How about this blast from the past… Iron Man– Sir Mix A Lot
nubs
Yeah, I love the hell out of Snakefarm, and I can’t explain why I enjoy the album so much. I hate individual components (e.g. drum machines) but love the whole. I don’t know why…
Anyway, I’m going to drop a archetypical example of badassery and then head to bed.
Beyond the song, Boys from the County Hell wins for best title, hands down. And the badassedness of the song is indisputable.
ETA: While the line “My brother earned his medals at Mai Lei in Vietnam” is hard enough, the original (and hard to find) lyric is “My brother earned his medals raping gooks in Vietnam”
Missed the window:
And by badassedness, I mean hard, violent, horrible, and irredeemable.
Warren Zevon’s Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.
I’ll also nominate Mr Bad Example, but the protagonist more bad than badass.
Most of Bon’s stuff was along those lines - in a very good way!
He does have a way with words…
A song about real-life badasses the Kray twins (or more accurately a song about a weirdly obsessive devotee of the Krays):
The Last of the Famous International Playboys - Morrissey
How about Alley Oop? He’s a mean motorscooter and a bad go-getter.
The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde
“Now one brave man, he tried to take them alone;
They left him lying in a pool of blood and laughed about it all the way home.”
If we’re doing gangsters, how about Pretty Boy Floyd? (Dylan version.)
Pretty boy grabbed a log chain
and the deputy grabbed his gun
And in the fight that followed
he laid that deputy down
I’ll pick an odd example, Link Wray’s “Rumble”, which isn’t so much about a single badass as it is about badassery in general. You listen to it, you are the badass.
Er, “Sympathy for the Devil”, by the Rolling Stones? It’s about a cultured, civilised badass. “Midnight Rambler”? Not so much a tough guy - he sneaks around - but you wouldn’t want to mess with him. I would have picked “Street Fighting Man”, but it’s a bit subversive, 'cause the main character eschews violence for a career as a rock and roll singer.
Indoor Life - Archeology
I suppose the lyrics are a little vague but at least to me it sounds like a song with a mad scientist as the narrator “the man who tames the beast”.
Let’s not forget about the meanest of the mean, the toughest of the tough, and the baddest of the bad…Charles Nelson Reilly
Ballad of the Green Berets