E minor · Camelot 9A · 136 BPM
You Can't Bring Me Down
by Suicidal Tendencies
- 136
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 29
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Rocky George, the lead guitarist of Suicidal Tendencies, wrote "You Can't Bring Me Down" with vocalist Mike Muir. The 1990 single appeared on the Lights...Camera...Revolution! album and found moderate commercial success, though it never reached any of the major music charts. It helped move the band from punk rock toward thrash metal.
The track opens with a hypnotic whammy bar solo before shifting into a clean, almost acoustic rhythm guitar part. A solo built on 8-finger tapping and shredding carries the intro until the tempo speeds up and the main riff arrives with the first verse. Around the 3:40 mark the arrangement slows and cleans again for another solo, and near the end Muir abandons singing for a ranting, almost spoken delivery before a final extended chorus. His last words on the record are "Suicidal!", followed by a cackle.
A music video made for the single became a major hit on MTV's Headbangers Ball. It centered on the band's ban from appearances in Los Angeles, opening with a newspaper headline reading "Suicidal Tendencies Banned In L.A." In the clip, Muir is taken prisoner by unnamed authorities and executed on the electric chair despite his "gang" trying to free him. The United States Constitution flashes in the background during the execution, a jab at the PMRC, which the band believed limited the American constitutional right to freedom of speech. The song also appeared in Danny Way's part in the skate video The DC Video.
You Can't Bring Me Down runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.