![]() ![]() They were chameleons, embracing irony before doing so was fashionable. The bands that killed hair metal were trying to find something sacred still alive in rock music, but Faith No More were trying to take the air out of everyone’s tires. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why Faith No More are almost fully independent now. The amount of diversity Faith No More crammed into 1989’s The Real Thing seemed to be a middle finger to arena rock, which dealt songs in two flavors: ballad and anthem. Their melding of rap verses and metal guitar was not completely original (Public Enemy had been sampling Slayer and teaming up with Anthrax before “Epic” came out), but it carried cultural significance, as if announcing that hard rock music could be urban, intelligent, sexual, and cosmopolitan all at once. Jazz, funk, swing, metal, soul, new wave, hip-hop, and straightforward pop were all elements of the group’s sound to varying degrees from that point on, later joined by opera, cabaret, industrial, and film soundtracks as the group evolved. And most significantly, the band prized versatility. While MTV was trying to find a feather-haired young stud to become the perfect fusion of Eddie Van Halen and Keith Richards, Faith No More put bass, drums, and synthesizers in the spotlight, rendering the guitar sometimes perfunctory (in retrospect, maybe this is why the band changed guitarists so often). Their lyrics, by turns emotional and perverse, frequently homoerotic, skewered West Coast machismo and then roasted it over an open flame. For a minute there, it might have been them or Metallica, them or Nirvana.Īfter all, Faith No More were doing as much to undermine the mainstream rock idiom of the ’80s as anyone else, maybe even more so. It’s easy to forget, however, that when “Epic” was catching fire in 1990 (almost a year after its release), Faith No More were ascendant - one of the many West Coast rock bands that A&R reps thought might become a household name. ![]() Their lone top-10 radio hit in the United States, “Epic,” still receives regular play, but other than an excellent cover of “Easy” by Lionel Riche’s band the Commodores, that’s the sum total of their breakthrough success. To many, Faith No More is a band heard but not seen. It also struck me as a dick move, since the band didn’t let Bowen onstage to play his own song.īut that’s the story of Faith No More: They care a lot, but they need to take the piss out of their listeners and themselves. It struck me as a classy move to reach back to the band’s first album, one that didn’t feature the band’s iconic vocalist, Mike Patton. When I saw San Francisco’s revenant Faith No More play Seattle for the first time in nearly 20 years, they closed their set with “Mark Bowen,” a song from their first album, named after their very first guitarist. ![]()
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