The Shield: Music from the Streets (Soundtrack) -- Various Artists

7/10

*This review is dedicated to the semi-colon. The semi-colon: it can't fully digest something, but it can sure get started*

I've been watching way too much television long before this current so-called "Golden Age of Television"--which is turning more and more into an epoch as it nears its 20th year--began. Good shows have been consistently beaming down from the sky since people started buying boxes to catch them.
The Shield is still, from start-to-finish, the best show I have ever screen.
Like most Americans, I was forced throughout middle school, high school, and college to read the works of Sir William Shakespeare. After the third or fourth one, I started to notice a vibe: the messenger missing Romeo; Macbeth falling to Macduff; Iago getting hauled off as Othello lies dead, King Lear going on...sabbatical. There's just some matter of plot that feels inherently Shakespearean. Sure, there's some of that in the prestige television of the last 20 years: Tony Soprano crying over his ducks; Omar getting shot in the back by a kid; Lost coming down to an ancient feud between two brothers; Jon Snow actually being THAT person's son.
The fact of it is, though, none of those shows feel like they can be divided into Shakespearean acts in a natural manner. None of them feel like they are working toward an inexorable Shakespearean end. There's a certain artifice...they all, even though they are great, overstayed their welcome just a little, then realized (or rather, their showrunners realized...unless I am missing something, and TV shows are actually sentient) that they needed to end.
The Shield unfolds organically, over seven seasons, to its inexorable end. It ends the only possible way it could have ended. It is a perfect show. It might be the only perfect show. I'll generally give the caveat, "Well, the production values are a little lower in the first couple episodes...you have to be patient with that," but the truth is, everything that happens in those episodes is paid off seven years later: there's not a stretch where the antihero falls into a tiresome, circular behavior rut in the third quarter; there's never a feeling of "the lesson for this season is..."; there isn't an episode that is solely dedicated to explaining a character's tattoos; the show's grittiness always feels like an outgrowth of its world, and not a device to titillate the viewer. The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, Game of Thrones, they are all great shows, and they've been surrounded by other great shows, but none are The Shield.
The X-Files is my favorite show of all time. As a whole, it doesn't even touch The Shield's coattails.
This isn't just some contrarian outsider opinion. The Shield has the accolades to match. And those voices from when it ran concurrently with The Wire...the ones that said that because The Shield is constantly thrilling, and The Wire requires truckloads of patience, The Wire is better..."The Wire is steak, and The Shield is a cheeseburger?" Time is blowing that noise away. Just because something is more entertaining doesn't mean it is of a lower quality. So there.
Anyway, this soundtrack, The Shield: Music from the Streets, is quite interesting in that on paper, it should be absolutely terrible, and on disc, it is a lot of fun. Music on The Shield is, with a very small handful of key exceptions, only incidental, generally only occurring when the police are knocking down a door and raiding a house (where music is playing), or chasing a perpetrator through a lively street (where music is playing). The songs The Shield utilizes give a sense of place, though usually that place is aggressive and unpleasant. The show's theme song itself is a bizarre mish-mash of rap, heavy metal, and tango, designed to let you know from the other room that The Shield is starting. On top of that, rap-and-metal combinations aren't exactly looked fondly upon in 2018. Because of this, I thought I was in for an all-out ear assault.
Man, I was mistaken. I bought The Shield: Music from the Streets a decade ago and never listened to it. Last week, I listened to the entire album as I drove down Highland Road in the sunshine, and I loved it. Yes, the music is dated. It is a bizarre mishmash of metal, rap, rock, Latin music, Latin metal, Latin rap, and Latin rock. The show takes place in the post-9/11 Los Angeles 00's, and this soundtrack nails that vibe. It feels absolutely lived in, like you are walking through various, let's say "vibrant" neighborhoods in the mid 00's on a sunny day. Several of the songs are completely sung or rapped in Spanish. There isn't a vibe of having your door knocked down, and your teeth knocked in--there's instead the strangely pleasant vibe of being a tourist.
Overall, this soundtrack reminds me of hanging out with my friends in and right after college (these songs are all taken from the first four seasons of the show, before the '06, '07, and '08 seasons got really dark...you know, late Act III, and Acts IV and V...and the music changed accordingly), chilling at my pad, playing Gamecube, reading comic books, listening to music, watching The Shield. These 19 tracks bring those days back to mind...yes, I just defined "reminds" in an attempt to not use it twice in this paragraph; at least I didn't use a semi-colon.
So while my opinion on The Shield is objective, my opinion of this soundtrack, and the semi-colon, is not.


2005 Lakeshore Records
1. The Shield Theme by Vivian Romero, Ernesto Bautista, and Rodney Alejandro :42
2. Hating Hollywood by Theory of a Deadman 3:25
3. Death March by Black Label Society 3:05
4. Bring 'Em Out Dead by Onyx 3:43
5. Lay Down by Mikal Raymo 3:18
6. Perkins by Peyote Asesino 4:15
7. Caught Up in the System by SX-10 2:33
8. Freedom Band by Delinquent Habits 4:10
9. Pride by Damageplan 4:18
10. Nothing's Clear by Ill Niño 3:20
11. Rushing In by Crazy Anglos 2:40
12. No Muerdas La Mano by Kinto Sol 3:43
13. Breakdown by Tantric 3:12
14. Betrayal by The Black Maria 3:40
15. Let's Ride by Conejo 4:57
16. Ooohhhwee by Master P 4:11
17. Mafia by Kelis 4:14
18. Cuiden a Los Niños by Brujeria 3:29
19. The Shield (X-Ecutioners Remix) by Roc Raida, featuring DJ Paradime 3:29