Order VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER here
My life changed for the first time when I was 10 years old. For the better, I might add. I was lounging in my parents' basement, watching my local music channel's heavy metal programming Solidrok. It was the day I heard my first Pantera song Mouth For War. At that precise moment, I got to know myself better. I understood what kind of kid I was and what kind of man I wanted to be. It's still one of my favorite songs today. Pantera's iconic record VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER is now 23, old enough to go out and buy itself a beer, so I thought now was as good a moment as ever to revisit its greatness since all the kids who grew up to it are now adults. VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER is a bona fide heavy metal classic whether you like it or not. It changed the lives of several kids lounging in their parents' basement in the nineties and here's why.
The greatest thing about VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER is that it is a thoroughly badass record with positive lyrics. How great is that? Of course, Dimebag Darrell's legendary guitar shredding and Phil Anselmo's mean mugging are major parts of Pantera's appeal, but what makes VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER shine is the absurdly efficient lyrical content. It's a record about the virtues of pride, strength, anger, righteous violence, things like that. Mouth For War for one is about the cleansing powers of punching someone in the face repeatedly. A New Level is about rising about adversity, looking down on it because at the level you reached, there is no such thing as adversity anymore. See what I'm talking about? Angry positivity is the best positivity.The greatest lesson from VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER is that anger, when channeled properly, can improve your existence.
Here it is, the song that changed my life.
The album is split in two distinctive halves: the one that people listen to and the other that went virtually unlistened by everybody in existence. I couldn't tell you why that is. My best guess is that This Love creates both a separation and an emotional peak (although I don't think it's their best song at all, far from that) that fans don't feel compelled to start Rise, which is honestly a decent song if a little inferior to the absolutely blistering beginning of the album. Mouth For War, A New Level, Walk, Fucking Hostile and This Love maybe are the greatest first half of any album of all-time, so it doesn't matter if I tell you that No Good (Attack the Radical) and By Demons Be Driven could very well be on the first half of that record, you may never listen to it because it doesn't have that magical continuity in aggression. VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER is great cover to cover, but the latter half suffers because it's not as spellbinding as the first.
Even in Pantera's energetic legacy, VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER stick out as some kind of oddity, a happy accident right in the middle of a tormented career that (spiritually) ended after the release of their fourth album THE GREAT SOUTHERN TRENDKILL. It positioned Pantera as THE band that ''got'' the kid growing up in the nineties. They have forever shaped my upbringing and by default the man I am today. It's a great, timeless and important record that molded how plenty of young men now in their thirties think. There is a definite argument to be made that this is not their best record, that the darker, more introspective FAR BEYOND DRIVEN is, but their most important one, the record they'll be remembered for is VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER. That is the reason why you should give it a spin at least once in your life.