A Hardcore Look at Love and Life
Social Distortion’s take on past wrongs and our greatest challenge
I’ll start by saying that I’m a very new fan of Social Distortion; my knowledge of their story and songs is akin to that of someone whose buddy just introduced him to peanut butter on pancakes. It’s a weird but awesome thing to learn about, and this someone might go through a weird phase of trying peanut butter on other unconventional foods or eating way too much of it at once to make up for lost time before just settling down and appreciating a truly great breakfast food (or anytime of day food) combo without feeling like an imposter for liking something that he probably would have loved all along if he’d only known better. That’s to say I don’t know much about Social Distortion aside from that I enjoy their music and have found a real personal connection in a lot of their lyrics.
A good friend did the good deed of putting Social D - how real enthusiasts refer to the band - on my radar, and it’s been a true gift to my Spotify and my mind, which always benefits from the contribution of a voice that connects with something true and relatable. I’ve found that connection in this friendship and in the songs of Social Distortion, and I’m incredibly grateful for both. Music captures something intangible in very much the same way that a good conversation can. There’s emotion and meaning that run deeper than the words, and the work of Social Distortion (I still feel unqualified to refer to them as Social D) channels a specific mingling of angst, fear, hope and triumph that ring true of so many in the community of recovery.
The lead guitarist and vocalist, Mike Ness, draws from his own experience with addiction, and he dives into this struggle in the lyrics of songs such as “Ball and Chain”, “It Coulda Been Me” and “Drug Train”, all of which explicitly address the weight and chaos of addiction. Two songs that have particularly resonated with me at this point in time are “I Was Wrong” and “Angel’s Wings”. While “I Was Wrong” feels like a practice in analyzing our agency in past resentments, fears and conflicts, “Angel’s Wings” seems to present the next step in moving forward from that past into a solution that starts with surrender.
The lyrics in “I Was Wrong” run through a litany of past wrongdoings interwoven with the speaker’s repeated admission of his flawed perception of himself as the victim or as justified in his actions. This song walks us through the fundamental misconceptions we have in active addiction when we live in a world in which we view ourselves as the epicenter of our relationships with the rest of the world. The title introduces the diseased mindset that causes these misconceptions and pain by placing the first pronoun “I” as the agent in the statement. In titling the song “I Was Wrong”, Ness not only admits to being mistaken but goes so far as to suggest that the central problem in his past thinking lay in his conviction in the importance of self. Ness is the main songwriter and front man, so I’m going to refer to him as the speaker throughout this essay even if he didn’t intend it all to be biographical as such. Based on his story, I think his words ring true for him as well as for the thousands or millions of people like me who listen and connect profoundly with his first person speaker.
The song has this melancholy hard core sound to it. There is definite regret in the words, but it’s paired with acceptance. In admitting “I was wrong”, he accepts his role in each of these debilitating feelings: the perpetuation of fear, the self defensive anger, the isolation and self destruction all too characteristic of life in active addiction. Ness sings, when I was young, I was so full of fear. I hid behind anger, held back the tears. Something I’ve found in exploring past resentments and even current tendencies is the central role of fear in my thoughts and actions. Even when I’m not aware of it, fear occupies such a strong place in my mind. Fear ruled my thinking in this way for such a long time. Fear of not being enough, of rejection, of loss, of people leaving. All these and more advised how I interacted in relationships, how I presented myself and my story, and in so many small tendencies and ways of thinking I didn’t even realize were rooted in fear. Ness’s lyrics reflect the way in which fear can lead to our use of anger as a defense mechanism against appearing weak or showing emotion. This is the opposite of practicing vulnerability. Fear, this terrible advisor to whom we’ve given so much power for so long, tells us it’s the worst idea in the world and will lead to everyone hating us and leaving us if we let ourselves reveal true emotions when we’re struggling. So we hold them back.
Ness continues: It was me against the world; I was sure that I'd win, but the world fought back, punished me for my sins. I felt so alone, so insecure. I blamed you instead, made sure I was heard. When we live with an egocentric mindset, we slip into the mode of thinking that the world is against us, and even when we face conflicts and consequences that stem from the harmful cycle of addiction, we fail to see our place in these issues and view them as a punishment from outside us. When people leave us, criticize us or fail to empathize with us in the way our suffering minds deem appropriate, we feel cut off and abandoned. It’s such a lonely way to be. Even when the people in our lives try to help - they tried to warn me of my evil ways - we can’t always hear it, especially when we still lend so much power to the voice of fear in our minds.
In recalling past wrongs, Ness looks at his understanding of love: And I think about my loves. Well, I've had a few. Well, I'm sorry that I hurt them. Did I hurt you too? I took what I wanted, put my heart on the shelf, but how can you love me when you don't love yourself? This part really resonates with me. I find myself thinking of the people who have left their marks on my heart from time to time. These are all the loves- the romances and the friendships that held space in my life for a while before leaving for different reasons. I think about the people I’ve loved and lost, and even though I can see now that my perception of love wasn’t always what I think love is now, it still cuts deep to think of how terribly my failure to truly love myself or them hurt so many people. It’s also true that my perception of our relationship may have meant something entirely different to me than it did to any romantic partner or friend with whose life mine was entwined for a time.
It hurts especially because no matter what that love really was, at the time it felt true to us and hurts as such to lose it. When we try to love someone else despite hating ourselves, we fail to see the true nature of what we’re doing. In our failure to love self and in keeping our hearts safely disconnected, we do damage to ourselves, to the people we try to love, and to the love itself. We don’t know we’re doing it, and we can genuinely believe we’re giving the best love we can, but addiction keeps us from giving and receiving the fullness of love that is available to us. We want connection, but when we don’t know true connection, we mistake shadows of love - need, want and expectation - for the real thing. Wanting someone, needing someone or placing expectations on someone are not the same as loving someone, just as being wanted, needed or sought out are not the same as being loved.
Stephen Chbosky wrote that we “accept the love we think we deserve.” In active addiction, we don’t often think we deserve much. We accept fragments of the love we want, and we give semblances of love that we believe will make us more lovable. This is not true love, and it does not garner true connection. We create false representations of love and hold these up instead of the real thing, starving ourselves and others while the real thing waits just within reach. I’ve said I love you so many times and firmly believed in the truth of my feelings and words before really knowing the intensity and power of true love. It was all I knew, so it was true for me. But you can’t love with a heart on a shelf. I can see now that the love I thought I felt, even if true, was only a small taste of the full experience that love can be.
I recently read Good Omens, a hilarious satire by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and there’s a character in it - Famine - who thrives on creating faux food for his starving, fad-dieting worshippers, who consume it while wasting away to skin and bones. They feed on something they think will result in happiness via improved self image and don’t realize the fatal implications of their actions. It’s an ego-driven and ignorant practice; the people are technically eating, but they’re also starving themselves. I think our distorted attempts to love can look like that. When we’re giving and receiving love that only consists of self-serving motives and exists solely to thwart the fear of being alone, we’re starving ourselves and others.
When we can’t see love, we don’t listen with love. Ness sings, And they tried to warn me of my evil ways, but I couldn't hear what they had to say…I was fighting everything, but the only one that I hurt was me. I’ve definitely been here, the place when my failure to hear the love with which my people were speaking prevented me from surrendering and accepting the guidance and help available to me. Fear of appearing weak and of rejection told me that I only really deserved anyone’s love and respect if I handled things on my own and cleaned up my life to a reasonable extent before letting anyone know just how bad things had been. I wanted to be in a place where I could look back on my chaos before admitting it was ever there in the first place; this need to be in control and the fear of being seen just as I was prevented me from truly hearing what they had to say. This selfish perspective doesn’t help; it only hurts us and the ones who love us.
Throughout the song, Ness repeats I was wrong, emphasizing his role in the hurt and the wrongness of his past ways. Before we acknowledge our part in it all, we can think that factors beyond our control are working against us. Ness looks at this misconception with the lines How could someone's bad luck last so long? Until I realized that I was wrong. Until he reaches the point of seeing his place in the pain he carried with him in his younger days, the pain is just bad luck; and when the pain is bad enough to even overpower the pain of fear, we can be forced to ask for help: I got society's blood running down my face. Somebody help me get outta this place. It’s a pretty gruesome, messy image to present, and it’s notably not just the speaker’s blood of which he sings, but the blood of society. It’s as if he’s caused and experienced so much pain that he’s reached the point when asking for help has become necessary for survival.
If “I Was Wrong” is a dive into the past spanning to the point of finally seeking help, “Angel’s Wings”sounds like the answer to that desperate call. I don’t know what it is exactly - the sound or the words- but the way Ness opens this song picks at the crying chord in me. In “Angel’s Wings”, Ness takes on the voice of someone responding to the call for help we hear in “I Was Wrong”, and there are more than a few lyrics in this song that echo lines from the other song. The opening lines are slower paced, as though he’s taking the time to really acknowledge the person he’s talking to, even if that person is just himself: You say you're down on your luck, hey baby it's a long, long way up. Hold back now, hold back your fears. You say you're really down and out, and you feel like there's no way out now. Let go now let go of your tears some more. I think the part that kind of makes me want to cry is the part when he says “it’s a long, long way up.” It’s brutally honest, and I appreciate that, but I also know how hard it is. I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of remark a few times, and it’s tough to hear that you have a long, difficult time ahead of you. In addiction, I refused to believe it; but now I accept it as the honest truth of what I have to do to get where I want to be.
Ness says to hold back your fears and to let go your tears, words that echo the opening lines of “I Was Wrong”: I was so full of fear. I hid behind anger, held back the tears. In these lines, Ness recognizes the fear that holds him back; it cripples him emotionally and feeds him a warped world view. In “Angel’s Wings”, he shifts the language, urging you to hold back fear rather than be held back. And rather than holding onto our tears, we have to let them out. It’s so easy to listen to fear and believe that we can’t show emotion when we struggle, but holding in our true feelings only isolates us.
We reach a point in our addiction and isolation when we just can’t stand going on the way we’ve known. Before we even really know what to do about it, we can question our ability to maintain living in this way. Ness’s lyrics touch on this crisis: How many times have you asked yourself, Is this the hand of fate now that I’ve been dealt? You’re so disillusioned, this can’t be real. And you can’t stand now the way you feel. These lines reflect the moments we have when we question if this life is really all that there is. Addiction turns into misery over time, and even though we stay in it, most of us look at our lives and wonder how it became this bad or how it can possibly carry on. But addiction does affect our mentality, and often we think that it’s the only way to cope with the compounding pain that we experience. Even before we have the wherewithal to pull ourselves out of this egocentric cycle and accept the available help, we know we have to change something. Ness sings, I don’t care about what they say, I won’t live or die that way. Tired of figuring out things on my own, Angel’s wings won’t you carry me home? Knowing he can’t save himself, Ness calls on angel’s wings to take him home. This imploration comes from a place of desperation, of not knowing what else to do, and of being willing to believe in something that can do what he can’t for himself.
Calling on an angel to carry him home is just what we do in recovery when we place our trust in the plan of a higher power to return us to the place of conscious connection we’ve lost. We have to trust in our higher power if we’re going to start the real work of climbing that long, long way up that Ness speaks of in the opening lines of this song. If we think we can do it ourselves, we will keep trying to remain in control and will fail to see that we need something greater than ourselves to return home, the true home that never went anywhere even when we put distance between ourselves and the state into which we were born.
Ness closes “Angel’s Wings” on a confident note, reflecting on the change already taking place in him: I triumphed in the face of adversity and became the man I never thought I’d be. This first line echoes a part of the third step prayer, in which we offer ourselves to God, asking him to take away our difficulties so that victory over them will help others see him working in our lives. Ness’s song conveys a similar kind of trust in a higher power that allows him to experience this kind of victory over hardship and to be the kind of person he hadn’t imagined possible at his lowest point. I think we all experience this kind of recognition at points in recovery; we’re able to see changes in ourselves and to see that we’ve overcome obstacles that may have seemed impossible before. Ness recognizes his greatest challenge now as “a thing called love”, and it’s such an honest and humble admission to make for someone who has overcome so much. This simple expression of love requires vulnerability and the courage to act even with all the same fears that held us back before. Choosing to love without reservation is simultaneously the greatest risk we can take and the greatest gift we can give ourselves and others. We risk rejection, hurt and disappointment in choosing to trust and love, but we also give ourselves freedom from that shelf we kept our hearts on for so long when we made the self-serving choice to let fear dictate how we loved and received love. When Ness says, I don’t care about what they say, I wanna marry you someday, he expresses his love openly and honestly regardless of what others may think and of the eventual outcome of his determination. He doesn’t say he will marry this person, but that he wants to, and in doing so gives a clear idea of his feelings and intentions, leaving the rest in the hands of another person and his higher power. He closes with three lines entrusting himself and “you” to angel’s wings, placing this his greatest challenge in the hands of his higher power yet again. I like the phrasing here and the final recognition that he isn’t as tough as he used to think. He realizes that love - of himself and others - is his great endeavor in life now that he’s freed himself from fear and isolation, and he also recognizes that love requires surrender to circumstances beyond his power to control. He expresses his feelings and desires honestly before calling on angel’s wings again, thereby ceding his control over the actual outcome of expressing this love.
“Angel’s Wings” is about taking that step from despair into trust; it’s about the experience of hopelessness and the only action we can take to move out of that place. There’s a Tibetan phrase for this feeling - ye tang che - that means being completely exhausted and experiencing the hopelessness that forces us to give up and surrender self will. This hopelessness is necessary for us to accept that we can’t save ourselves on our terms. It’s more about losing hope in our expectations than about renouncing hope altogether. When we feel this “really down and out” and that “there’s no way out now”, we’re forced to accept another way and renounce self will, which is necessary for us to begin the path of recovery. From this place, we stop trying to orchestrate the movements of others in our life, we stop letting fear tell us how to love and who to let in, and we let go of even the need for certainty. When we stop trying to make the world what we think we want it to be, we’re able to finally see it clearly as it really is and accept it for that.
So I like Social Distortion. I like their songs; I think Mike Ness is incredibly cool (for more than being buddies with Bruce Springsteen, which is just the coolest); and I find their band name so fitting for the music they give us. I have no idea what the story is behind that name, but it reflects the kind of thinking we have in active addiction. We have this distorted view of ourselves and our relationships with others. We don’t understand love, we don’t realize the power we give fear, and we misinterpret the simplest communications and actions. We don’t recognize that we’re wrong until we’re able to see the hopelessness of our situations and trust in something greater to lead us home.
I don’t know if I’ve done justice to these couple songs or this band, but it’s my attempt to express what they’ve become for me. I grew up putting peanut butter on my pancakes; I did not grow up listening to Social Distortion. I’m grateful to have both in my life now.
