Bad Religion beat Al Gore to the punch

Downloaded without permission, of course.

Bad Religion is a punk rock band that has been warning us about the environment long before Al Gore started gabbing around the globe.

In fairness, Mr. Gore cemented an important message in everyone's brain, whether they liked it or not.

However, Bad Religion reached me first and made a stronger impression. Years earlier, on a smaller platform, the band pleaded the people to save the planet from themselves while rocking their faces off.

A favorite is "Watch it Die" from 1993's Recipe for Hate, especially the last verse, which sums up the Earth's fate as man conquers nature:

I was born on planet Earth

At a drastic time full of plastic mirth

And every day, I've seen increasing signs

And you would too, if you opened your eyes

You had your chance, you did not try

And now it's time to watch it die.

I recently learned that Eddie Vedder sang the second verse of "Watch it Die." The two singers' voices sound similar even with careful listening, although you can catch a few flutters of Eddie's signature resonance.

I dusted off a couple of discs and was blown away by the profundity of the lyrics, which I knew by heart as a teenager. As I have discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, Bad Religion is a punk rock band that had an impact on my worldview.

Bad Religion, Against the Grain (1990)

But at the time, did I really know what Greg Graffin was singing about? Nowhere near the depth that I do as an adult who works for a living and watches the world turn. Graffin eventually went on to earn a Ph.D. and teaches at Cornell University.

Graffin's songs for Bad Religion are equal parts punk and poetic professor. Never would I have encountered the some of the topics he presents, such as the philosophical "Misery and Famine" from Against the Grain (1990):

Misery and famine, it's a force we cannot see

Misery and famine, don't allow complacency

Misery and famine, great ellipse we bend to thee

Misery and famine, it compels us naturally.

Songs like "Entropy" sounded like a science essay delivered by a pissed off lounge singer for a garage band with the gas pedal floored - and yet the package and all the precise moving parts are catchy if you can keep up: "Something in our synapses assures us we're OK, but in our disequilibrium, we simply cannot stay, it's entropy ... "

Bad Religion also motivated me to look up the word entropy in the dictionary, which defines entropy as "a degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system," although the main part of the definition had something to do with thermodynamics.

Like many corn-fed kids from small towns in the middle of America's Heartland, I discovered Bad Religion when their major label fed me the band's 1996 album Stranger Than Fiction. "Infected" and "Handshake" stand among the band's best.

I saw them in 1996 at the Riviera in Chicago. I was 17 and had never been to a club show like that. I bought a shirt that listed a bunch of songs together in a paragraph with no spaces, and one of the songs was "Fuck Armageddon, This is Hell." You had to look for the four-letter word, and yes, I wore it to school once.

At the show, my virgin ears were blasted with glorious power chords and Graffin's sociopolitical messages. A concertgoer near me knew every word to "Handshake" and shouted along. Here's a clip from 1996 (the subtitles are kind of cool):

"This is the way of the modern world, and something's gotta give"