In 2010, Bad Religion celebrated 30 years of being L.A.’s seminal punk band. They played a series of House of Blues shows in Anaheim, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. The Orange County Register wrote an article about the anniversary at the time. This included quotes from contemporaries and artists who were inspired by the band. Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine shared his memories of hearing Bad Religion’s 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse? for the first time. He called them “truly one of the greatest L.A. bands.”
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De la Rocha recalled first hearing the album in 1985 when he was 15. “The first thing I remember is pulling the insert from the sleeve of the record and seeing those drawings from Dante’s Inferno, and that red wash over the blurry shot of Los Angeles, and I admit I was scared. A little terrified even. I had no idea what to expect,” he said in 2010. “When the needle hit the record I have to say it was a defining moment for me.”
He continued, “The music was darker than most punk records I had heard. It was almost gothic, and there was a genuine sadness to the melodies. Listening to the words I remember being overwhelmed. It wasn’t some revelation that god didn’t exist … it was more like an injection of the sad truth. That our condition is the product of the mess of our own making … and at fifteen that was as scary as the inferno drawings.”
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How Does the Debut Album From Bad Religion Hold Up to Today’s Standards?
Bad Religion’s debut is just one metric by which all modern punk should be judged, but it’s an important one. It’s melodic and literate while retaining the essence of early 80s DIY. The 1980s punk scene was volatile, divisive, and pure raucous poetry, and How Could Hell Be Any Worse? was one of its pillars.
“Voice of God is Government” stands out as one of the album’s most innovative tracks. It begins with a parody of televangelism, urging “neighbors, let us join today in the holy love of God and money.” It all culminates in lines like “If we shun God and Jesus Christ, religious love is sacrifice / Love for God is shown in cash, the love they send is mailbox trash / With every pamphlet we receive, more money asked for Godly needs / Build a million dollar church, with money spent on God’s research.”
“There Are Two Things You Can Do…”
Thinking about their milestones, Bad Religion strikes me as a band that made it in mainstream punk but never shied away from making the statements they’d been making since 1982. They didn’t fizzle out or sell out in an attempt to keep the fame train going. They stayed true to their name—targeting “institutionalized hypocrisy of predatory televangelism,” as described in a 2010 article in OC Weekly.
Bad Religion was more self-aware in their time; when they began, they were hyperaware of being “these kids from the Valley not wanting to be another band saying, ‘F–k you, I won’t clean up my room,’” said bassist Jay Bentley to OC Weekly.
“If anything tries to define what I do, then my job is to deny that definition,” said Bentley at the time, so I won’t try to define Bad Religion. But I will say that their debut album is still as good as it was in 1982. As Zack de la Rocha said of How Could Hell Be Any Worse? in 2010, “Throughout the record there was very little relief from the sad truths except one: ‘there are two things you can do … one is to turn and fight … the other’s to go headlong into the night.’”
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