Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers

This is ZZ Top at their most unrepentantly carnivalesque — a song that announces its intentions in the title and then delivers on every one of them without apology or irony. The riff stomps rather than shuffles, all downstroke aggression over a kickdrum that hits like a fist on a bar top. Frank Beard's drumming here has a particular looseness that keeps the whole thing from feeling mechanical — it grooves despite its bluntness. Gibbons' guitar is turned up and slightly nasty, not the pristine tone of a studio perfectionist but the sound of an amplifier being asked to work just a little harder than it wants to. The lyric is essentially a manifesto for a certain tribe of outsiders who have no interest in respectability and find the whole concept mildly offensive. But the song never tips into genuine menace — it's too cheerful for that, too clearly in on the joke of its own excess. The pleasure it offers is the permission to find nobility in lowbrow pleasures, to insist that cold beer and loud music constitute a perfectly valid philosophy of life. In 1973, this was a statement. Decades later, it sounds like a handshake.