Vulgar Display of Power is the sixth studio album by American heavy metal band Pantera. Released on February 25, 1992, through Atco Records, it was the band's second collaboration with producer Terry Date, after having worked with him on their breakthrough album Cowboys from Hell (1990).
The album was well received by both critics and fans, and is Pantera's highest selling album to date and would eventually be certified double platinum. It is often considered one of the most influential heavy metal albums of the 1990s. In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked Vulgar Display of Power 10th on their list of 'The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time'. Several of its tracks have become among the band's best known, such as "Mouth for War", "A New Level", "Walk", "Fucking Hostile", and "This Love".
Background
The band's 1990 major label debut, Cowboys from Hell, demonstrated a change in their musical direction, from their 1980s material influenced by hard rock or glam metal bands like Van Halen and Kiss to a new similarity to bands like Slayer, Metallica and Black Sabbath.
Recording and production
In 1991, Pantera returned to Pantego Sound Studio to record their second release under Atco, Vulgar Display of Power. The album was produced by Terry Date, who specializes in the rock and metal genres and had worked with the band on Cowboys from Hell. Date also went on to produce the band's following two albums, Far Beyond Driven (1994) and The Great Southern Trendkill (1996). Before Date came in to work on the album, the band had demoed three tracks, "A New Level", "Regular People (Conceit)" and "No Good (Attack the Radical)". The rest of the songs were written in the studio with little preproduction and demoing.
After being in the studio for two months, Pantera were invited to open for Metallica and AC/DC at the 1991 Monsters of Rock free concert in Moscow, Russia's Tushino airfield on September 28, 1991. The band then returned to the studio to continue work on the album. They travelled to New York City to master the album at Masterdisk. Although guitarist Darrell Abbott was credited on the album with nickname "Diamond Darrell", during the recording of the album he had dropped that nickname and assumed "Dimebag Darrell", and bassist Rex Brown dropped the pseudonym "Rexx Rocker".
Musical style and lyrics
Drummer Vinnie Paul said that Cowboys from Hell was really close to the "definitive Pantera sound". When Metallica released their self titled album in 1991, Pantera considered it a letdown to fans because they believed Metallica abandoned the thrash metal sound heard in previous albums. Pantera felt they had an opportunity and a gap to fill; they wanted to make the heaviest record of all time.
The riff for "Walk" is played in a time signature of 12/8. Darrell had played the riff during a soundcheck while Pantera was touring for Cowboys from Hell and the rest of the band loved it. Following this tour, the band returned home and found that some friends thought that rock stardom had gone to their heads. The lyrics for the song were inspired from these people's attitude toward the band; Anselmo's message to them was, "Take your fucking attitude and take a fuckin' walk with that. Keep that shit away from me."
Title and artwork
The title of the album is taken from a line in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. (Priest: "If you're the Devil, why not make the straps disappear?". Girl: "That's much too vulgar a display of power, Karras.") In April 2007, the title was used for the book A Vulgar Display of Power: Courage and Carnage at the Alrosa Villa, which includes many Pantera song titles as chapter headings. The book details the incidents leading up to the murder of Dimebag Darrell.
The album's cover is a photo of a man being "punched" in the face and was shot by photographer Brad Guice, who also shot the photo for the Cowboys from Hell cover; Dimebag Darrell originally came up with the idea while playing around with a photocopier, and moving a photo around on the bed of the photocopier as the lamp was moving to get a distorted, smeared look of the face on the photo. The band told their label that they wanted "something vulgar, like a dude getting punched". The first version of the cover that the label brought to the band showed a boxer with a boxing glove, but the band did not like it, so the label produced a second version, with the bare fist. A popular rumor that was stirred up by Vinnie Paul was that the man on the cover was paid $10 a punch and was hit in the face a total of 31 (Rex Brown claiming 32) times to get the right picture. However, Guice dispelled this when he confirmed that the man, who was a hired model named Sean Cross, was never actually hit.