"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
This year's choices will lean into my being an '80s kid quite a bit, I think - I'm free from the shackles of the calendar that I had for This Year, and can hit all of the other bands I was listening to at the same time, back in my misspent youth. I make no apologies.
If you were around then, you know this song. You might even know it if you weren't around then. But there's a certain weird fraternity of the people who knew who Faith No More was before they switched singers and suddenly got huge in 1989.
And that later, more popular incarnation of the band is good, don't misunderstand me. But if I could save one Faith No More song, desert-island-style, there would be no question. It would always be We Care a Lot, one of the iconic songs of the 1980s.
(We care a lot) about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
(We care a lot) about the NY, SF and LAPD
(We care a lot) about you people
(We care a lot) about your guns
(We care a lot) about the wars you're fighting, gee that looks like fun!
It's a snotty song - as a lot of my favorites from the '80s are - and a deeply sarcastic one, a song that means pretty much exactly the opposite of what it says. It's a parody of We Are the World and all of those similar good-cause songs, a piss-take on the idea of caring in the first place.
And yet...is there some actual caring, buried in the sarcasm? You'll have to decide that for yourself - Faith No More is too busy having fun.
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