Track Listing
1. Next Big Thing
2. I Got You Babe
3. Back to Africa
4. Master Race Rock
5. Teengenerate
6. California Sun
7. Two Tub Man
8. Weekend
9. (I Live for) Cars and Girls
Review
Intelligent? No. Adult? Certainly Not. Politically Correct? Nope. Insightful? Not Really. Musically accomplished? Not that much. Fun? Yep.
The Dictators bring us an interesting album which is prefiguring a lot of what was to come in terms of punk and generally young people music. It all has a veneer of frat boy music, with a little more than a hit of the Beasty Boys both in lyrical content and in the voice of Manitoba. We saw that the New York Dolls were pretty close to punk, but they were still too smart, all those pretences are dropped here, and the Ramones and Pistols would thank them immensely.
But more than anything this is a very funny and fun album, the music is singa-longable, the riffs are great and it is all thouroughly enjoyable silliness. Even the tracks which look scary at first sight like Back to Africa and Master Race Rock are actually nothing serious or racist, Back To Africa's chorus is "I want to go Back to Africa" and the Master Race Rock seems to be about healthy living snobbery, if we take into account the fact that most of the members were Jewish it all makes more sense as a put on.
So a fun but ultimately inconsequential album which deserves its place in the list because of the fact that it opened the doors wide for this type of beer guzzling, girls, cars and surf music for the punk generation. So, good on them. Get it at Amazon UK
or US
.Track Highlights
1. Master Race Rock
2. The Next Big Thing
3. I Live For (Cars And Girls)
4. California Sun
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The Dictators are represented in the "Punk Wing" of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, in Cleveland, Ohio. Steven Van Zandt called them"The connective tissue between the eras of The MC5, Stooges, NY Dolls, and the punk explosion of the mid to late 70's".
The Next Big Thing, in 2006 at CBGB's:
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