Make Me Laugh

Album: State of Euphoria (1988)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Anthrax laying into televangelism, a popular target of thrash metal bands of that period (Slayer's "Read Between The Lies" comes to mind). Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante explained to Melody Maker September 17, 1988: "There's a lot of these guys in America. You turn on a channel, and you see a coliseum-type place, and there's this preacher looking out at you through the camera with this imploring expression, and he goes on about the will of God, and 'we really need the money'. And we see this all the time, and we think, 'this is so ridiculous'. It makes us laugh. But the sad part, the unfunny part, is that people believe in all this s--t because they have nothing else to believe in. And the evil part is that this guy is sucking the lost and lonely in, brainwashing them to send in money and then everything will be beautiful. It's sick.
    "The other thing," he added, "is that a lot of these evangelist organisations are ready to put down heavy metal music as corrupting, and there's the PMRC, but in reality they are the bad eggs, the mind-manipulators. All we're doing is playing our music.
    "The thing that hurts us is when some kid commits suicide, and they find a tape in his room with Anthrax, Ozzy, etc on it – and right away, they blame the music. They don't go into the background of how the kid got f---ed up, how his family was. Could be that the music was what kept the kid going for so long, his only reason for living. Who knows?"

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