Today’s album of the day is one of my top five favorite albums of all-time, Warrant’s masterpiece Dog Eat Dog. This was the band’s third album and the final record that frontman Jani Lane wrote entirely by himself. After this album flopped, he lost his confidence and the other guys in the band started co-writing the songs and they were never as good as the material Jani wrote for this album. While Dog Eat Dog does have some sex songs in the form of “Machine Gun” and “Hole In My Wall,” for example, they weren’t overly cheerful fluff like “Cherry Pie.” They were somewhat darker and not nearly as cheesy. But it’s Dog Eat Dog’s more mature material that makes this album their best. From the sci-fi, prophetic “April 2031” to the contemplative “Andy Warhol Was Right,” this album actually features some of the most brilliant lyrics ever written by any artist of any genre. Honestly, I am a huge lover of music and own a few thousand CDs and a thousand records and I’ve been a music journalist for over 20 years and I have seldom heard an album with better lyrics than some of the songs on here. And the ballads “The Bitter Pill” and “Let It Rain” are easily the best songs Jani Lane ever wrote and two of the greatest love songs ever recorded. “The Bitter Pill” is truly epic and even includes this weird bridge in German that sounds like something Queen would have produced in their prime. There are also other unexpected things among these songs. “Andy Warhol Was Right” begins with a young child singing the first verse of the song about someone with an unfortunate childhood who grows up and murders a celebrity. “Why did God make you so famous when he only spit on me,” Lane sings later in the song. “I want to bathe in your light / I want to be on the news / if I take your life, it’s nothing personal / I’m just a boy and his toy gun, dying for attention.” This song still gives me chills over 30 years after it was released. Likewise, “April 2031″ also features some children singing in rather eerie way.” These surprising elements give the songs extra depth and make it rise to a level that few “hair bands” ever achieved. Dog Eat Dog is, easily, the best album the genre has ever produced, period. It simply does not get better than this.
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