Breakin' the Law: 5 Classic Heavy Metal and Hardcore Punk Songs About Justice

The fine folks over at Decibel
Magazine—America’s premiere publication covering all things
heavy metal, thrash metal, black metal, death metal, hardcore,
grindcore, and more—kindly solicited my thoughts on the noisy
intersection where music and law frequently meet. In other words,
they requested and I delivered a short list of my
personal favorite heavy metal and hardcore punk songs devoted
to the topic of justice. Here’s the introduction by
Decibel‘s great writer Shawn Macomber and a sneak peak at
one of my picks:

Today the Metalnomicon welcomes Reason senior editor Damon
Root, one of the most thought-provoking, singular voices writing on
the intricacies of American law today. He’s also a metal/hardcore
devotee and the original articulator of the Suicidal
Tendencies litmus test for federal candidates, which, as we all
know, has had a profound effect on our nation in several alternate
dimensions.

So, anyway, yeah, Root’s new book
Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court
is a straight up tour de force of eye-opening,
epiphany-inducing history parsing. It’s great and everyone
interested in the inner workings of the Supreme Court and its
profound effect on our lives should read it. But we suspected some
metal/hardcore science got excised by the squares at Palgrave
Macmillan and, thus, hit Root up for a list of five classic
hardcore and metal songs about justice.

The man did not disappoint…

3. “Legalize Drugs” by Fear

Writing in 1972, future Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman argued that “street crime would drop dramatically” if the
U.S. government legalized drugs. Not only did drug prohibition
create a lucrative black market run by violent gangsters, Friedman
observed, it led to the incarceration of millions of nonviolent
offenders whose only crime involved getting high.

Wait, did I say Milton Friedman? I meant to say Lee Ving, the
beef bologna-loving frontman for the infamous punk band Fear.

“We’ve got the largest prison population in the world,” sings
Ving, and there’s only one way to correct that injustice: “When you
take away the profit, then you destroy the black market… Legalize
drugs!”

Read the whole thing here.