Bad Cop/Bad Cop, The Ride
In a time of chronic rage, happiness is revolutionary.
Bad Cop Bad Cop has done angry. The band’s 2017 full-length, Warriors, was recorded in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The Los Angeles quartet’s new full-length, The Ride (Fat Wreck Chords, June 19, 2020), shows what happens when you come out the other side of that anger.
“It’s not that I am just stoked or blind to suffering,” says singer-guitarist Jennie Cotterill. “I think anger is a legitimate and understandable reaction to injustice and wrongdoing. It’s just that for myself, I am trying to move past ‘reaction’ into productive ‘response.’”
“Sometimes when things are so bad, instead of staying there in the bad, you rise above it into ways that you can create the kind of life that you want to have,” adds singer-guitarist Stacey Dee.
That’s not to say The Ride finds BCBC singing “Kumbaya” and staring at their navels to ignore the world around them. “Certain Kind of Monster” and “Pursuit of Liberty”—both written and sung by bassist Linh Le—are blistering repudiations of the current administration’s treatment of immigrants.
The former is an imagined conversation with an ICE agent, and the latter juxtaposes her family’s immigration to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 to current events, something she’s never explored musically.
“I have a really hard time writing anything personal because I always think to myself, ‘What kind of message are you trying to convey?’ If it feels too focused on how I am affected by it, then to me the song loses its meaning,” Le says. “I had to get over that silliness and learn to balance my perspective with the message I'm trying to send.”
The message BCBC is sending this time around is less about wagging your finger at others, or giving the middle one to the Man, than it is about self-love and acceptance. As Cotterill puts it, “Love is a more powerful truth than anger.” That positivity fuels many of The Ride’s tracks: “Originators,” “Simple Girl,” “Community,” “I Choose,” “Perpetual Motion Machine,” and “The Mirage” exude confidence, gratitude, and compassion. In 2020, such things qualify as contrarian.
“These are political statements—self-love is a huge fucking statement,” Dee adds. “It’s asking people to find it in themselves to create the life that they really want to have so they're not in turmoil, so they're not in a place of stress and sickness.”
Dee speaks from experience. In 2018 she was hospitalized twice for different ailments, then discovered she had stage one breast cancer at the end of the year. Fortunately it was highly treatable, but the experience was life-altering. Dee captures it with brutal frankness on “Breastless,” whose bright melodies belie the struggle described in the lyrics.
“There were nights where I would lay on the floor and cry for hours about everything in my life, just to get it the fuck out of my body,” Dee says. “I didn't want to fucking keep hanging on to that shit for the rest of my life.”
Instead, she had surgery to remove the 2-centimeter lump and hit the road for a monthlong tour 10 days later. “I had to be positive about it, that I'm going to look at this as like, ‘I made it through, and I'm finally strong enough to walk through something like this without it letting it destroy me,’” Dee says.
The perspective behind The Ride lends it an undeniable maturity, without losing its power. Recorded throughout much of 2018 and 2019 by Johnny Carey and Fat Mike of production team the D-Composers, the album boasts all of the elements of BCBC’s sound: big guitars, lock-step bass and drums (the latter by powerhouse drummer Myra Gallarza), intricate vocal harmonies, and plenty of attitude.
It’s just that this time, the attitude is encouraging, not raging. Nowhere is that more apparent than lilting album closer “Sing With Me.” Built around acoustic guitar, piano, and Cotterill’s voice, it’s an exhortation to “sing with me / or sing your own song / I don’t mind, just as long as you find / a voice.”
“A creative outlet is a mental-health resource,” Cotterill says. “If you get to express yourself in any way and feel that power and agency and independence that comes with it, you are stronger in every way.”
“Stronger in every way” aptly describes Bad Cop Bad Cop in 2020. The anger may have taken a back seat on The Ride, but what’s taken its place is even more powerful.
Fat Wreck Chords will release The Ride on June 19, 2020.
Track listing:
Originators
Certain Kind of Monster
Take My Call
Simple Girl
Breastless
Perpetual Motion Machine
Community
Pursuit of Liberty
The Mirage
I Choose
Chisme
Sing With me