“God is a Bullet” by Concrete Blonde

"God Is a Bullet" kicked off the campaign for Free, Concrete Blonde's second album, as its lead single in 1989, and it is an anti-gun song written from street level. The band lived in Los Angeles and had seen shootings and gun trouble up close; Johnette Napolitano and James Mankey wrote it around 1987, and the band produced it themselves, with Earle Mankey recording and Chris Tsangarides handling the mix.

Napolitano didn't soften any of it when she talked to The Ottawa Citizen in 1989. She blamed a country raised on too many John Wayne movies, and she remembered somebody shooting out her car windows while the band was rehearsing, and another day watching a man pull a gun on someone and driving on with her head ducked beneath the dashboard. The sound of gunfire, she said, had become so ordinary in L.A. that it proved things were out of hand.

The single reached No. 15 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks. Jane Simpson directed the video, which broke into rotation on MTV even as the channel pushed the band to hand over a different one.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.