Metal Edge Presents
Highlights
READER POLL: THE TOP 5 MÖTLEY CRÜE SONGS OF ALL TIME
Photo by Chris Walter/Getty Images You voted. We counted. And for a band whose catalog spans grimy Sunset Strip proto-punk, arena-crushing ballads and one of the most notorious comeback singles in metal history, the results say a lot about what Crüe fans actually treasure — starting with a winner that predates the band's first major-label deal. Here are your top five, counting down to No. 1. 5. "Home Sweet Home" Power ballads were a cottage industry by the mid-Eighties, but almost none were built like this. "Home Sweet Home" opens with Tommy Lee — the most kinetic drummer of his generation — alone at a piano, playing a melody so patient and mournful it barely sounds like the band that made 'Shout at the Devil.' Mick Mars' guitar, when it finally arrives, is all sustain and ache, and Vince Neil delivers one of the least sneering vocals of his career. Released on 1985's 'Theatre of Pain,' the song became a phenomenon on MTV, where fans requested the video so relentlessly on Dial MTV that the network instituted a policy retiring clips after a set run — the so-called Crüe rule. What's remarkable in hindsight is how unguarded it is: a band whose entire brand was excess admitting to exhaustion and homesickness in the middle of the ride. Four decades later, your votes suggest it still hits the same nerve. Even the dirtiest band on the Strip wanted to go home. 4. "Wild Side" If "Home Sweet Home" is the Crüe at their most vulnerable, "Wild Side" is the band at their most dangerous. The standout from 1987's 'Girls, Girls, Girls' opens with Nikki Sixx committing outright blasphemy — twisting the Lord's Prayer into a street sermon for runaways, dealers and everyone else surviving on the wrong side of Hollywood Boulevard. It was the darkest lyric he'd written to that point, and it came from an honest place: Sixx was deep in the heroin addiction that would nearly kill him within the year. Musically, it's arguably the heaviest thing the band ever cut. Tommy Lee's stuttering, syncopated drum pattern hits more like Judas Priest than the glam pack the Crüe were lumped in with, and Mars answers with one of the grimiest riffs of his career. That contradiction — a band at its commercial peak writing its most menacing material — is exactly why the song endures, and why it's the cut fans cite when arguing the Crüe deserved credit as a genuinely heavy band. Your votes make the same argument. 3. "Primal Scream" The dark horse of this poll — and maybe its most telling result. "Primal Scream" arrived as a new track on 1991's 'Decade of Decadence' compilation, the kind of contractual bonus song most bands phone in. The Crüe wrote one of their fiercest. Credited to all four members, it's a groove-heavy, weirdly funky slab of hard rock that absorbed the changing early-Nineties landscape while sounding unmistakably like themselves. Lyrically, it turns the anger inward and outward at once — Sixx processing childhood wreckage and hard-won sobriety, Neil spitting the verses with a rasp that sounds genuinely wounded. There's a case it's the best vocal of Neil's tenure, which carries extra weight given that within months he and the band would split. That makes "Primal Scream" one of the final statements of the classic lineup, a glimpse of the road the Nineties Crüe might have traveled. Nearly three and a half decades on, you put a compilation track above "Home Sweet Home" and "Wild Side." Consider it a verdict. SHOP MOTLEY CRUE 2. "Kickstart My Heart" The backstory borders on myth, except every word is true. December 1987: Nikki Sixx overdoses on heroin, is declared clinically dead, and is revived with adrenaline shots to the chest. Two years later he mined the worst night of his life for "Kickstart My Heart," the second single from 1989's 'Dr. Feelgood' and three minutes of pure velocity — a song about being slammed back into existence, written by the only guy with firsthand experience. Fittingly, it's the leanest machine in the catalog. Mars' revving talk-box intro remains one of the great opening statements in hard rock, and the newly sober band — recording with producer Bob Rock — discovered that clarity could hit harder than chaos ever did. A Grammy nomination followed, then decades of trailers, arenas and video games. The ubiquity never dulled it: the song still closes Crüe shows because nothing can follow it. There's a poetic justice your ballots recognize. The band's nearest brush with the end produced the song most likely to outlive them. MOTLEY CRUE ‘TOO FAST FOR LOVE’ 45TH ANNIVERSARY LP 1. "Live Wire" And at No. 1, the first shot fired. "Live Wire" opened 1981's 'Too Fast for Love,' the debut the band originally released on their own Leathür Records, and it remains the purest distillation of what Mötley Crüe was: punk desperation, metal muscle and glam theatricality crammed into one twitching, sweat-soaked anthem. Everything that made the band famous is already here at full strength. Sixx's gift for making menace catchy drives the whole thing, Mars' riff is nasty and economical, and Lee plays like a man being electrocuted — right down to the breakdown that collapses into coiled, whispering tension before detonating again. Neil's shriek sounds hungry in a way that can't be faked: four broke maniacs deciding they'd become the biggest band in the world through sheer voltage. The song helped turn a self-released record into an Elektra deal and never left the setlist. That your ballots put it above every platinum-plated hit that followed says something genuinely cool about this readership: you value the spark over the fireworks. According to you, the Crüe never topped their opening statement — hard to argue with the wire that started the fire.
Korn’s ‘Life Is Peachy’ and the Changing Face of Alternative Music
How a turbulent era, a self-destructive band, and a generation’s alienation fueled a platinum-selling album
AVENGED SEVENFOLD ANNOUNCE COLLAB WITH STREETWEAR BRAND REPRESENT.
Avenged Sevenfold have previewed a collaboration with 247, the performance label operating under British luxury streetwear brand REPRESENT, in a joint Instagram earlier today. Photo by Dimitry Mak The teaser offered a first look at a sleeveless shirt carrying the band’s name across the chest over Casey Howard’s “City of Evil” artwork, with 247’s wordmark in matching lettering on the back. Photo by Dimitry Mak 247 launched in 2020 and has since become the fastest-growing vertical inside a Manchester company that reported £80.8 million in revenue in 2023. REPRESENT’s rock catalog has run through the mainline until now, where Metallica, Oasis, a five-years-in-the-making Iron Maiden capsule and a Guns N’ Roses collection the label called its fifth major rock collaboration arrived as washed cotton priced around $165 a shirt. 247 built its name on ultra-endurance athletes like Russ Cook and William Goodge, which puts A7X in front of a customer who has never queued at a merch table. Photo by Dimitry Mak The drop lands in the closing stretch of the band’s summer. The co-headline run with Good Charlotte wraps August 27 at Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre in Phoenix, three days before a one-off with A Day to Remember at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles.
