White Light White Trash Analysis

In 1996 Social Distortion, Orange County, California punk stalwarts, released their third major label album, White Light, White Heat, White Trash, to critical acclaim. It was the band’s first album in four years, the belated follow up to their first major success, Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell. In those interim years the band lost its longtime drummer and would lose a second drummer before the album was released. Mike Ness, the pumped-up, tattooed singer and songwriter, struggled with newmaterial. The band spent a year in the recording studio, the final results sounding much like previous Social D albums, with its signature blend of roots rock and punk, angry, angst-ridden lyrics and Ness’s gravelly baritone. Upon the album’s release, the band netted legendary punk drummer Chuck Biscuits, of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and D.O.A. fame.

Formed in 1979 by childhood friends Mike Ness and Dennis Danell, Social Distortion came at the tail end of the initial punk movement. From the beginning, Ness’s songs were marked with anger and frustration. As it was in the beginning, so it is with White Light, White Heat, White Trash. As Lorraine Ali, wrote in Rolling Stone, “One reason for Social D’s
Suburban punks from Orange County, they entered a scene dominated by Los Angeles groups like X, the Weirdos, and proto-hardcore bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. The band’s early years were tumultuous. Fast driving hard core was replacing the punk rock of the seventies. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was dead of an overdose and a hero to some. Hard drugs were rampant. “I started drinking and doing drugs when I was eleven,” said Ness. “I did them until I was twentythree. I got thrown out of my house when I was fifteen. Then I just survived. My houses were mostly just a bunch of dope fiends shooting up,” he told Chris Mundy of Rolling