Sacred Cow Saturday: Social Distortion – “Mommy’s Little Monster”

Punk rock has been around long enough  to hold within its musical boundaries a slew of albums considered both classic and essential. We here at Dying Scene love and appreciate these classic albums, but every once and a while we have the urge to challenge what the community has deemed sacred. Every Saturday, two Dying Scene writers will square off head-to-head and either attack or defend one of these so-called classics. Up for slaughter today is Social Distortion‘s “Mommy’s Little Monster.” Does the 1983 classic hold up today? You be the judge. Tim Ryan will be defending and Jo will be attacking.

Let the battle begin!

The Defense

Social Distortion’s debut album, Mommy’s Little Monster hit shelves for the first time in 1983. For context, this is two years after Black Flag’s Damaged, one year after Bad Religion’s How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, and was recorded after a very successful tour with the now heralded Youth Brigade. In short, Mommy’s Little Monster was released at exactly the right moment in history, right in the eye of the 80s LA punk storm.

The album was almost instantly critically acclaimed, and while not as successful as their later albums, it set them on plenty a punk’s map. Now, the album is regarded as a classic, and I’m here to defend it’s honor.

At nine songs, one might expect a vicious burst of punk energy that ends seemingly before it begins. One would be wrong; what Social Distortion instead provides is a record that shows an incredibly diverse range of influence, from the classic rock the band is now known for imitating, to post-punk to whatever else, while simultaneously broadcasting exactly what the band will evolve into.

Mommy’s Little Monster is separated from it’s peers by Mike Ness’ instantly recognizable vocals, and the blues inspired guitar work on showcase throughout. The more midtempo songs on the album help demonstrate another strong point – the production. The album is full of dirty, gritty sounds that make the listener feel as though he’s just gotten away with some kind of crime, especially on tracks like “It Wasn’t a Pretty Picture”, which is appropriately enough about a litany of crimes being committed, and the opening guitar squeal and steady pulse of “Hour of Darkness.”

The album closes with a huge risk (something I’ll call “Jungleland Syndrome” after Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Born to Run” closing track) and wins big. Mommy’s Little Monster could be called a classic based on the strength of this song alone, as homages and odes to it abound in modern punk. Opening with a venomous arpeggiated chord, the song wastes no time introducing gong crashes and a monstrous sounding organ, before closing with the most badassest of outros. Surprising, experimental, urgent, and most importantly, classic, the song works as a representation of Mommy’s Little Monster as a whole.

The Attack

Here’s the thing about Social Distortion’s Mommy’s Little Monster— it’s got some of my favorite album art of all time. The post-apocalyptic cover sketch looks like something out of Alas Babylon meets “Nightmare before Christmas”. The child in a mask, sitting next to the ghoul on the couch of what was once a house, mindlessly watching TV of an atom bomb exploding is a great image. I want to hear an entire album about this single image.

Unfortunately, the cover art could be off a totally different CD and make as much sense as it does here. This end-of-days imagery has only a casual relation with the content of the package- in fact, while Social Distortion are clearly emotional and pissed off about something on Mommy’s, we never really find out what. All the rage feels half-baked, at best. All the elements that make the band great are starting out here, from the melodic hooks to Ness’s unique voice– yet while tracks like “Hour of Darkness” start to scratch the surface of a deeper lyrical meaning, the words sound as if they are not ripe for speaking just yet.

Mommy’s little Monster isn’t awful for what it is– the problem is that what it is happens to be a spinning 3 min West Coast punk song played 9 times in a row. This redundancy is a side effect of the birth of the album- recorded in a spur of energy over the course of one day. It’s not an awful first attempt at an LP, it’s just not one that’s strong enough for the amount of praise it gets in the punk catalog.

The majority of the lyrics seem clunky. Syllables are bent and pulled to fill the amount of time left in a verse. As a result, much of Mommy’s plays like a group of musicians who wrote their parts in separate rooms, and came together to play them as they were recorded, hoping for something that might work.

Songs like “Anti Fashion” read like the lyrics of someone trying too hard to be contrarian–“You are so plastic you could be a Barbie Doll,” Ness belts, “where did you get those $100 pants? You know I’d love to rip them up.” Not to be outdone in terms of foot-stomping insubordination, “Telling Them” contends “I slam the door, say, ‘shut up you jerk” before falling into a chorus of simply… “ahhhhhh.”

Maybe Mommy’s sounded better in pre-internet days, when it was out of print and only your brother’s buddy had a copy he might let you listen to if you asked forever. There is the hint of something better yet to come hiding in the title track, and in others. I can fully understand why a Social D fan would want a copy of this in their collection. Historians of West Coast Punk have all the right to love this album for its placeholder in time. But for the occasion listener, their later work is significantly stronger.