After 'Cops' was canceled after more than 30 years, the writer of its ubiquitous theme song 'Bad Boys' tells us why he wishes you knew more than the chorus
More than 30 years later, “Bad Boys,” which was re-released in 1993 after the show proved to be a success, catapulted the veteran reggae group to global fame, with multiple generations still able to reflexively sing, “Bad boys, bad boys/Whatcha gonna do/Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”canceled the long-running show
after 32 seasons. If Inner Circle’s Ian Lewis, the songwriter and bassist behind “Bad Boys,” had his way, the cancellation would bring a renewed analysis of the song past its ubiquitous chorus. “Thirty years. How many groups in the world can say they have a song that the world knows, but what is not understood is the essence of the song,” Lewis tells, but if they listen to the song, everybody just knows the hook. They don’t listen to the words of the song where it’s talking about a person who was coming into crime and adversarial towards their parents.
When Lewis first saw the show in 1989, he thought it would be “a docudrama; something that would come on one time and that would be the end of it.” The track would eventually peak at Number Eight on the200, soundtrack Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s popular film franchise of the same name, be serve as “I hope people take a moment to understand that the song is about teenage life and becoming semi-aggressive as you start growing up,” Lewis says.
But as police practices have come under greater scrutiny, some have questioned the use of a reggae song on a show that glorifies the profession primarily at the expense of minorities. Lewis grappled with this when the show first aired,
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