Holy Wars... The Punishment Due

About Holy Wars... The Punishment Due

"Holy Wars... The Punishment Due" is the opening track of thrash metal band Megadeth's 1990 album Rust in Peace. The song has an unusual structure: it opens with a fast thrash section, shifting at 2:26 after an acoustic bridge by Marty Friedman to a different, slower and heavier section called "The Punishment Due", interspersed by two guitar solos played by Friedman, before speeding up again with a third and final solo played during this segment by Dave Mustaine. The entire song is commonly referred to as "Holy Wars", with "The Punishment Due" referring to the heavier slower section. The lyrics deal with global religious conflict, particularly in Israel and Northern Ireland. In an interview with the UK magazine Guitarist, Dave Mustaine said that he was inspired to write the song in Northern Ireland, when he discovered bootlegged Megadeth T-shirts were on sale and was dissuaded from taking action to have them removed on the basis that they were part of fundraising activities for "The Cause" (i.e. the Provisional Irish Republican Army). "The Punishment Due" is based on the popular Marvel comic book character, the Punisher. A cover version of the song is playable in the band simulation game Rock Revolution. The master recording is purchasable as part of the Rust in Peace album pack on the Rock Band band simulation platform, is playable in the Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock game, and is available as DLC for Rocksmith 2014. The music video for "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due" was filmed in August 1990 (around the time of the Gulf War in 1990). It depicts news footage of various armed conflicts, mainly from the Middle East interspliced with footage of the band playing. more »

Year:

1990

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Brother will kill brother
Spilling blood across the land
Killing for religion
Something I don't understand

Fools like me, who cross the sea
And come to foreign lands
Ask the sheep, for their beliefs
Do you kill on God's command?

A country that's divided
Surely will not stand
My past erased, no more disgrace
No foolish naive stand

The end is near, it's crystal clear
Part of the master plan
Don't look now to Israel
It might be your homelands

Holy wars

Upon my podium, as the
Know it all scholar
Down in my seat of judgement
Gavel's bang, uphold the law
Up on my soapbox, a leader
Out to change the world
Down in my pulpit as the holier
Than-thou-could-be-messenger of God

Wage the war on organized crime
Sneak attacks, repel down the rocks
Behind the lines
Some people risk to employ me
Some people live to destroy me
Either way they die, they die

They killed my wife, and my baby
With hopes to enslave me
First mistake, last mistake!
Paid by the alliance, to slay all the giants
Next mistake, no more mistakes

Fill the cracks in, with judicial granite
Because I don't say it,
Don't mean I ain't thinkin' it
Next thing you know, they'll take my thoughts away
I know what I said, now I must scream of the overdose
And the lack of mercy killings
Mercy killings
Mercy killings
Killings, killings, killings, killings
Next thing you know, they'll take my thoughts away

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Megadeth

Megadeth is an American heavy metal band from Los Angeles, California which was formed in 1983 by Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson, after Mustaine's expulsion from Metallica. The band has since released 13 studio albums. A pioneer of the American thrash metal movement, Megadeth rose to international fame in the 1980s and was ranked as one of the "Big Four of Thrash" along with Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax, who were responsible for creating, developing and popularizing the thrash metal sub-genre. more »

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