10/18: Test For Echo

I can't tell if I really love or really hate these lyrics.

Some kind of pictures on the sense o’clock news
Miles of yellow tape, silhouetted chalk lines
Tough-talking hood boys in pro-team logo knock-offs
Conform to uniforms of some corporate entity
Don’t change that station
It’s a Gangsta Nation
Now crime’s in syndication on TV

“Test for Echo” sounds incredible. I love the grungy, raw guitars—loud, discordant, and utterly 1990’s. Like they took the best ideas from Soundgarden and did then in the Rush style. As such, “Test for Echo” speaks to a very particular era of my adolescence that makes my soul sing with nostalgia.

But… the lyrics, y’all. Huge misfire for me. Maybe? I can’t decide.

On the one hand, some of the lyrical references to “Gangsta Nation” and so forth feel so dated they might as well be wearing a poodle skirt. Plus, the emphasis on “hood boys” and “gangstas on TV” veers this dangerously close to old guys shaking their fists at The Youths.

Except, I think that’s kind of the point of the song? As best as I can figure, “Test for Echo” is more of a critique of modern media coverage: At this point in the ‘90’s, we were seeing the rise of 24-hour news networks and the Internet; we were inundated with wall-to-wall TV coverage of Rodney King, the Michael Jackson trial, OJ Simpson, COPS, and so many more. The nightly news became a veritable parade of Black men on trial, one long, unending media circus masquerading as a justice system. There’s an irony to the lyrics, or maybe an unreliable narrator, something that I just can’t put my finger on.

I can’t decide. What do y’all think?