THE LIST: A Taxing Time Of Year

You work 13 hours a day, pay more for a gallon of gas than you do for lunch and then once a year, the government calls and asks if it can borrow a couple hundred bucks it’ll never give back. We’re not gonna complain because, after all, someone far smarter than we are once said something about the only certainties in life being death, taxes and the fact that Orlando Bloom always needs punched in the ear (or something along those lines). Still, one of the greatest freedoms America grants is the freedom to bitch about paying taxes. While you only have a few more days to file your paperwork, we thought you could use a soundtrack to match your frustration. –Tim Karan








Thursday ‘For The Workforce, Drowning’ from War All The Time (2003, Island)
Thursday’s bleak office-dweller anthem doesn’t have a lot to do with taxes, but listening to it definitely won’t make April 15 a happier day. Geoff Rickly laments the life you lose when you enter corporate life with the lines, ‘These ties strangle our necks, hanging in the closet, trapped in the cubicle, without a name, just numbers on the resume stored in the mainframe, marked for delete.’ Makes you just wanna take your savings and buy a farm of some sort, don’t it?

">





// VIEW THE LIST HERE

Dethklok ‘Dethharmonic’ from The Dethalbum (2007, Williams Street)
Fictional cartoon characters on Metalocalypse or not, Dethklok own perhaps the most brilliant take on disdain for paying taxes. With lyrics like, ‘I want to keep my money and give away absolutely nothing to the government who moderates my spending,’ and ‘If I could write off your murder, I’d save all of my receipts, because I’d rather you be dead than lose a tiny shred of what I made this fiscal year’ are probably exactly what you have running through your mind when you look at your pay stubs.

">


NOFX ‘Murder The Government’ So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes (1997, Epitaph)
NOFX have never been huge proponents of subtlety. When a song’s first lyrics are, ‘I wanna see the constitution burn, wanna watch the White House overturn,’ there isn’t much room for alternate interpretations. Still, NOFX are equal opportunity miscreants, going on to say, ‘I wanna tar and lynch the KKK, I wanna pull and shoot the NRA.’


">


Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards ‘To Have And To Have Not’ from Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards (2001, Hellcat)
True, this is a Billy Bragg cover, but Lars & Co. give this tale of the disenfranchised a whole new angry spin, singing, ‘The factories are closing and the army’s full, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ve come to see in the land of the free, there’s only room for a chosen few.’


">


Thrice ‘Cold Cash, Colder Hearts’ from The Artist In The Ambulance (2003, Island)
While this song seems mostly directed at Americans’ indifference toward the suffering of residents of less fortunate countries, the underlying theme of embracing money over humanity (‘We’ve learned money matters most’) seems pretty appropriate this time of the fiscal year.


">


The Offspring ‘Pay The Man’ from Americana (1998, Columbia)
Depending on context, ‘the man’ can mean anyone from the guy who brings a chilled keg to a frat party to Samuel L. Jackson. But it’s obvious that the Offspring are talking about ‘the man’ as in the collective bureaucracy of America. It’s difficult to take an optimistic view with lyrics like, ‘Look at you and your struggle for freedom, but you ain’t nothing, we all pay the man for living.’


">


The Suicide Machines ‘Invisible Government’ from A Match And Some Gasoline (2003, Sideonedummy)
Detroit punk outfit Suicide Machines took the corporate structure of America one step further in ‘Invisible Government,’ claiming that a secret network of businesses are the actual rulers of the world. ‘Behind the scenes things get done that you and I could never believe, atop the world they’re pulling strings, a puppet I’ll never be used to satisfy their greed.’ An implausible scenario? Not if you watch television or, well, think.


">


Dead Kennedys ‘Take This Job And Shove It’ from Bedtime For Democracy (1986, Alternative Tentacles)
Another cover song that’s more of a commentary on the working class than a direct shot at taxes, it ain’t gonna make disgruntled employees any more gruntled. Jello Biafra channels David Allen Coe when he opines, ‘I will not get all the pieces I’ve been working for, paper cups, minimum wage, just walk out the door.’


">


Anti-Flag ‘Daddy Warbux’ from Underground Network (2001, Fat Wreck Chords)
What? Anti-Flag are upset with the government? You could probably place about 98 percent of the Pittsburgh punks’ catalog onto this list, but ‘Daddy Warbux’ is especially fitting. ‘Our thoughts and our lives controlled by pocketbooks of rich politicians, they keep us at each others’ throats while we still pay their tax notes.’

">