“Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth

Dave Mustaine wrote every word and note of "Symphony of Destruction" for Countdown to Extinction, Megadeth's fifth album, released in 1992, and co-produced it with Max Norman, who also engineered and mixed. The lyric imagines an ordinary citizen handed the reins of the country while a phantom government pulls the public's strings, a paranoid civics lesson with the volume up. Mustaine sings and trades electric guitar with Marty Friedman over David Ellefson's bass and Nick Menza's drums.

Radio took to it in a big way, and it became one of the band's best-known songs. Wayne Isham's video, mostly black and white, cuts between the band members playing and a scrambled story of a political candidate gunned down and the riots that follow; MTV spun it heavily at first, then judged the assassination scene too harsh and had it edited.

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