Some days you just need to stick it to the man! This is a day that is like that for the Wild Heart for reasons unspecified.
So here it is folks: the 10 best songs that bring out the rebel in the wild heart – or at least the angry side! Even more funnier is the fact that some of these have been used in film!
1) We’re Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister. One thing that Twisted Sister did best was portraying rebellion of any kind. However their specialty was teenage rebellion. This rang true in their classic videos on MTV when they cast Mark Metcalf (best known for his role as the sadistic asshole that is ROTC leader Lt. Doug Niedermeyer in the John Landis classic National Lampoon’s Animal House. I must say this has to be a sequel to Animal House – even though it says at the end that Niedermeyer was shot by his own troops in Vietnam. Sadly I guess he survived.
2) Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears for Fears. If you have ever seen the film Real Genius with a very young (and handsome) Val Kilmer, you will know that this is the song that’s played at the end of the film. The film itself is about a group of Pacific Tech student scientists who are tricked into building a tracking device for a weapon. When they find out they were tricked, they exact a little revenge on the dean of students, Dr. Jerry Hathaway. Needless to say that due to his misdeeds (and felonies), he got what he deserved! On a more personal note, I had two of these in college. One was (I kid you not) a campus minister with the Baptist Student Ministry. Anyways, she would always act extremely rude to me and some of my friends. When I finally got the nerve to leave her group because of her sorry ass, she basically went from bad to worse: I joined another Christian group on campus and she tried to kick them out of the room (which the BSM owned) in the chapel at UH. She also asked friends of mine to leave the free lunch (which was open to the entire campus) that the BSM hosted just because my friend wanted another piece of pizza which they were throwing in the trash – why waste it? Thankfully she is no longer at that campus (they moved her to the UH Downtown campus) so its safe to say “good riddance” to her. The other one tried to falsely accuse me of something just to have me removed.
3) I Wanna Rock – Twisted Sister. If you ever had a mean teacher like this in highschool you can totally relate to this!! I did. She was my highschool algebra teacher
4) Invincible – Pat Benatar. According to Pat Benatar’s autobiography Between A Heart & A Rock Place, this was filmed shortly after the birth of her first child. In other words, her record label back then, Chrysalis, didn’t give her any sort of maternity leave because they were absolutely against her and her husband/guitarist Neil Giraldo having a baby. They thought it would ruin her sexy-rocker persona. One can only imagine that the bite in her vocals maybe was aimed at those snakes at Chrysalis.
5) You Better Run – Pat Benatar.
6) Land of Confusion – Genesis. Probably one of the most creative yet creepiest music videos ever made. The video drew much criticism for showing then-US president Ronald Reagan as stupid and out of touch with the rest of the world. The video came from the hit British television show Spitting Image. The funny thing is that some of the stuff rings true today especially when it comes to how the US dollar is pretty much in the toilet, the terrible state of the US economy
7) Volunteers – Jefferson Airplane. Lead singer Grace Slick definetly lived up to this song. She was friends with the likes of Abbie Hoffman and once tried to spike then-President Richard Nixon’s tea with 600 micrograms of LSD.
8) Crazy On You – Heart. Suprisingly enough, this is actually a protest song! According to the Wilson sisters, this is a song that was written in response to the war in Vietnam. At the time of writing, their boyfriends were draft-dogers living in Canada.
