Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
X’s fourth album More Fun in the New World featured some of the band’s most overtly political songs, and the Los Angeles punk quartet placed themselves explicitly in the lineage of Woody Guthrie on “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.” The song’s first verse wrestles with the guilt Americans can feel about the cruelty their tax dollars help pay for: “I must not think bad thoughts / I’m guilty of murder of innocent men / Innocent women, innocent children, thousands of ’em / My planes, my money, my guns, my soldiers / My blood on my hands.”
In the song’s third verse, John Doe and Exene Cervenka turn their attention to music, lamenting that most of the young bands on the charts in the early ’80s were British, and championing a few North American punk bands by name. “I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music, you know, the British Invasion / But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, D.OA., Big Boys and the Black Flag? / Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag?”
X was part of the first wave of West Coast punk bands in the late ’70s, and they continued uplifting the next generation of California punk, particularly SST Records bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen.
Mark Dery’s 2014 book I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams praised the song that inspired the collection’s title for articulating the hypocrisy and contradictions of the Reagan era. “‘I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts’ by the band X nailed the apolitical vacuity of the decade, when greed was good and the grandfatherly velociraptor in the Oval Office mused, on ‘Good Morning America,’ that ‘the people who are sleeping on the grates’ must surely be homeless ‘by choice’ in this Best of All Possible Worlds.”
Longtime X fan Eddie Vedder has covered multiple songs from More Fun in the New World, and Pearl Jam performed “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” with actor Tim Robbins during a 2004 MoveOn.org event.
Three more essential X deep cuts:
“Nausea”
Ray Manzarek of the Doors produced X’s first four albums, and played organ on several tracks including “Nausea” from 1980’s Los Angeles.
“We’re Desperate”
X’s debut single “Adult Books”/“We’re Desperate” was released on the small L.A. label Dangerhouse Records in 1978, and the band re-recorded both songs for their 1981 album Wild Gift.
“Come Back to Me”
X guitarist Billy Zoom occasionally played saxophone as well, most memorably on the ballad “Come Back to Me” from 1982’s Under the Big Black Sun.