Wel­come to the third part of our “Spot­light On: Szi­get 2010″ series. In this part, we will be look­ing at the legendary punk rock band, Bad Reli­gion. The band were foun­ded in LA in 1979, and since then have released on aver­age one record every two years. The ori­ginal mem­bers were all still in high school when the band got together, and although the ori­ginal line-up is all but reunited now, Greg Graffin, the vocal­ist, is the only mem­ber to have been with the band every step of the way. Their first record was released in 1981, and was an EP entitled “Bad Reli­gion”. It was released on Epi­taph Records, which was foun­ded by gui­tar­ist, Brett Gure­witz. How­ever, the band ditched Epi­taph for their eighth stu­dio album (and a rerelease of their seventh).

Gure­witz left the band tem­por­ar­ily in 1984, while he was in rehab for a drug prob­lem. How­ever, in 1987, he rejoined the band, and they released their third album, Suf­fer, which is widely seen as the band’s best album, and is con­sidered almost single-handedly respons­ible for revital­ising the SoCal punk scene. Des­pite this, it never made the charts. Without Bad Reli­gion though, we prob­ably wouldn’t have bands like blink-182, Greenday, NOFX, Ran­cid, Samiam, and by exten­sion, thou­sands, per­haps hun­dreds of thou­sands more. How­ever, all was not well in Bad Reli­gion, and in 1994, Gure­witz left the band, ostens­ibly because the Epi­taph band The Off­spring were mak­ing it big, but it was widely under­stood that it was not an amic­able split. The fight became quite personal.

In 2001, the band left Atlantic to go back home to Epi­taph, and wel­comed Gure­witz back into their ranks. Their four­teenth stu­dio album has been their most suc­cess­ful to date, chart­ing at 35. The word is that the next album will be released late Septem­ber this year.

The band are spe­cial among punk bands in the way that they use har­mon­ies in their vocals, and have intel­li­gent lyr­ics, which exploit a good range of vocab­u­lary. Des­pite writ­ing polit­ical songs, they tend to shy away from point­ing the fin­ger, pre­fer­ring instead to let the listener make his or her own decision. Their songs are ubi­quit­ous, appear­ing on film soundtracks, com­pil­a­tions, video games, and in more or less any other format ima­gin­able, as does their logo.

Their logo itself has caused a fair bit of con­tro­versy — the Chris­tian cross with a red circle and line through it. The band claim that it was ori­gin­ally just meant to “piss off” their par­ents, and it was easy “to put on T-shirts and for kids to spray paint onto walls”. They also claim that they regret choos­ing it because of its anti-religious con­nota­tions, how­ever, they still use the logo widely on their mer­chand­ise, mar­ket­ing mater­i­als, and album covers.

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Image found here, released under a CC-BY-SA licence by xCaru