In a song the band calls “extremely meta”, we hear about the reality of action movies in “First Blood.”

Track: “First Blood”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

The Mountain Goats are on the record a lot. There are a few albums, Bleed Out among them, where the band has given a few quotes about every single song. For “First Blood” their liner notes are about how action movies set you up to believe in these simplistic hero stories but that ain’t how things happen. That’s right there in the text, too, as directly as “John Rambo never went to Vietnam.” John Darnielle extends his description to say this kind of thinking leads to bad actors in the judicial system. We don’t have the space to get into that, but I figure it deserves to be repeated as often as absolutely possible.

This makes “First Blood” a fascinating song to include on Bleed Out. Most of the song is about “real” figures (either people who actually existed or characters who actually exist outside of this song) but about how their exploits can’t be trusted to be the way justice actually works. The bulk of the album uses action movie tropes to stand in for other emotions or situations. The Goats want to make sure you don’t get too caught up in that, thus here you get a reminder that absolutely could not be more direct.