title is “Snakedriver”? Of course, if some fake-ass biker rock band had a song called “Snakedriver” my previous statement would be null and void. It's songs like this that make this soundtrack stand the test of time which few rarely do.

“Ghost Rider”- Rollins Band

All Black Flag post-1982 is a fucking joke. Rollins is the Jim Morrison of punk, a poet, and seeing as poetry is the single lowest form of art, his solo projects fall into the same category, crap. Only song on the entire soundtrack that is unlistenable. Even just now as I illegally downloaded it from Soulseek, I skipped it.

Honestly, it's interesting how a soundtrack from almost 20 years ago still has such importance in 2013. Especially one that was just a haphazardly thrown together group of songs; so much resonance still comes from it. People still like Poison Idea and for many, such as myself was their first introduction to them. Would Pharmakon sound how they sound if young Margaret didn’t hear My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult's "After the Flesh”? Maybe, but I for sure wouldn’t be a hardcore/punk/metal freak without this record. Sad to say, but The Crow soundtrack probably changed my life.