When the eponymous debut by Venice, California’s Suicidal Tendencies landed like a scud missile in 1983, I had already immersed myself into hardcore punk via bands like DOA, the Circle Jerks, Kraut and many more. But Suicidal seemed like a different beast entirely. For a start, they didn’t really look like a punk band so much as a gaggle of West Coast gang-bangers. But beyond that, it was their sound that set them apart. While as stealthy and immediate as those afore-cited hardcore bands, Suicidal brought along a sonic heft that was clearly the result of an unapologetic love for heavy metal (a genre they’d soon blur the parameters of). Songs like “Possessed,” “I Shot The Devil” and “Fascist Pig” raced along at a breakneck pace, but the music was so burly. It’s no accident the band is largely credited with helping initiate the crossover scene shortly afterwards.
Of course, the song that really put … and kept …. the band on the map was their signature opus, “Institutionalized,” a first-person account from troubled teen/lead singer Mike Muir about his uber-dysfunctional relationship with his parents, their warped expectations and his comparatively pragmatic worldview. Scored by the band’s simmering fury and galloping bursts, the results are both hilarious and grimly acerbic. It pretty much became a classic upon arrival (spawning comparatively anaemic rip-off’s like “I’m An Adult Now” by The Pursuit of Happiness), and remains so today. It’s an anthem for disgruntled cynics everwhere.
The resulting video was as iconic as the track itself. Let’s go there now, shall we?
Yeah, so that’s the original.
Without going into chapter and verse about this next video, it’s prudent to seek out the mythos of “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,” a proto-Adult Swim concoction by the Cartoon Network in the 90’s that recast the membership of the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon as the cast of a strenuously unlikely talk show. From that germ of an idea sprang Brak, the intellectually stunted former space pirate. As evidently mandated by surrealist godfather Dr. Demento, herewith Brak’s cover of the Suicidal Tendencies staple, “Instituationalized.”
You were warned.
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