Hang the Pope

"Hang the Pope" is the sixth song on the 1986 album, Game Over, the first bow by thrash-metal band Nuclear Assault, penned shortly after it formed from a collaboration of Anthrax bassist Danny Lilker and former roadie John Connelly. A short (officially 38 seconds!!) throwaway piece, the offensively uptempo song has long been a fan favorite. The music is brutal and incoherent (especially as performed live). The refrain is simple -- it being impossible to fit anything complex into that span of time -- and yet still meaningful, with the words of the song being entirely as follows:

Hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang the Pope,
Hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang him with a fucking rope.
Hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang the Pope,
Hang the Pope, hang the Pope, hang him with a fucking rope.

Let's go to the Vatican; get him out of bed.
Put the noose around his neck and hang him till he's dead.

Lather, rinse, repeat (though the second repetition goes "hang him till he's fucking dead"). That being all there is to the song, no reason is given in support of this proposed hanging. At the time that the song was first released, the Pope in question was John Paul II, still comparatively young as popes go, and highly popular. A song advocating the violent murder of such a person was, naturally, lowly aimed at simple mischievous provocation. This is not to suggest that there were not legitimate critics of the Church and its leader, as exemplified in Sinead O'Connor's famous tearing-up of John Paul II's picture on Saturday Night Live a few years later. But Nuclear Assault's motivation in selecting the topic seems to have been a dose of semi-ignorant childishness.

Two and a half decades on, things changed. The Roman Catholic Church became engulfed in a scandal as it was discovered that child-molesting priests had been shielded by a high-level cover-up, having been simply shifted from one parish to another with no public reckoning. And, the popular Pope passed away, to be replaced by one who did not inspire such affection, but rather inspired mash-ups with Star Wars uber-villain Emperor Palpatine. This, in turn (or perhaps coincidentally, but probably not), inspired a resurgence in the popularity of the song measurable in YouTube views and cover versions (including, believe it or not, even a "folk music" version).