Album: Flip Your Wig
Year: 1985
(Mould)
Of course Flip Your Wig wasn’t all pure pop songs. Instead, they were the exception on an album that used their cleaner sound to support several anthems, like Bob Mould’s barn-burning “Divide And Conquer.”
In fact, it was the combo of heartfelt love songs and heartfelt anthems that has always caused me to rank Flip Your Wig slightly higher than New Day Rising, but only slightly, because both records were insanely strong.
Anchored by a massive, careeening Mould guitar riff that continually lands in the vortex of Grant Hart’s drum, “Divide and Conquer” is one of Mould’s angrier songs. You can tell not just because he sings it in his angry voice, but because he’s railing about the alienation caused out by the modern world of the mid-1980s.
Which, sure, probably seems somewhat quaint these days, even if he seems to predict the internet:
We’ll invent some new computers
Link up the global village
And get AP, UPI, and Reuters
To tell everybody, news news
The key to “Divide and Conquer” is that it doesn’t really have a chorus, so it feels utterly relentless gathering ever more momentum as Mould spews verse after verse after verse listing all of the things he’s worried about until he runs out of works and just start singing the riff.
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na, whoa
After that, Grant Hart comes in to help him out, and they trade off singing “divide and conquer” for awhile as that unstoppable riff just plays and plays and plays until collapsing at the end from sure exhaustion.
Like a lot of Bob Mould’s anthems on Flip Your Wig, “Divide and Conquer” harnesses the power his of guitar, his words and his melodicism almost effortlessly.
“Divide and Conquer”
Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Certain Songs Spotify playlist
(It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.)
Support “Certain Songs” with a donation on Patreon
Go to my Patreon page