“State of Massachusetts” by Dropkick Murphys

"The State of Massachusetts" was the first single from The Meanest of Times, the Dropkick Murphys' sixth album, issued on Hellcat on February 4, 2008, though modern rock radio was already spinning it the previous October. It's Celtic punk with a hard lesson at its core, a song about what drugs do to the people who take them and to their families. The title's a wink, too: Massachusetts is formally a commonwealth, one of only four in the union.

The video was shot in the abandoned Curley Auditorium on the Long Island Health Campus in Boston Harbor, next door to one of Boston's biggest emergency shelters for the homeless. Rolling Stone ranked it 83rd among the best songs of 2007, MTV's Nitro Circus took it as a theme song, and in 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, it finally cracked a Billboard chart, peaking at 14 on Rock Songs.

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