Christian punk for a movie about drug dealers
Godmoney is not a good movie. I rented it from Blockbuster in the late 90s and all I recall is a vague plot about a drug dealer stealing money. The acting is bad, the pacing is glacial, and beyond the soundtrack there’s really not much to recommend; it looks exactly like a low budget movie from a first-time filmmaker. Director Darren Doane got his start making music videos for Southern California punk bands, which didn’t call for a skill level much higher than “make the band look cool, maybe throw in some hot chicks”. He did a lot of videos. A lot. He must have had a lot of favors owed to him, because the cast of Godmoney is mostly filled with band members with little to no acting experience, and it shows. As bad as it is, Doane’s filmography only got worse, becoming Kirk Cameron’s in-house director for his ultra-conservative right-wing film studio, making a troubling number of Michael Madsen-starring direct-to-video features, and filming the occasional documentary defending homophobes. I’m not sure when the switch was flicked between 42K (something about a magical necklace, ninjas, and babes) and Kirk’s Cameron’s Saving Christmas (the official title), but he did not reveal himself to be a secret auteur.
Christian entertainment runs deep in Doane’s work, so it’s not surprising that most of the bands here were signed to Tooth & Nail Records, hell this could act as a decent label primer for those interested. Tooth & Nail stood out from the cornier church lovin scene by having pretty high standards, signing decent bands and not beating Jesus over your head.
It’s worth noting that V2 Records, the label that actually released the soundtrack album, were hot shit for a little while. Founded by Richard Branson in 1996 following the sale of Virgin Records, V2 showed the same willingness to throw money at anything, with the era of $15.99 CDs fueling their singing spree. They made their bones with Moby’s massive albums Play and 18, but constant restructuring in the early 00s meant that by 2007 they were more of a line item on a financial spreadsheet than a functioning label. It still exists in name, but since Moby reclaimed the rights to his V2 albums, it’s indistinguishable from any number of constantly repackaged and resold publishing rights clearinghouses.
Without further ado, Godmoney: The Soundtrack, which despite being 22 tracks long barely cracks an hour runtime.
These Epitaph mainstays always struck me as the jocks of the punk rock scene, spouting a generic PMA vibe but not weird enough to really interest me. I did own Full Circle in high school, and my cousin had Unknown Road, but as they’re kind of the template of generic Epitaph punk rock, they never really stuck with me. Guitarist Fletcher Dragge plays a drug dealer enforcer in Godmoney, but I mostly remember him in old interviews moaning about how the massive success of The Offspring’s Smash overwhelmed the label and he felt ignored.
Magnified Plaid managed to break out of the Christian Punk Rock ghetto by writing great songs and keeping their faith in the background. “Doing Time” is a quick little ode to youthful rebellion that goes down sweet with a catchy melody, but the theme seems to be that you can be a wild kid and wild adult and everything will be fine. Real punk rock shit right here. The band started out on Tooth & Nail but jumped to the majors in the post-Dookie feeding frenzy, and I clearly remember at the time Christian punks at my school saying they were good even if you weren’t a Believer.
The SoCal legends were on a roll in 1997, with Milo back in the band and a recent album that managed to both capture the energy of their 90s run, and help them earn some dough that they never saw back then. “Lucky” was a b-side from the Everything Sucks album, but damn near one of the best tracks they’ve ever done. It probably got the boot to give the album a better balance of the serious songs and joke songs, both of which they excel at.
Soundtrack albums have never been known for their good sequencing, but Godmoney is an anomaly in that it structures the tracklist around a few themes. After three tracks of aggressive pop-punk, it switches gears with four songs in the hardcore vein. Later on, the poppier tracks are grouped together, and the longer epics are at home at the end. Stavesacre are another Tooth & Nail band, and at less than 2 minutes this little bit of self-lacerating Christian hardcore doesn’t overstay its welcome, with something about “my carnal mind” heard in the din.
After some internet sleuthing, it would appear this song is the only recorded evidence of Chance 22. Looking through the liner notes, the most I can find is that one of the members currently works for a guitar manufacturer. Sounds like they threw every popular angry male music genre in a blender, you got some nu metal guitar chugs, some rapping, and some off-key singing. Despite owning this CD for nearly a quarter century, I’ve made it all the way through this song once, to write this essay.
Stanford Prison Experiment “The Accomplice”
I gotta make a stand here: If you name your band Stanford Prison Experiment, you better sound a lot more intense than this grunge sounding track. The only bands allowed to use that name make grindcore and fit 12 songs on a 7”.
Rollins Band “Saying Goodbye Again”
Henry Rollins seems like a decent guy. I like his non fiction writing, his spoken word stuff is OK, and he’s a tireless supporter of new and extreme music, but I do not enjoy the music he makes. I’m not even a big fan of his Black Flag years, not even Damaged (for the record, the best Black Flag vocalist was Dez, the guy who didn’t want to be the singer and quickly moved to guitar). I think a lot of my ambivalence about Rollins Band has to do with how he recruited clearly overqualified musicians to play what amounted to dumbed down stoner rock. Eventually he did replace them with a dumbed down stoner rock band, but nothing he’s sung on has ever resonated with me. Despite that, “Saying Goodbye Again” is a pretty affecting track, one of several he wrote about seeing friend Joe Cole get shot and killed in front of him during a robbery.
Down By Law “Independence Day”
Some songs just unfold perfectly, with every note and word following the other in a way that hints at some divine force. Not God (though most of the bands on this comp might say that), but a force in the universe that connects us all. Dave Smalley’s post-Dag Nasty and All outfit probably had some other songs, but this brief celebration of seeing a band live is good enough to outshine the singer’s exceedingly iffy politics.
I thought this song was really deep in high school but damn, whiny dudes are the worst. Revelations Records had this side hustle of former hardcore bands going for a janglier alterna-rock thing, and while it was occasionally successful, more often than not it was a forgettable relic from the era.
Dance Hall Crashers “Nuisance”
I have one bit of trivia for Dance Hall Crashers, and it’s that they were formed by Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman after Operation Ivy broke up. They cycled through a couple band’s worth of members, switched from dancehall to a pop punk/ska/sorta swing sound, and found success with two lead vocalists. They burned bright, but soon petered out around the turn of the century. In their heyday they were inescapable, with their legit roots in the punk scene and the fatc that they seemed to pop up on a lot of soundtracks (this isn’t the first song of theirs I’ll be covering in this series). The song’s fine, I mean you can’t have a 90s pop punk soundtrack without ska, it just wasn’t allowed back then.
Few things from Dude Ranch stood the test of time, but as a record of how middle class suburban white boys talked, it’s damn near a perfect time capsule. “Voyeur” is, conceptually, pretty bad, though to his credit Tom DeLonge always makes the creepy characters in his songs the butt of the joke, making his narrator in this song also witness his high school bully taking a shower (then again, he also knows his bully’s shower schedule, so there might be more to it).
AFI made 3 albums of snotty punk before finding fame as the ur-Mall Goth band, though to ask some fans, they never got any better than songs like “I Wanna Get A Mohawk (But Mom Won't Let Me Get One)”. This song is from their 2nd album Very Proud of Ya, and it’s a pretty good litmus test to see if you’ll like any of their pre-Black Sails in the Sunset stuff.
Niche scenes have this weird phenomena where some bands are incredibly popular within them, and completely unknown to the rest of the world. Slick Shoes were another Tooth & Nail band with a massive following in their little sphere, enough to be a steady touring act for years and get their own greatest hits album. They sound like any number of pop punk bands of the era, but if you were looking for some pogoing with your fellowship, I bet they were awesome.
Guttermouth “A Day At The Office”
This is a band that doesn’t care about anything, which in 1997 made you a sort of court jester in the punk scene, with everyone waiting for the next crazy shit you’ll pull. Guttermouth’s singer Mark Adkins was a human Tasmanian Devil, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake (there’s a reason there’s a long list of former band members), but the music is surprisingly tuneful, owing more to country and western than the SoCal punk scene they came from.
Did you know their old singer was professional baseball player Scott Radinsky? I saw him play with his later band Pulley in Detroit with Voodoo Glow Skulls (see below). This has been Trivia Corner.
This is actually a medley, starting out with the listed track then moving to “First Class Mail”, which follows on the original album. For a band with strong Christian ties, a line like “She sees these things through dogma's narrow eyes” is surprisingly critical of the church.
Voodoo Glow Skulls “You Don't Have A Clue”
Read this story about the fake split Hickey made using an irate message someone from VGS left on their answering machine, it’s funnier than anything I can think of.
One last fun song before the brutal final sequence, enjoy it!
The riff is sick, and the weird lyrics can be chalked up to the fact that the Swedish band didn’t speak English as a first language. This track probably goes along with some harrowing scene in the movie where the main character loses his girlfriend or something, I can’t remember. US fans probably know them from their opening track on seminal emo comp (Don’t Forget To) Breath, which is about as perfect an intro to 90s post-hardcore as you can ask for.
Christian Death Metal sounds like an oxymoron, but have you ever seen a crucifix? Clearly the most devout prefer a realistic depiction of Jesus’ torture and death. Living Sacrifice had an early run as a thrash act, but like a lot of metal bands in the late 90s, embraced groove metal (essentially nu metal minus the makeup). Most of their albums are on Tooth & Nail sub-label Solid State: yes, Christian Metal was so popular that Tooth & Nail needed a separate department to handle it.
It’s funny that the main character is played by Rick Rodney of militant straightedge band Strife, as his character gets mixed up with drug dealers. The band’s letter jacket logo, and the types of people I saw wearing their shirts, led me to believe they were a humourless chugga chugga hardcore band and… I wasn’t wrong. Bands that come across as self-help gurus always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do appreciate the cleaner sound and straightforward songwriting on their later album, Witness a Rebirth. Too many 90s hardcore bands tried to go all Industrial and it was never a good look.
This song is 8 minutes long, perfect for the end credits. Despite the credit to Far, it’s really a Jonah Matranga track, and a fairly accurate example of the music he’d make for the next few decades. Far had some pretty good songs, but getting wrapped up in the grunge/punk wave in the 90s rarely panned out in the long run. Nowadays “former punk dude goes solo acoustic” is a pretty normal path, but credit’s due to one of the first (but not the First). After Far disbanded, Jonah went the full DIY route, self-releasing a ton of home recordings, touring non-stop, and occasionally joining a full band.
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