THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “The Legendary Queen of Soul” by Aretha Franklin

by ROUGE! guitarist Johnny Cum-Lately

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely done one of two things: 

1. Resisted the urge to jump to the comments and type YOU ASSHOLE! HOW DARE YOU SAY AN ARETHA FRANKLIN ALBUM SUCKS!! YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS? YOUR MAMA DIDN’T RAISE YOU RIGHT! YOUR MAMA GOT A WOODEN LEG WITH A KICKSTAND!!

Or 

1. Want to type an all-caps screed like the one above, only you’ve decided to read on in the hopes of finding more ammo to indict me in the way that only a comments section on the Internet can do. 

So, if you’re more B than A, that’s good, because context matters, especially in the case of the album The Legendary Queen of Soul.

The album in question is a compilation album released by Columbia Records in 1981, during a curious time in Aretha’s career. She continued to record and release new material throughout the 1970s, but by 1981, she had gone eight years without a top 10 pop single and hadn’t cracked the pop top 30 in five years. She was still cracking the Hot 100 and had some top 5 and number 1 hits on Billboard’s R&B chart, however. 

Her public profile in white America got a boost thanks in large part to her cameo in the 1980 hit movie The Blues Brothers, and her song “Respect” getting lampooned in the movie Airplane!, which hit theaters that same summer. It also didn’t hurt that she was name-dropped in the Steely Dan top ten hit Hey Nineteen, which peaked in early 1981. She was still a few years away from her huge mid-eighties comeback that saw her score hits on her own, dueting with the Eurythmics, and topping the pop charts with George Michael. 

So, what’s notable about this compilation album I’m writing about? Depending on how much of a music nerd you are, you might assume that Aretha debuted with the iconic songs that we all know and love. But it turns out that’s not the case. By the time she released such iconic tunes as “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You)” and “Respect,” she had already been a recording artist for seven years. 

The songs that made Aretha the Queen of Soul were released in the late sixties and early seventies, and all for Atlantic Records. The double album The Legendary Queen of Soul compiles 20 songs from her seven years at Columbia Records. None of them are anthemic, like “Respect.” None of them are iconic, like “Chain of Fools.” None of them soar like “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman.”

Aretha signed to Columbia Records about 1960, when she was still a teenager. She was discovered by legendary talent scout and producer John Hammond, who also worked with Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Bob Dylan. And based on listening to this compilation of her Columbia years, her tenure there was marked by a throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks mentality. 

Listening to the songs on the album that were produced by Hammond gives the impression that as a producer, John Hammond largely failed Aretha. Three songs produced by him became top 10 hits on the R&B charts, but only one of them “Won’t Be Long,” is included on the compilation. That song comes the closest to a classic Aretha song, both in terms of her performance and the musical arrangement. But too often, the Hammond-produced tracks sound old-fashioned and out-of-date for the early 1960s. Take the song “Blue Holiday.” Listening to it, it seems as if Hammond is trying to make her into another Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith. It is worth noting that Hammond was in his early fifties when he was producing Aretha. 

It’s also worth noting that these songs were recorded in the early 1960s. As an African American woman in that time, she had less power and respect from white America than her male cohorts. She wasn’t allowed to choose her own material, have input on any song’s arrangement, or, in most cases, accompany herself on the piano. She was a voice, a great voice, and she did what she was told. 

An example of this is her cover of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic “Walk on By.” The song was a top 10 hit for Dionne Warwick, and in covering the song, Aretha is basically doing karaoke. Everything about the song smacks of buying the sheet music, handing it to the studio musicians, and playing it note-for-note while the tape rolls. It’s the total opposite of Issac Hayes’s classic version. There’s literally no reason for Aretha’s cover to exist. It’s a blatant attempt at a cash grab. 

A major label like Columbia catered to a predominately white audience. This was still the era of “race records,” records recorded and released to mostly urban ghettos. Most black artists of the time recorded on independent labels (James Brown on King; Ray Charles on Atlantic; The Impressions on Chess; Motown). It’s really no surprise that Columbia was unable to make Aretha a star, let alone a cultural icon. 

After working with Hammond produced middling results, Columbia then had her recording show tunes, none of which were included on the compilation. Even the album’s liner notes say thank goodness.

Speaking of the liner notes, they don’t exactly give off the impression that you purchased a treasure trove of underappreciated gems. The notes include such phrases as “… the fit isn’t quite right” in describing three blues ballads that are included. The notes also have such inspiring phrases as “Though the material can rarely be inspired …”, “… almost as good …,” and “All the pieces that seemed to explode out of her in those first few Atlantic albums are present.” 

The liner notes are correct. You can hear it several times. Take “Every Little Bit Hurts.” In retrospect it hints at what’s to come, but the song’s arrangement never lets Aretha display her vocal power. In fact, none of the musical arrangements showcased on this record do her any favors. The arrangement on “You’ll Lose a Good Thing” is another good example. 

The fourth and final side highlights her work with producer Clyde Otis, who seemed to be more in tune with the then-current sounds of mid-sixties soul. Songs like “Two Sides of Love” are fine. Indeed, “Cry Like a Baby” (not the Box Tops song) sounds like something that would’ve come out of Motown. 

Does this album stink? Compared to albums like Lady Soul, yes. But in general? No. It’s fine. There isn’t a bad performance by Aretha anywhere on the compilation. It’s as if she was incapable of a bad performance. But this album is not essential. The public seemed to agree. It peaked at 209 on the album chart in 1981. It’s also not available on Apple Music. 

The best way to summarize this album? Have you ever watched American Idol or The Voice and a contestant performs a song, thinks they did a good job, but the contestant gets deflated once the judges tell them that their performance was fine, but that they didn’t think the song was right for them? That’s this entire album. Good performances by Aretha, but none of the material was right for her. I didn’t bother listening to any of the studio albums from her Columbia years – all of which are available on Apple Music – but I feel comfortable in assuming that all that material fits the above description. 

Keep in mind that Aretha had little to no say in anything she recorded with Columbia. It must have been liberating when she signed with Atlantic – a label that specialized in black R&B. Take her signature song, “Respect.” It’s an Otis Redding cover. But unlike “Walk on By,” Aretha not only chose to record the song, but made significant changes to it. She adds in the words for the background singers. She adds in the break where she spells the title. She played piano on the recording. She performs it with more intensity than Otis Redding did. Unlike many of the songs on the compilation, she sounds powerful when singing “Respect,” not meek. By making the song an almost long-distance writing collaboration with Redding, she added to the song and made it, arguably, the greatest and most socially significant cover song in American popular music history. 

What does that have to do with the compilation I’m writing about? When one considers the timing of its release, the liner notes that must’ve made purchasers feel like they got gipped out of $7.95, or whatever a double-album cost in 1981. Combine this with the half-ass cover artwork that looks more 1961 than 1981, this album reeks of a cynical cash grab by Columbia. Sure, it was the first Aretha compilation released by the label since 1972’s In the Beginning: The World of Aretha Franklin 1960-1967 (which only peaked at number 160 on the album chart), but was it necessary? I’m assuming that her Columbia studio albums were either out of print or produced in low numbers. The public made it clear nine years earlier that they weren’t interested in her pre-Atlantic work. It’s easy to imagine a bunch of Columbia executives deciding to put out a compilation of stuff sitting in the company vaults, slap a stock photo and a typewriter font on it, and get a cheap product out to market. It doesn’t help that her biggest pop hit from her Columbia years, “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” (No. 37 in 1961) was excluded from the album, even though it was mentioned in the liner notes. 

Do I regret getting this album? No. Do I regularly play it? Of course not. I have plenty of better options. 

Do you regret skipping to the comments section to tear me a new one? Who I am kidding. Of course, you don’t. And if you haven’t yet, go ahead. Hit those comments, keyboard warrior. Show me some D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T. 

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “Pool It!” by The Monkees

*sigh*

Oh this one’s going to hurt to write about.

For those who don’t know, I love The Monkees, and I mean love The Monkees. I was gifted a copy of their first album by an old friend, and before I knew it I was diving deep into their TV show, their movie Head, and just about every Monkees thing imaginable from during their original run as a band from 1966 to 1970. Eventually I even went and got a copy of Good Times, their 2016 reunion effort which brought together the then-surviving members of The Monkees for an album that arguably holds up incredibly well, even among their original albums.

The same can not be said of their other two “reunion” efforts, but only one is truly worthy of an THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US feature, and that’s their 1987 reunion effort Pool It!. So why this particular effort as compared to their 1997 release Justus which featured all four members of the band for the first time in 30ish years but couldn’t really find the tunes to back up the hype? Why not Changes, the final album from their original run which saw The Monkees become a shell of their former selves to finish off a contractual obligation? Hell, why not the soundtrack to Head which would become their lowest-charting album until after Peter Tork left the group?

Well, before I can get into all of that I need to get into who The Monkees even were before they decided to come back 17 years later, and the shenanigans they got into (a little “monkeying around,” you see) in the meantime.

The Monkees didn’t really start off as a band, they started off as the center-points of a TV show that was based around a fictional band with the main cast being Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith. Yes, they did eventually become a real band, but it was only after the success of their TV show and a couple of records had been released, leading to a widespread demand for public concert appearances while simultaneously terrorizing the pop charts. Their first four records hit number 1 on the Billboard charts and not only did this lead to Mike Nesmith getting away with lying to the press in 1967 about The Monkees outselling The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but this lie would go completely unchecked until 2017 when Nesmith told the story in his autobiography about lying to this reporter who printed the lie as fact. This is the sort of impact The Monkees had, and while they had a fair share of success they also got a lot of somewhat-unwarranted flack for a handful of things such as not playing their own instruments on their first two records (an issue that would be remedied on the 1967 effort Headquarters where they played and wrote their own music), and despite both the upfront honesty about how the sausage gets made and later attempts to “become a real band,” their reputation as a manufactured pop group is more-or-less solidified. Never mind that plenty of bands were doing the exact same thing in the 60s with groups like The Wrecking Crew, The Monkees would be the ones taking most of the ire and scorn from press and critics alike from that point on. Eventually the band falls apart piece by piece as Peter Tork leaves the group in 1968, Michael Nesmith leaves in 1970, and the group continues as a duo before putting out one final record, Changes with just Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz. That album is, at best, inessential, but it saw The Monkees go from being a manufactured pop group to fighting tooth and nail to be the real thing before eventually reverting back to the manufactured pop of their early records. It’s a sad career arc from a band who history would end up being particularly kind to and give a long-lasting legacy.

Due in part to TV reruns of The Monkees still giving the group some popularity even in their absence, Dolenz and Jones would eventually team up in 1976 with Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, two of the songwriters who wrote most of The Monkees’ early hits including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” “Words,” and “Valleri” to do a reunion album under the name Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart and they would market it as “the guys who wrote ’em and the guys who sang ’em.” This album is also somewhat inessential, and no one really talks about in the way they do with the other records, if only because it lacks the actual Monkees name despite being a de-facto Monkees reunion album. The group would eventually go their own separate ways after the album is released and a subsequent tour follows it.

The year is 1986 when MTV, then in its relative infancy, shows a Monkees marathon over a weekend in February. A few months later Peter, Micky, and Davy announce that they’re going out on the road to do a 20th anniversary tour celebrating The Monkees. Mike Nesmith is unfortunately not able to attend due to previous commitments with his video production company, though he does join the band on stage in 1986 for a two-song encore featuring his number “Listen To The Band.” It’s also worth noting that unlike his fellow band mates, Mike Nesmith isn’t in a financial bind like the others presumably are because when his mother, the inventor of liquid paper, passes away Mike receives a hefty inheritance from her which left him in a more-or-less financially secure place for the rest of his life. So Nez is out, but we still have the other three Monkees here! A month after the band gets back on the road a greatest hits collection is released which includes three new songs recorded by the group; “That Was Then, This Is Now,” “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere,” and a cover of “Kicks,” originally by Paul Revere and The Raiders. They’re all pretty good, but they feel a bit too “80’s” and “synthetic” for my tastes, but that’s just me.

By this time The Monkees are singularly one of the hottest acts of the year going into 1987, and a certain special guest would open up for the group during this time but behind the scenes certain things are starting to unravel; Davy Jones refuses to be on stage when the group would sing any of the new recordings from the greatest hits comp because he wasn’t involved with it, and even outright said he would leave the tour if “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” would be released as a follow-up single to “That Was Then, This Is Now.” Elsewhere MTV starts to reject any further Monkees material because of what is reported to be a misunderstanding between the group and MTV over appearing on their Super Bowl special as Davy Jones was out of the country at the time. They try to angle it as “oh The Monkees are no longer popular like they were last year” despite the fact that the band had basically been riding a revival of Monkeemania and viewers had been flooding their request lines to see the new music video that acted as the lead-off single to what would be the first official Monkees album in 17 years. Keep in mind, this was back in the days where MTV still played music and had a major say in what was and wasn’t a “hit” so this became something of a slap in the face to a band who had helped build the network up and vice versa.

Alright, so if MTV won’t show the new music video then I will. Here’s the first single and the opening track off of their latest album Pool It! entitled “Heart and Soul.”

The music video is kind of funny, the whole concept of The Monkees having to adapt to the times because of how things changed since the 60s is some… well… some good clean fun. As for the song itself, this is closer to what I was hoping for from a reunion Monkees single; it’s very much the sort of song that fits in Micky’s wheelhouse as a singer, the production isn’t too obnoxious, and the synthesizers aren’t too “in your face,” though I guess my main complaint is that the guitars sound too small and thin for such a big song. I guess you could say that stranger things have happened, but let’s keep moving onward.

This song is called “(I’d Go The) Whole Wide World” and it’s a cover of a Wreckless Eric song from 1977. The original has a very 60s taste to it so it makes sense that The Monkees would want to take a stab at their own version of it, but what even is this? It feels like the arrangement and production are a total mess, the drum machine they’re using isn’t doing the song any favors, and with how much of a mess the production is I can barely hear much of anything outside the guitar, vocals, and drums. I’d think if you’re going to try and sound “vintage” like that then why not just fully commit? What does the band have to gain from trying to do these over-the-top 80’s-styled remakes of other songs?

“Long Way Home” comes after that particularly head-scratching inclusion and this time Davy Jones takes the lead vocal. All I can really say is that honestly I had to listen to this song by itself a handful of times because there’s absolutely nothing notable about it whatsoever, it’s a down-tempo 80’s ballad with that same ugly drum machine, the same synthetic sounds, and Davy’s voice hasn’t aged too much but it has gotten noticeably worse. You can kinda hear how he has to strain himself to hit the higher notes or to move into a different gear, energy-wise.

Up next is “Secret Heart” and the intro to it is kinda questionable, but honestly I think I kinda like this one. Those little funky guitar stabs and the saxophone solo work on this in more of a Hall & Oates way than not. Micky Dolenz’s voice is in top form, way better than the songs that came before it. It’s one of the better songs I’ve heard on here but I still can’t help but wonder why this sounds like The Monkees were more focused on getting play on The Weather Channel instead of on the radio.

Peter Tork writes and sings this next one, it’s called “Gettin’ In.” Peter Tork doing vocals on a Monkees album feels like a relatively novel concept because during the original run of the band he only sang on four songs; the goofy-as-fuck “Your Auntie Grizelda,” a few lines on a verse of “Shades of Gray,” a few lines again on a duet for “Words,” and on the Tork-penned composition “Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again.” On this song, Tork brings his best Wang Chung impression and honestly this one also works way better than I was expecting it to. At first I heard the opening synths and let out a big groan, but then they subside and when the vocals kick in it all comes together. I wouldn’t have suspected that Peter Tork would be the best one to show “The Monkees for a new era” but it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to have happened. (Bonus beats: here’s a live clip of Tork performing the song. This is kind of rad as fuck, if I’m being honest.)

Davy Jones goes next with his own self-penned song “(I’ll) Love You Forever.” This is the sort of thing I was expecting Davy to come swinging out the gates with, honestly. Davy’s strong suits were always on those sweet gentle ballads and the fact that this is one he wrote himself shows that he knew his own strengths just as well as the next person. The synthesizers just work, the gentle nature of the track is on point, and it might be the closest we get to “60’s Monkees” on this album.

Alright, so at this point we’re about halfway through the record. So why are we going off in this direction? Why does the album sound like this exactly? As it turns out, according to the album’s producer Roger Béchirian the band specifically wanted to go in more of a “modern” direction much to his chagrin. You have to understand that Béchirian wasn’t just some Monkees fanboy, this was a man who produced for artists like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and The Undertones. He was known for working primarily with garage rock bands and producing the sort of albums that would’ve been perfect for a Monkees comeback LP, and sure he did work with Wang Chung on their first album, but The Monkees were more likely to make their own “Cruel To Be Kind” than to make “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” This change in direction along with a lot of the behind-the-scenes issues the group had stem directly towards Davy Jones and what he wanted Pool It! to sound like, so that’s why the album has those syrupy ballads, it’s why Tork doesn’t get much singing time on this record despite his one contribution so far standing out more than everything except “Heart and Soul,” and it’s a major part of why The Monkees were ultimately not built for the 80s. I get that Davy had a lot riding on this album though; he had a career in theater before The Monkees and was even featured doing a number from a then-recent theater gig on a very important episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. Why was it important? You can take a guess as to who else was in that episode. When The Monkees disbanded Davy didn’t really have the success he predicted he would have with a solo career, having only released two regular studio albums between 1970 and 1986, and outside a few appearances in a few movies and TV shows he basically fell off the face of the earth. With that said it wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to find out that Davy had a lot banking on the Monkees reunion album and was trying to be the band quarterback in lieu of Mike Nesmith in his absence. I don’t normally like to speculate and point fingers in such a way, but make no mistake, all the research I did for this article point directly to Davy Jones as a major issue behind the scenes.

Davy also sounds like a problem on the opener to side b and second single from the album, “Every Step of the Way.” What the hell even is this?? This would’ve worked if they were committed to the 60’s aesthetic but instead we get this weird attempt at 80’s pop metal complete with another saxophone solo thrown in there. I think the saxophone is the only thing that doesn’t sound over-produced to hell and back and it’s the best part of the song. Davy’s vocals on this are also questionable at best, he sounds like he’s trying to force himself to have a little more gruff in his voice and that’s just not Davy Jones. Look, you are who you are guy, and yeah Davy has dipped his toes in the harder, punchier side of rock on previous Monkees tunes but he never had to force himself to sound like something that he clearly wasn’t. It’s a shame because underneath it all there really is something that could’ve been something with this song.

Micky takes the mic back on “Don’t Bring Me Down,” which was written by Mark Clarke and Ian Hunter. I only bring this up because when I checked to see who they were I audibly went, “wait, Ian Hunter is one of the guys from MOTT THE HOOPLE? Now there’s a band I haven’t thought about in a long time.” I digress, but this song is actually pretty good, underrated even, so I’ll give it a thumbs up. The aesthetic of the record as a whole works in this song’s favor and the horn synths that close it out don’t feel as obnoxious as some of the other synths I heard on the earlier tracks. I could’ve seen this working as a possible third single to the album or even as the follow-up to “Heart and Soul,” but I still assume that Davy wanted to have a single for himself instead so here we are.

Dolenz also sings on the next track, “Midnight.” Honestly I kinda like this one, I don’t normally think of “funk” when I think of The Monkees, but goddamn does this kinda rip. It helps that Micky has a knack for being able to blend in with whatever environment a backing track finds him being placed in. Honestly, he could’ve probably been given some lo-fi black metal track and he would absolutely crush it, but that’s the power of Micky Dolenz. A lot of people really like this song, too, at least if YouTube comments are anything to go off of. I guess my only criticism, and it’s nitpicky at that, is that the song goes on for a bit too long; it’s four-and-a-half minutes long but it could easily be half that time length and it would still work. Oh well, you can’t always get what you want I guess.

The next track is probably one of the more bizarre offerings I could show on any THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US article. The Monkees have tried their hands at a lot of genres; pop-rock, funk, soul, country, showtunes, even stuff with Native chanting. On here they’ve tried new-wave, dance pop, 80’s adult contemporary ballads, but “She’s Movin’ In With Rico” takes on another genre previously unexplored; reggae. And god does this thing sound like ass. Davy Jones sounds like he’s trying his hardest to do this vaguely Jamaican accent while he recounts the tale of being dumped and heartbroken by his lover because, as the title suggests, she’s moving in with Rico instead. But we know nothing about this Rico character other than he’s “everybody’s hero.” This might be the worst Monkees track I’ve ever heard, and I’ve sat through all their studio albums. THAT should tell you a lot.

Peter Tork gets his second vocal contribution of the album with “Since You Went Away” and this is also a nice little song for Tork to sing. It’s on-par with the goofier side of the songs he would typically sing with The Monkees, and it shows especially at the end in the fade-out when he commits to being the silliest person in the room. Apparently this is a re-recording of a song he did with his post-Monkees band Peter Tork and The New Monks, and that version kinda kicks serious ass in a way the Pool It! version doesn’t, but that’s still an upgrade from B+ to an A, so congrats for having the highest batting average on this album, Peter, and may you rest in peace.

The album finally closes off with another soft ballad from Davy called “Counting On You.” This is the exact sort of arena-rock ballad I would’ve expected more of on this album, right down to the guitar solo coming about 3/4ths of the way through it. Davy didn’t write this one but the fact he sang some of these clunky lyrics though is not exactly working in his favor. Ultimately it’s not a bad song but it also feels like a fart of a nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Alright, the album’s done. It felt like such a slog to get through this thing, honestly. Is the album any good? Oh, far from it. A couple good songs on an album does not make for a good album, and unfortunately even with the couple of good songs on here we do not have a good album. I don’t even know what to say about this album other than oh god why does this even exist? I’m blown away that this even exists, I’m amazed that Peter Tork’s songs are some of the best on here, I’m shocked that Davy Jones had to drop so many stinkers you would’ve thought it was a rest stop bathroom, and I can’t believe Micky Dolenz does as well with the material as he does. I don’t think some of the songs on here are necessary at all, especially “(I’d Go The) Whole Wide World,” I don’t see much of a need for “Rico” either, and generally we’ve got an EP of good songs here at best.

I’m flabbergasted, but what did critics think of it? Believe it or not it was pretty hard to find contemporary reviews for it, but I did find one from the LA Times which told you all you needed to know when their opening blub reads “hey hey, it’s a letdown!”

Woof.

In modern-day reviews; AllMusic gave it a 1-and-a-half out of five star review and a fairly brutal takedown in the form of, “this is normally the part of a review where the reviewer would advise this release for die-hard fans only, but I can’t even suggest that, as no one should be subjected to such poor quality unless they’re a collector or completist — and even then it’s best to keep Pool It! in its original packing, if anything to increase the resale value.”

Woof.

Well what did audiences think of it? Pretty much every music review site that isn’t Amazon also shits on this thing pretty mercilessly as well. I did find this one tidbit from Monkees Live Almanac where they asked people what their top 2 favorite songs on the album were and these were the results they came to.

The real shock here is that “She’s Movin’ In With Rico” isn’t ranked dead last.

For someone who doesn’t like doing so, I’ve been making conclusions left and right about this album here, but I do have one theory as to why this album ultimately stalled The Monkees’ potential for a longer wave of success during their reunion stage, and it doesn’t have as much to do with the music as one may assume, but rather it’s got a lot to do with the cover art. Seriously, take a look at this thing again and really look at it for good measure.

When Monkeemania 2.0 kicked off it was because a new generation of kids had been introduced to The Monkees via the TV marathons and the older albums, so in a way their look was still permanently stuck in the 60s. With the cover to Pool It! they looked less like the hot guys you’d find out at the pool and instead they looked more like the creepy uncles you’d see poolside at the family BBQ, especially Davy Jones whose mullet does him no favors. It might sound a bit mean to pin it entirely on their looks, but some folks certainly do still judge an album by its cover, and the music inside doesn’t give it much of a fighting chance either.

The worst thing to consider is that The Monkees didn’t need to go the route they did, they could’ve gone back to the sounds of the 60s and fit right in with bands like The Bangles or R.E.M. who were making their bread and butter doing jangly alt-rock that was reminiscent of the era The Monkees came from. Roger Béchirian also publicly stated that if Peter Tork had more of a say in what went on the album Pool It! wouldn’t have been as weak of an album as it ended up being, but of course Davy Jones wanted to have more of a say in what went on what, and it’s a shame we may never fully get to hear what Tork could’ve brought to the table. The aftermath of this whole ordeal wasn’t brought upon by just the album alone, but it sure as shit culminated with it and it spelled disaster for Micky, Davy, and Peter. In short; they would continue to tour for a couple years after the fact but Monkeemania 2.0 was over the second that album went out onto shelves across the country.

Davy Jones passed in 2012, Peter Tork passed in 2019, and Mike Nesmith passed away in 2021, leaving Micky Dolenz as the last man standing. In the wake of their respective passings as well as watching fans go blue in the face trying to get the band nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, history has become particularly kind to the pre-fab four. Their 1966-1970 run of albums as well as Good Times reminded folks that The Monkees were just that good and with more people embracing the commonplace knowledge of 60s bands using session musicians combined with their interesting story as a group there’s been something of a change in attitude regarding the band. In 2023 The Monkees legacy is secure, but 1987 was the year that The Monkees went for broke and it didn’t work out for them out of a desire to sound more “modern,” but Pool It! was far from the worst failure to come from Monkeemania 2.0. That honor goes to The New Monkees, but that’s a story for another day. Stay tuned.

This is Harvey VD reminding you to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers!! Peace.

(…P.S., here’s 1980s DC hardcore punk legends Minor Threat covering “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone” in case you wanted to hear covers coming from unlikely bands.)

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “GTR” by GTR

(This month’s article was written by ROUGE! guitarist Johnny Cum-Lately)

The early 1970s may have been the heyday of progressive rock, but the eighties were a pretty good time to be an aging prog rocker.

Ridiculed as dinosaurs by music critics, in the eighties some prog rockers tightened their arrangements, shortened their songs, and made inroads on the pop charts. A version of Yes topped the Billboard Hot
100 for two weeks in January 1984 with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” a song that sounded like nothing else any version of Yes had ever recorded. Two years earlier, former members of Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer called themselves Asia and went immediately into the top 5 with “Heat of the Moment.” (Disclosure: That Asia album was the first one I bought. I still have it.)

But no group of aging prog rockers dominated the eighties like Genesis, or more specifically, Phil Collins. From 1984 through 1989, Collins had 7 songs top the Billboard Hot 100 (None of which were “In the Air Tonight,”). Genesis, with Collins on vocals and drums, had hit after hit throughout the decade, briefly taking the top spot with “Invisible Touch” in 1986. Even Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford got in on the act with his side project Mike & the Mechanics topping the charts in 1989 with “The Living Years.”

Genesis’s dominance of the decade wasn’t limited to current members either. Their original singer, Peter Gabriel went to No. 1 in 1986 with “Sledgehammer.” That means that Genesis, either directly or
indirectly (mostly indirectly) accounted for 10 number 1 hits between 1984 and 1989. That’s a hell of a run.

But there was one person within the Genesis orbit who did not cash in on commercial success during the eighties. His name was Steve Hackett.

Before Genesis became synonymous with eighties yuppie pop rock, it was one of the best and most adventurous progressive rock acts of the first half of the 1970s. The band’s shows also had a theatrical
bent, thanks to Gabriel, which can be seen in this 25-minute live clip of “Supper’s Ready.” (Hackett’s the guitarist with the truly spectacular ‘stache). But Gabriel left for his solo career in 1975, and Hackett
followed two years later. He launched a solo career that was not exactly filled with commercial music, but his label stuck with him for a good decade, despite little mainstream success. In that time, his former bandmates in Genesis, now a trio, recognized that lengthy, complex songs were fading in popularity and wisely shifted to a more pop-oriented approach.

Guitarist Steve Howe encountered similar difficulties with his longtime band, Yes. After an ill-fated 1980 album in which the electro-pop duo The Buggles were merged with the remaining members of Yes, Howe and keyboardist/former Buggle Geoffrey Downes left Yes to form Asia. But as Asia quickly fell out of favor, Howe left the band in 1984. He and Hackett, who were friends, decided to work together.

The result was the formation of a supergroup called GTR, a band that aimed at the Album-Oriented Rock radio format that Asia briefly conquered. GTR’s eponymous debut album was released in May 1986 to a decent amount of hype. Surprisingly, some of that hype was contributed by MTV, even though Howe
was 39 years old and Hackett 36 when the GTR album was released.

So where did the name GTR come from? It’s the abbreviation for “guitar” used by recording studios for labeling guitar tracks. The name, along with the reputations of the two primary members, implied
excitement, and great guitar work for aficionados.

Did it deliver? Let’s dive into this album and find out.

“When the Heart Rules the Mind”: Here we are: THE BIG HIT. The first single. The first music video. The song that would define the supergroup GTR, accompanied by a video with everyone in suit jackets? Seriously, this looks like the other cops on “Miami Vice” formed a band to play in some club while Crockett and Tubbs searched out a drug lord. Either that or the lawyers on some eighties legal drama moonlighting in a band. From “L.A. Law” to corporate rock.

But what about the song? It’s got a good title. I hate to spoil the rest of the album for you, but it’s the cleverest word combination you’ll hear on the record. Maybe this song is about when emotion overtakes logic? As ROUGE! drummer/vocalist Harvey V.D. says, “red flags look like flags when you wear rose-colored glasses.” But do we get insight into this phenomenon? No. We get meaningless verses that
have no connection to what is being sung in the chorus, and we also get the first cliché on the album: “One look, and love is blind.”

The prog roots of the two guitar Steves are evident. This song has distinct parts, even a quiet fingerpicked acoustic guitar part, which becomes a vehicle to repeat the meaningless chorus. You know
what other song has distinct parts? “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. That song is a 10 on a 10 scale. Its music video is a 10. “When the Heart Rules the Mind”? The song is a 5. The video is a 4. I wonder if the song became a hit single because of its musical merits, or because the hype fueled interest.

“The Hunter”: Is GTR a one-hit wonder? It fits the definition: A band that had one hit song, faded away, and had no impact beyond that one song. And if you assumed GTR was a one-hit wonder, you would be
wrong. This song, the second single off the album, cracked the Billboard Hot 100. It peaked at No. 85, so it wasn’t exactly a major hit.

This song was written by Downes, Howe’s former bandmate in Yes and Asia. It embodies the archetype of mid-eighties corporate rock. I have no recollection of seeing this video on MTV.

I wonder if the guitar Steves chose Max Bacon as the vocalist for GTR because of how similar he sounds to longtime Yes singer Jon Anderson. I’m not saying that to be dismissive. Jon Anderson is a terrific vocalist with a distinct, higher-range voice, and Bacon is as well. He demonstrates some serious voice control late in the song. It’s his best moment on this album. But this song sounds like it could be a Yes track.

“Here I Wait”: Am I listening to GTR, or Foreigner? That’s what I’m wondering. Here I wait for a GTR band identity to come out. For a song boasting two topflight guitarists, the guitar breaks are disappointing. They don’t take the song anywhere. The breaks are just there, as if by formula.

“Sketches in the Sun”: The first instrumental on the album, and probably closer to what people expected from GTR. Howe and Hackett trade licks throughout the 2 and a half minutes of this piece. It’s fine. But it doesn’t move. I don’t hear any passion nor attitude, just good technique. This song is closer to ambient music than rock.

“Jekyll and Hyde”: One criticism of this album is that there are brilliant moments, but the band never builds off them. This song is a perfect example of that. Its opening is solid. There’s some tension building in the music. But once the vocals kick in, that momentum vaporizes. The music never builds off the strong opening. A wasted opportunity.

“You Can Still Get Through”: RELAX! DON’T DO IT! WHEN YOU WANT TO GO IT!

Oh wait, this isn’t the Frankie Goes to Hollywood classic. It’s GTR basically ripping off the iconic synth bass line of that song.

I should mention that GTR’s debut album was produced by Downes. Downes’s Buggles bandmate was Trevor Horn, who handled vocals in both the Buggles and the ill-fated Yes sojourn. He quit Yes around
the time Downes and Howe did, but Horn went into production. In that role, he, along with Mutt Lange, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, pretty much defined the sound of eighties pop. Horn’s production
credits include “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, The Art of Noise, Pet Shop Boys, Grace Jones, Seal, ABC, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Downes’s production resume is thinner. He’s focused his career on performing and recording. His production resume doesn’t include anywhere near the commercial success that Horn had. Saying that GTR hired the wrong ex-Buggle to produce its album is too easy, and a cheap shot. Look at Horn’s production resume. Aside from Yes, none of the acts were known for guitar being a featured instrument. The goal of GTR was to be less synthesizer-based (even though Downes was a keyboardist and Howe left Asia in part because he felt the keyboards were overtaking guitar in the band’s songs. If you’re getting the sense that YouTube music critic Todd in the Shadows could do a Trainwreckords episode on GTR, go ahead and suggest it to him.

What’s my point? If you wanted to summarize the mid-eighties in one song, “Relax” is a great example. “You Can Still Get Through,” is the attitude needed to survive the GTR song.

“Stop, look, and listen.” Those are the opening lyrics of this song. I want to hit stop and look for something else to listen to.

“Reach Out (Never Say No)”: This song is not to be confused with “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by The Four Tops. That song is performed with passion. Levi Stubbs’s lead vocal has a grit more in line with sixties Southern Soul rather than the smoother sounds of classic Motown. The Four Tops song has great harmony vocals, hooks galore, and a fantastic bassline by the legendary James Jamerson that keeps the song moving. It is everything that GTR’s “Reach Out” is not. GTR encourages you to “Never Say No” in this song. Be like Nancy Reagan in the eighties. Just say no to this GTR song. It isn’t memorable. “Reach Out I’ll Be There” is memorable. It’s immortal. Listen to The Four Tops song instead (after you finish reading this review, of course). The GTR song? It’s there. Lyrically, the verses and bridge seem
disconnected from what’s being sung in the chorus (the song’s title, repeated). Why am I writing about this GTR song – which reminds me of fellow mid-eighties crap band Starship – when I can listen to The Four Tops?

“Toe the Line”: “Sometimes you want to kick yourself for letting things get this far.” And there you have it: The most honest lyrics on this album.

But if you don’t kick yourself for getting this far, and pay attention to the lyrics, you get a series of cliches: “swimming against the tide,” “who holds the key,” “double-edged sword.” Then there’s the title.
I immediately thought of “Hold the Line,” by Toto, a similarly designed-for-AOR-radio rock song. Both songs are performed just fine. Both songs have verses that seem disconnected from the chorus. But
“Toe the Line” is lifeless, whereas the Toto song has some energy to it. “Hold the Line” also has a batshit crazy guitar solo from the underrated Steve Lukather. It’s a great solo. It has nothing to do with anything else going on in the song, but great solo. On the other hand, GTR never blessed the rains down in Africa. Fuck Toto and their white savior colonialist “Heart of Darkness.” And fuck Weezer for covering that goddamn song.

“Hackett to Bits”: There’s some shredding on this 2-minute instrumental, which is is one of the few highlights on this album, but it loses momentum toward the end. The sad irony here is that within a few years, instrumental shred albums would have a moment, with Steve Vai, Gary Hoey, and Joe Satriani releasing instrumental shred albums that got decent airplay on AOR stations. This track wouldn’t have gotten the airplay that Hoey and Satriani received, but it would’ve fit right in. Talent-wise, Steve Hackett’s right there with those guys I just mentioned. Too bad here he’s serving up more noodles than a package of Top Ramen.

“Imagining”: You’re not imagining it: this is the last track on the album. It’s 6 minutes long. And it takes a minute and a half before the song effectively kicks in. If you haven’t lost interest yet, I’m impressed. I’ve lost interest. But I must listen to this song. And write about it. Maybe I should apologize for this month’s selection for this column. This is brutal. A catch phrase for this column could be “We listen so you don’t have to!” I know. You’re expecting in-depth analysis, and her I am being a smartass again. You want to hear about chromatics and other music theory as applied to rock and pop? Go watch Rick Beato. Even he won’t touch GTR.

Now that we’ve made it through this album, and been harsh, maybe we should ask if this band was doomed from the start. As we’ve seen, no one in this band was a renowned lyricist. Aside from Hackett,
none of them had reputations as songwriters, and Hackett followed his creative impulses rather than trying to adhering to popular trends during most of his solo career. In a case of life imitating art, music
writer J.D. Considine practically plagiarized the Shark Sandwich album review from “This is Spinal Tap.” In his review of GTR for Musician magazine’s August 1986 issue, Considine wrote three letters: SHT. The
review perfectly describes the lyrics.

This album went gold in the U.S. and Canada, largely on the initial popularity of “When the Heart Rules the Mind,” a song that peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. GTR peaked at No. 11 on the album
chart. But Hackett soon lost interest in the project. There was no second GTR album, and the first one soon went out of print.

In the wake of GTR, Hackett went back to his solo career – which continues to this day – and Howe rejoined Yes. Except it wasn’t Yes. The reunited band had the entire lineup that recorded “Fragile,”
except for bassist Chris Squire. Squire remained in the entity known as Yes. Legal action ensued. So, the reunited Yes that wasn’t went by the name Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe. It’s a name that
screams “Hurt in a car wreck? Call the law firm of Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe. We don’t get paid unless you win.”

GTR still has fans. Just read the comments on the videos of “When the Heart Rules the Mind” and “The Hunter.” Otherwise, the album and band have no lasting cultural relevance. You never hear the hit song on classic rock radio. None of the album’s songs have been sampled. You never hear GTR in any film or TV soundtracks. Aside from the album and additional tracks being available on at least one streaming music service, GTR has disappeared.

Consider the book “The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock” by David Weigel. In this otherwise thorough narrative history of progressive rock (including a section on prog from Italy, which led the authors of a leading rock history textbook to issue a new edition that included Italian prog), GTR is absent. Even though two of the genre’s legendary guitarists were involved; even though drummer
Jonathan Mover briefly played in Marillion, a band that is mentioned in 20 pages of the text, there is no mention of GTR. Reading the introduction, Weigel is clearly a fan. He conducted extensive interviews and did a lot of research. So why no mention of GTR? Did he too think the whole thing was SHT? Did Norton, the book’s publisher, think the same? How about you. Do you agree with Considine? I do. I briefly had the GTR cassette. I listened to it one time in 1986, found it boring, and never played it again. I
acquired the cassette from my dad, who bought it and found it boring. I’ve listened to the album more for writing this column then I did back when GTR had its moment.

In conclusion: THX for reading this SHT about GTR.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “Fitz and the Tantrums” by Fitz and the Tantrums

I frequently get asked questions by some readers about what constitutes a certain album being featured on this recurring part of the website and honestly, I don’t know. I guess part of it is being able to tell a compelling story since my medium is more or less restricted to text and external links, but there’s more to it than that.

I can never cover The Orwells by The Orwells because even though that album is in fact a disaster I don’t think I can tell the story in a way that doesn’t somehow prop them up in a certain light, and if you want to know why I won’t do that despite being a fan of some of their work then go google it for yourself and be prepared to get real sad real fast.

I have considered tackling Revelation: Revolution ’69 by The Lovin’ Spoonful because wow that one is beyond bad but there’s not much out there about the album and it’s not really a compelling album to write about anyway. Here, I’ll sum it up; “lead singer and songwriter John Sebastian leaves the band, drummer and occasional singer Joe Butler takes over vocal duties and leaves the writing to songwriting teams, it’s underwhelming at best and the band breaks up.” See? Didn’t need a whole article to tell you that.

I can’t even really write about Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs even though that one seems like the most dead-to-rights Albums feature, and a perfect underhand pitch that’s slow and straight down the middle, but because of the weird afterlife it has had where it’s gone on to become a cult classic that in many ways leads to the band reuniting for a one-off special at MASS MOCA a few years back because Frank Zappa had to run his fucking mouth, I can’t cover it. Shame, really.

So why this album? Why this band?

You know… for a long time I really liked Fitz and the Tantrums. And then I didn’t. I haven’t thought about them in a long time and then I came across a tweet on my feed that perfectly encapsulated why I stopped paying attention to them. It’s so cringey in how it tries to pull off a weird promotional effort for whatever their latest stupid thing is these days while also completely ignoring how tone-deaf it comes off in the current sociopolitical climate. It’s the first time I’d thought about them and it’s because I had to absolutely recoil at the sight of this video.

So with that said…

Fuck it, I’m calling time on Fitz and the Tantrums.

Todd In The Shadows covered Crash by The Human League on his TRAINWRECKORDS series about disastrous career-ending albums, and in it he cites how in spite of it containing their biggest hit, the #1 single “Human,” it was also the album that ultimately leads to their downfall. The same argument could be made of many records, notably Liz Phair’s self-titled album from 2003, where she tanked her indie cred for popstar aspirations and while it yielded a hit single it also was the end of anyone really caring about Liz Phair (though now we’ve all come around and admitted that the album is perfectly fine). What do Fitz and the Tantrums have in common with these folks that even puts them in that same boat?

Well, before we can fully get into that, let’s get into who these guys even were before this album dropped and ruined us, because who they were varied from year to year. The year this whole thing really starts is 2008, a young man named Michael Fitzpatrick starts writing songs on this organ he gets from an ex-partner and eventually he starts a band with a couple of strikingly talented musicians; drummer John Wicks, bassist Joseph Karnes, saxophone player James King, backing/second vocalist Noelle Scaggs, and keyboardist Jeremy Ruzumna. This band eventually signs with indie label Thunderbird Records and puts out their debut album Pickin’ Up The Pieces which contains a somewhat-big hit in the form of “MoneyGrabber,” a goddamn banger of Motown-influenced soul. The album itself is, in my opinion, pretty damn good too. It really hits this nice cross-section of soul, Motown, and pop, though notably it’s a record that does not feature a lick of guitar on it. Seriously, that’s pretty impressive that they managed to gain the success they did like that and there’s nothing in there for a guitar player to come in on. They would end up opening for The Specials on their reunion tour, wind up on some national TV spots including Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, play a lot of the big-name music festivals for up-and-coming bands, and would even play on the show Darryl’s House featuring Darryl Hall of Hall and Oates fame, whom Fitzpatrick got a lot of comparisons to early-on with his singing voice. Elsewhere the band’s star continued to rise in other less-known ways; for example, did you know James King played on this song? Yeah, that saxophone solo at the end is all him, and that’s a song that has gotten universal acclaim, has ultimately stood the test of time and is well on its way to being a goddamn classic if I must say so myself. Okay, the first album does well enough to top the Heatseekers chart and your saxophone player is now embedded in the musical canon whether you like it or not, what next?

On their second album More Than Just A Dream they not only got promoted to Elektra Records but they also upped the ante a lot by going in on adding some new wave influences to that cross-section of sounds they’d cultivated within the 3 years between albums. It featured some guitars and relied more heavily on synthesizers for parts of it, but those are still Fitz and the Tantrums songs deep down. For every “Spark” or “The Walker” where they were clearly trying to get on pop radio and grab a hit (which they did for “The Walker” by the way) they also had songs like “House on Fire,” “6AM,” and “Fools Gold” where, yeah the production values increased a little bit, but they still sounded like the same band. Two of the three singles from that album ended up getting them platinum records and the album itself peaked at #26 on the US Billboard Charts, but critics were less interested in it compared to their first record which received a lot of positive critical reviews when it came out. Even now some folks still ask “why this record?” and ponder why they chose to go chasing pop hits when they could’ve easily gained a more sustained albeit different brand of success if they stuck along their own road, but there’s more coming 3 years down the line.

In interviews with the band around the time their third album came out, the band said they attempted to “find that magical thing” in their music that made them who they are and admitted to the band being an ever-evolving group that didn’t have a consistent “sound,” and that their third record was going to be more about the success they experienced going into said third record. There’s no point in shadowboxing yourself when you’re in a band that’s on the rise and have all the best stuff in the world heading your way.

In June of 2016 Fitz and the Tantrums have come out with their third album, simply a self-titled effort. I guess I’m not a huge fan of bands self-titling any record of theirs after their first one (…YOU HEAR ME, WEEZER?) for what can only be described as a whole list of weird personal reasons but Fitzpatrick stood firm on his reasoning of why they ultimately went this route, saying…

“By having a self-titled album, it’s kind of like putting our stake in the ground, claiming our identity completely. We know who we are and that is a band that can take chances by taking all different genres and putting them together. We’re not going to be reducible to one genre or one stereotype, so for us it was a proclamation of our own confidence in our sound and what we do.”

-Michael Fitzpatrick, The Aquarian interview (2016)

Okay, you know what? Ballsy, but I can respect that. A band that jumped around with different sounds on their first two albums and kinda confusing some folks in the process is claiming “this is who we are” and sticking with it. Bold indeed. So what does the new Fitz ad the Tantrums sound like? What have they chosen to stake their claim in? Well… they chose to kick off their self-titled third album with the opening single “HandClap,” and if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard it at all since it came out, allow me to introduce you to it. It’s June 2016 and you go find the new album on whatever respective streaming service you’re into, and you hear that this is how we open up their third album.

Holy shit that sounded like absolute garbage. Like… holy shit what the fuck is going on with this song?? That saxophone line sounds bad, the riff it relies on isn’t any good either, and there’s really nothing good to grab onto here. There’s also Fitz’s psuedo-rap he’s doing on the verses and it’s… (don’t say cringe, don’t say cringe, don’t say cringe) …not great. Even that hook with the hand claps is not really a strong sentiment to build a song around. I sent this to a friend years ago when it came to talking about bands we thought “sold out” and when I brought this song up he said something to the effect of “I’ve never heard of these guys and they sound like they’re trying way too hard to write a hit. It sounds like garbage.” Telling him how far the band hand fallen was a depressing conversation.

In short my reaction upon first hearing it when it first came out in 2016 was “what. the. fucking. fuck?” but I can admit that I might just be a bit of a nasty critic towards this song though. In fact, the general public liked it enough to make it go 4x platinum in America and hit #53 on the Billboard charts and #2 on the US Alternative charts. Though maybe it is still just me being a nasty critic, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot considering all they changed up to get there, right? And for the record, it’s their highest-charting single. It didn’t even hit the top 40, but you’re certainly gonna hear it at every single sporting event from now until whenever people finally decide this song is no longer cool to use like that.

Okay, so that’s the first impression of the album, what’s next?

Well… it’s “Complicated.” And it features a truly horrible hook in

“It’s complicated when we get naked. But I can take it.”

Fitz and the Tantrums, “Complicated” (2016)

…they really just took the cringiest thing they could find a threw it into the MAIN HOOK didn’t they? And yeah, I know, it’s rich coming from a drummer/singer in a band that mostly just tells dick jokes in their songs, but FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS ARE NOT THAT KINDA BAND. And that’s saying nothing about the music which, once again, features this really cold, bland backing track that’s mostly driven by a drum machine and a few synths. Fitz and the Tantrums were cool when they were mixing the synths and live band stuff on their second album because it still had the human element to it, and it fucking worked, this doesn’t in really any stretch of the imagination. There’s really close to nothing going for this song, so to have it up near the very front of the record following one of your biggest singles is ballsy.

I almost didn’t want to continue, but I did. And incidentally the next song was probably titled after my reaction to the first two tracks, it’s called “Burn It Down.”

Okay, this one is nice, it starts with a nice little piano riff and has that classic Fitz feel to it, and Noelle’s vocals add some nice backup.

aaaaaaaaand there go the electric drum kits again trying to do these vaguely outdated dubsteppy fills. And the vocal manipulations to make it sound all skippy. Is the rest of this song bad?

Okay, the second verse comes in and it’s not as bad as it is at the start, Noelle gets the lead and she has a beautiful lead here as the song kinda tones it back a bit. There’s still little electronic flourishes here and there but it’s something much more in place with the second album than not.

Up next is the second single off the album, and one I don’t think I ever heard on the radio, it’s called “Roll Up.” To put it bluntly; this sounds like ass. Actually, it sounds even worse than ass; this sounds like a store-brand version of an Imagine Dragons song. The music video is a cringy little piece too that can basically be summed as “what if phone bad??” Not surprisingly this barely made a blip anywhere; it hit #42 on the US Rock charts and that was it. No certifications anywhere, and certainly not the follow-up to the success of multi-platinum “HandClap” that I’m sure Elektra was hoping for.

“Tricky,” “Fadeback,” and “Run It” follow “Roll Up.” I think the best I can say of pretty much any of these songs is “…eh.”

Is there anything good on this album?

“Get Right Back?” Eh, sounds too much like a bad take on a Britney Spears song.

“Do What You Want?” I kinda like this one, but I think that’s because it reminds me a bit too much of “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities, and I actually kinda like that one too. There are no guilty pleasures here at ROUGE! HQ.

“Walking Target?” Sounds too much like it’s trying to get play in a Target or Old Navy store. I do like some of the synthesizer choices here but overall it’s not a good song.

The album closes with “A Place For Us.” Much like all the others it’s alright, I guess.

Alright, we’re done here. This album as a whole ranges from boring to particularly bad cringe. Honestly I just don’t think these sounds work too well for this band and maybe that’s just why the album doesn’t work as a whole.

Maybe I’m just a nasty critic, I saw plenty of people who talked about how much they love this album and how much they really liked all the songs on it, so what about the other “nasty critics?” What did they have to say about it?

Well, AllMusic gave it a 3.5/5 star rating, Newsday gave it a B+ rating, and The Courier-Journal gave it a 3/4 star rating, even going so far as to say we’re back in the era where rock bands could have pop hits! Wow, that’s pretty good, right? So maybe this pop gambit paid off because they certainly had some good praise there.

…wait, hang on, I found all the other reviews.

ooooooh boy this is bad.

Consequence of Sound? D.

PopMatters? 4/10.

Rolling Stone? 2/5, even opening up their review by saying “Fitz and the Tantrums have lost their soul — literally.” The rest of that review is also particularly harsh at times so reader please be advised on that front.

There’s no actual rating system anywhere to be found for this one but Spectrum Culture didn’t have anything nice to say about it either, with this choice quote being “the combination of frenzied instruments tripping over each other and a heaping pile of useless lyrics leads to something that lacks listenability.”

Spill Magazine gave it a 1/5 star review, and said “the biggest qualm that exists with this record is that it isn’t just a sellout, but it’s an unimpressive sellout. If the tunes at least had some sense of artistry attached to them, there would be no need to so cruelly dismantle this effort. However, the cheesy ‘oh oh’s and terribly arranged vocal effects all crash and burn throughout the entire 11-track duration.”

The big one that came from The 405 (which is down now, but some websites have saved bits and pieces of the review) which stated, “I tried listening to this record in as many different ways as possible — sitting, standing, running, dancing, brain turned on, brain turned off. No mode of listening could redeem the fact that this album is just bad … Each and every track on this album is so jam-packed with garbage pop flourishes that it can get exhausting.”

Exhuasting is the proper adjective to describe the album, too. I was actually somewhat worried that despite having a few months to write this one out I wasn’t gonna get it done in time because the album truly is just exhausting in just about every sense of the word and trying to write about it feels like a chore. If you chose to listen along to the album as you read this article, I truly apologize for doing that to you.

The aftermath of the album wasn’t particularly notable because the album itself also wasn’t particularly notable either. They did an album 3 years later and even have a new album coming out this month, but when you go and look at their chart history it feels like any pop momentum they could’ve gained was immediately lost on them. Fitz and the Tantrums were never the sorta band that could terrorize the pop charts in any country to begin with, but their songs have only ever hit the US Rock charts. A lot of critics in their harsher reviews all stated that this was probably the album that was going to kill their relevance as a musical act, and honestly I’d say as much as well. Maybe taking a page out of the playbook of Pat Monahan (of Train), Michael Fitzpatrick would go on to do a solo record in 2021 and I literally just found that out during the research for this review which should, in theory, say all sorts of things about the band and how their relevancy was more or less killed by this album, even with their new album on the way I have heard absolutely nothing about it whatsoever that wasn’t found out by me poking and prodding around at what these guys have been up to lately.

In a way it’s actually pretty fucking sad; a band that had one of the better Motown revival sounds of the 2010s decides to go pop and instead crashes and burns so hard that it kills any and all momentum they could’ve possibly had. It didn’t have to be this way either, they could’ve easily stayed the course and had the sort of longevity that comes from a band that gains a hardcore cult following and they would’ve eventually broken out on their own accord that way and gotten success through that avenue as well. Instead they try to go directly for radio hits and dumbing down their lyrics to lowest-common-denominator status and hoping it was “relatable” enough, and while the short-term success was good for the band it ultimately would be their last taste of actual success. I guess in the end that’s just how it was always going to work out. The only other thing I can say about Fitz and the Tantrums is, “wow, that Hall and Oates album really fucking sucked.”

This is Harvey VD reminding you to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers. Peace.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: Johnny’s childhood record collection

(by Johnny Cum-Lately, guitarist for ROUGE!)

I was born and the sixties died.

In “1970” Iggy Pop yowled, “I feel all right.” Few young people probably agreed with him. The year was when the Vietnam War expanded into Laos and four Kent State students were murdered by National Guard troops. In music, the year of my birth was highlighted by three musical calamities: The breakup of the Beatles; and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Boomer lore claims the final nail in the sixties rock coffin was Jim Morrison’s death in July 1971. The death of sixties music took place while Morrison was still drinking himself to death.

In addition to the big three, 1970 was the year that Peter, Paul and Mary, breakout stars of the early sixties’ folk
revival, split up to pursue solo careers. Just one year earlier, the trio topped Billboard’s Hot 100 during Christmas with John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Also calling it quits in 1970 were Simon and Garfunkel, sixties icons who had the year’s biggest album, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the title track was the biggest song of the year. The song won enough Grammys to sink a boat floating in troubled water.

The 1970s are, arguably, rock’s greatest decade. It saw the emergence of many styles that are still popular: Punk, metal, dance music (in the form of disco), electronica, hip-hop, and prog (assimilated into metal). Think of your own tastes and I guarantee you love an act that either started during the decade or had its biggest success then. It’s as if the seventies were timeless, full of songs and albums that will outlive us all.

Consider: Black Sabbath, David Bowie, the Ramones, Stooges, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, the Cars, Devo, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, Aerosmith, Van Halen, P-Funk, Joni Mitchell, et al, meet the criteria laid down in the previous paragraph. We can add more to this list.

But we’re not here today to talk about quality. We’re going to discuss the forgotten chunk of half-used moldy cheddar lurking in the back of your fridge.

We’re taking this drive in a pea-green 1975 AMC Pacer equipped with an 8-track player. And on this drive, we’re wearing a red plaid suit with a wide-collared brown Dacron dress shirt left half open to
show off an untrimmed chest.

Did you honestly think that in a column called “The Albums That Ruined Us” we’d be talking about “Funhouse,” “Maggot Brain,” or “Rocket to Russia”?

My goal is to give you, the consumer, a truly complete picture of seventies music, for good or ill.

Find yourself a hazmat suit. You’re gonna need it.

When I’m not attacking a Fender Stratocaster in ROUGE!, I work as a college librarian. Part of a librarian’s job is historic preservation, whether it’s important documents, local history materials, or keeping that century-old copy of Jerome Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat” in good condition. That said, my biggest historical preservation interest is in albums and records. And recently, in the name of having some sort of historical record, I created a playlist called “My 45s as a kid.”

My memory is sharp, so compiling a 28-song, 113-minute playlist was simple. However, it’s incomplete. Only two B sides are included, thereby destroying what little hipster cred I had. I owned at least one KC and the Sunshine Band 45, but I don’t remember which song it is. I’m sure I had more 45s back then, but they got spun so infrequently that no imprint was made. The ones that are on the playlist made the biggest impact. There’s some true classics on the playlist (“Pinball Wizard,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Dust in the Wind,” “Bohemian Rhapsody”). There’s also dreck. Guess where we’re going?

I don’t recall how I acquired most of the 45s I had in my pre-K, kindergarten, and early elementary school years (1973-1977). I know my parents provided nearly all of them, but I don’t know if I asked for any of them. Once I showed a love of Elton John, they’d get some of his newer singles. Maybe my dad, a former musician who was an avid album collector, belonged to a record-of-the-month club? I say that because in researching this column, I discovered that some of these vintage vinyl Velveeta we’ll look at topped the Billboard Hot 100.

We’ll examine each of these pieces of moldy musical muenster in approximate chronological order of release. Keep in mind this shitlist is free of Tony Orlando & Dawn, Helen Reddy, “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” “The Night Chicago Died,” “You’re Having My Baby,” or “Disco Duck.” But what we’re about to look at will taste just as bad as drinking lukewarm orange juice after brushing your teeth.

Put on that hazmat suit. Now.

“No-No Song” – Ringo Starr: Dad was a Beatles fiend. He had nearly every American LP they released. Those albums got regular spins on the living room hi-fi stereo. He loved the Beatles. I do too. As a preschooler, I used to flip through his album collection. I was fascinated by album covers. Since my early childhood was just a few years after the psychedelic era, the LP covers were colorful. Many of those albums are today considered classics. Notably absent from his collection were Beatle solo records.

During the first half of the 1970s, all four Beatles were viable solo artists. Even Ringo. And if one gauges success by Billboard No. 1 hits, Ringo was, for a time, more successful than John Lennon. By the end of 1975, Ringo led Lennon 2-1, but Ringo was close to 100 pitches. He was about to leave the game as disco warmed up in the bullpen.

It may be hard to believe, but “Instant Karma” wasn’t a No. 1 hit. Neither was “Working Class Hero.” Ditto for “Mind Games.” And despite many overwrought cover versions, neither was “Imagine.”

Lennon’s only No. 1 hit of the polyester decade was 1974’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” a largely forgotten song that featured Elton John, then at his commercial peak, essentially sharing the lead vocal. Lennon wouldn’t catch his former drummer until the final week of 1980, when “Starting Over” went to No. 1 in the wake of his murder.

So yeah, Ringo had two No. 1 solo hits. “No-No Song” was not one of them. “No-No Song” was on his album “Goodnight Vienna,” which was released the same year (1974) as “You’re Sixteen,” which was his second – and final – song that topped the Billboard Hot 100. “No-No Song” was released as a single in early 1975 and reached No. 3 on Billboard. It was a No. 1 hit in Canada. Canada also gave us the hard rock band Monster Truck. These facts are not related but show that even awesome countries support lousy music.

“No-No Song” features a beat that, while not quite disco, is close. It even has horns. In it, the narrator declares, with a hint of a Jamaican accent, all the things he doesn’t do no more, like smoking marijuana, snorting cocaine, and drinking alcohol (specifically moonshine) because he’s “tired of waking up on the floor” and “it makes it hard to find the door.” Meanwhile, Ringo had a serious drinking problem during this time that continued until he entered rehab in the late eighties. He sadly had a lot of experience waking up on the floor and having trouble finding the door.

This tune has a vibe of a bunch of celebrity musicians getting together in the studio to record a temperance anthem while a mountain of cocaine sits atop the mixing board, and everyone drinks champagne between takes. Irony can be pretty ironic.

Did I mention my parents got a 4-year-old child this record? And said 4-year-old child played this record a lot? But maybe the song worked. I never tried cocaine. I also never thought about Ringo in the context of a solo artist. After the mid-seventies, neither did millions of others.

Three years ago, as of this writing, I saw Ringo’s All-Starr Band. This was the first – and possibly only – time that I got to see a Beatle. I don’t recall if “No-No Song” was played. But at one point during the show, Ringo, in a lecherous voice, asked “Are there any little girls in the audience tonight?”

Me: “RINGO, NO!”

After the cheers (CHEERS???) subsided, he said, “This song is for you.” The All-Starr Band launched into “You’re Sixteen.”
“You’re sixteen, and you’re mine,” sang Ringo. He was 78 FREAKING YEARS OLD.

By today’s standards, “You’re Sixteen” is creepy AF. Ringo’s tone-deaf introduction didn’t help. He would’ve been better off announcing that the next song was a number 1 hit for him, and that he hopes everyone enjoys it. I would’ve been ok with that, even if he was 33 years old when that song topped the charts.

No no no no, I don’t want cringe no more …

“Love Will Keep Us Together” – The Captain and Tennille: And you thought the hazmat suit talk was all hype.

I am not going to analyze why this song is bad. There’s plenty of that online. There’s no sense in piling on. But I will say that some strange noises emanate from The Captain’s keyboards during “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and they’re not strange in a good way.

Instead, I’m going to talk about “The Captain,” a.k.a. DARYL DRAGON. He got one of the coolest names ever and blew it.

Forget the turtlenecks and captain’s cap. He should’ve grown his hair out and started wearing satin capes (keeping the aviator shades, because aviator shades rule). He should’ve formed a proto-metal band called Dragon’s Lair. Said band could’ve featured DARYL DRAGON laying down some lengthy, complex keyboard solos in the middle of songs about Viking voyages, Visigoth conquests, and dwarves terrorizing hapless villagers. He could’ve been a keyboard god like Jon Lord, Keith Emerson, and Rick Wakeman. His band would’ve been better than Atilla, Billy Joel’s short-lived proto-metal duo. They couldn’t have been much worse.

Instead, a man named DARYL DRAGON marries an attractive female singer, scores several pop hits with her, makes a fortune, and … yeah, he probably made the right move. Especially since he later owned the recording studio where Guns N’ Roses recorded “Appetite for Destruction.”

And while we’re at it, quit dissing Toni Tennille. Four years after her and DARYL DRAGON released their signature song, she provided backing vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Everyone deserves a shot at redemption.

“Bad Blood” – Neil Sedaka: The same year this topped the Hot 100 for three weeks, classics like “Fame” by David Bowie, and “Shining Star” by Earth, Wind and Fire also topped the charts. Since my dad has passed on, I must ask my mom: “WHY DID YOU BUY ME THIS PIECE OF CRAP?” Oh, that’s right, Elton John provides uncredited backing vocals on “Bad Blood.” Elton was at his commercial peak in 1975, and he was my first musical hero. Buying this single for me made sense. And as far as my parents selecting my music, all parents make mistakes.

For those of you who don’t know (which is probably everyone reading this screed) Neil Sedaka was kind of a big deal in the early sixties. He was a successful Brill Building songwriter, scored some hits as a performer, and had a No. 1 hit in August 1962 with “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” Then The Beatles arrived and Sedaka disappeared from the American pop scene for more than a decade. Eventually, he met Elton John, and Sedaka signed to the Elton’s new Rocket Records label.

What followed was, at the time, perhaps the greatest comeback in American pop music history. Sedaka was more popular than ever in 1975, and he seemingly was as unlikely a pop star as can be imagined. He was in his mid-thirties. In some photos from that time, he looks pudgy and appears to have a combover. And he still became, for one year, a bona fide pop star.

Sedaka had a role in three No. 1 singles in 1975. He co-wrote “Love Will Keep Us Together,” for DARYL DRAGON and Tennille. As a performer he topped the charts twice that year. “Bad Blood” was his second No. 1 of the year – and last of his career.

“Bad Blood” is mostly forgotten today, but it deserves more respect in pop music history. In this song, Neil Sedaka unwittingly became a rap pioneer.

Sedaka’s contribution to the future genre appears in the second and third chorus, when the word “bitch” is sung. “Bad Blood” was probably the first No. 1 song to feature that word as a lyric. Prior to
Sedaka’s groundbreaking contribution, the closest that word came to appearing on a No. 1 single was as the title of the B-side to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” in 1971. I’ve listened to “Bad Blood” a few times recently. It’s a man talking to his friend, who was mistreated by a woman. Sedaka’s voice is thin, but he and Elton blend well in the chorus. Musically, it’s dated, but so are most pop hits from any year. It has a keyboard part that hints at funk, but the song itself goes nowhere. It’s mid-tempo and it stays there. It doesn’t inspire dancing, fast driving, volume cranking, head banging, moshing, or any combination thereof. It’s exists for 3 minutes and 10 seconds, provided you don’t tap out earlier.

And what does “bad blood” have to do with a woman who mistreats a man? Did she get a tainted transfusion? Is there a blood disorder that causes women to mistreat a man? Are there certain blood types that predisposes a woman to commit heinous acts? The title (repeated throughout the chorus) makes no sense in the context of the verses, which are delivered like a high school guy taunting his friend about that girl who mistreated him. So, it’s not cool for her to treat him “like small change,” but the narrator can talk to his so-called friend the same way?

Dear Neil Sedaka: You come off as a jerk in this song.

“Sky High” – Jigsaw: The best way to describe “Sky High,” is just like the pea-green Pacer I mentioned earlier: DOA. In this case, the acronym means Dated on Arrival.

Jigsaw was a British pop-rock act that in the U.S. was a one-hit wonder. In this case, “one-hit wonder” means you’re puzzled as to how the hell they ever had one hit.

“Sky High” was the main theme to the 1975 martial arts action yarn “The Man from Hong Kong.” It stars George Lazenby, who played James Bond once (“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”). “The Man from Hong Kong” has a 6.6 rating on IMDB, meaning that it is apparently a better movie than every Cheech and Chong picture, “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” “Freddy Got Fingered,” and “Twilight.” So beautiful.

This up-tempo song was a smash, going top 10 in seven countries and top 20 in two others. In the U.S., it peaked at No. 3 on Billboard. Musically, the song opens with blaring horns, a sub-disco hi-hat riff, and chicken scratch guitars. It sounds like a mid-seventies’ movie theme – to a blaxploitation film. But once the vocals of drummer Des Dyer start, we are whiter than Syracuse after a lake-effect blizzard.

I haven’t seen “The Man from Hong Kong,” but reading the brief synopsis on IMDB makes me wonder what “Sky High” has to do with the movie. The lyrics are about a guy proclaiming how wonderful his love affair could’ve been with an unnamed person (presumably a woman, given the homophobia of the times) who blew it all sky high, by telling him a lie, without a reason why.

What was the lie? Did said person say they were going to get Biffo Beech good seats for an Arsenal-Manchester City match and not come through? Did this person promise to meet Biffo at Applebee’s on a date night, but instead showed up at Wendy’s? We never find out what the lie is, but based on Biffo’s chirpy lyrical delivery, totally devoid of intensity, the lie couldn’t have been that bad. Biffo Beech doesn’t seem too upset. Why should we care?

But what makes this song stink, rather than just a dated artifact? It’s during the chorus, when Biffo Beech goes to the top of his vocal range and drags out the word “high.” Biffo Beech blew that one sky high, by telling the producer a lie – that he could not only hit that note, but sound good doing it.

“Saturday Night” – Bay City Rollers: Fuck you I still like this song.

“Convoy” – C.W. McCall: Listening to pop radio in the early and mid-seventies could easily transform into story time. Those were the years were when story songs were at their peak. Two great examples of this style both were No. 1 in their time: Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” and Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle.” If you’re a dad, especially if you have a son, hearing “Cats in the Cradle” at the wrong time will reduce you to tears.

“Convoy” is also a story song. It’s cheesy. It will not reduce you to tears. Well, maybe not the kind of tears that “Cats in the Cradle” inspire. But you know what “Convoy” can lay claim to? It spawned a pop-culture phenomenon. In a way, “Convoy” was the “Macarena” of the mid-seventies.

“Convoy” tells the story of a group of truckers uniting, driving across the country, defying speed limits, and evading the cops (known as ‘bears” in the ‘70s trucker slang of the song). We never find out why the truckers have decided to take on the bears outside of Flagtown. Or was it Tulsa Town? Do I really have to listen to this again for the sake of 100 percent accuracy?

The story is that the truckers continue to go “’cross the USA” and evade the cops, the “bear in the air,” the Illinois National Guard, blow through the toll booths of New Jersey, all to some unspecified location on the east coast. “Let them truckers roll!”

I have questions: What started this convoy? What’re they mad about? And how did they drive from Shakeytown to the Jersey shore without running out of gas? Logically, the bears would’ve nabbed those “thousand screaming trucks” well before they encountered the Illinois National Guard in Chicago; all those trucks would’ve run out of gas.

“Convoy” has a few plot holes. But what it lacked in literary finery it made up for in the deep baritone of C.W. McCall (an alias for an advertising executive) delivering the CB slang of the day. And it’s that CB slang that makes the song an oddly compelling listen. Musically, it’s a hodge-podge of dated countryish elements, like banjos coming in the second verse.

“Convoy” was a No. 1 hit for just one week in January 1976. But in its wake, it seemed more and more regular folks bought CB radios. They were the cell phones of the day. It was how people learned about accidents on the road ahead, speed traps, or the antics of a driver and a truck stop hooker at the rest stop you just passed. My parents had a CB radio in our motorhome. I hope dad didn’t call himself the Rubber Duck or Pigpen.

A couple of years after the song topped the charts, “Convoy” was turned into a movie. This film looks like it stinks. Here’s the trailer of another picture that cashed in on the fad.

And yet somehow, “Convoy” is a reliable go-to in any “worst songs ever” list. I’m not sure why. Dated? Absolutely. Cheesy? Like homemade mac and cheese. A novelty song? Of course. But so is “I’m Too Sexy,” which is one of the greatest songs ever written. Why? Because it’s fun. I guess “Convoy” is as well.

This tune is considered a country song, mainly because it’s about truckers. In general, I LOATHE country music. But I was 5 years old when this song dominated radio. The story and delivery would probably appeal to any 5-year-old, even today’s kids. These children can watch “Frozen” every day for a year and still love it, whereas the kid’s parents were ready to let it go after seeing it for the fifth time this week and it’s only Tuesday.

We should not entrust our pop culture to 5-year-olds. Bad things happen when we entrust our pop culture to 5-year-olds.

“Afternoon Delight” – Starland Vocal Band: ROUGE! vocalist/drummer Harvey V.D. likes to sit on the toilet and sing this song while playing his acoustic guitar. I could end this in-depth, scholarly analysis of this song right here, but more must be said. Out of all the examples of bad seventies songs, why does this one receive so much invective? Why isn’t more hate directed at “Shannon,” a hit single (peaking at No. 6) for Henry Gross that’s from the same year (1976) as “Afternoon Delight.” “Shannon” is about a DEAD DOG.

“Afternoon Delight,” meanwhile, is a celebration of midday sex. People are more tolerant of a DEAD DOG than they are about getting it on in the afternoon. This is America. We work in the afternoon! If you’re not working, you’re lazy, don’t care about your family, and are probably a woke communist snowflake instead of a real American with real values! Because real Americans apparently prefer a DEAD DOG to boning in the afternoon.

I’m not going to pile on “Afternoon Delight.” It’s done. It’s a cliché. You want to read about how lousy this song is, you can find it online.

Maybe this ditty gets hate because it helped Starland Vocal Band win the Grammy for best new artist instead of Boston. Yes, ahead of the band that gave us “More Than a Feeling.” Ahead of the band whose self-titled debut was, for many years, the biggest selling debut album in history. The Ramones debut album was released the same year as “Afternoon Delight,” but hardly anyone bought that first Ramones album that year. More people, including two young parents in Las Vegas, bought “Afternoon Delight.” So maybe some hate is justified.

Does “Afternoon Delight” stink? Not really. The female vocals sound a bit screechy, but it’s no worse than a lot of other mediocre pop songs that went No. 1. Its biggest crime is that it’s from mid-seventies and is not about a DEAD DOG. I say, let’s get it on at 2 in the afternoon. Everyone couple up, forget waiting ‘til the cold dark night, because everything is clearer in the light of day. Put skyrockets in flight. Let’s all get sweaty and fill the air with grunting sounds. Let’s turn our houses, our apartments, the vans we live in down by the river, into Chateau Grunteau. Let El Grunteau in the afternoon reign supreme!

…Unless you all would rather hear about a DEAD DOG.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “Garth Brooks in… the Life of Chris Gaines” aka “Chris Gaines’ Greatest Hits” by Garth Brooks/Chris Gaines

In April of 2021 the New York Times published an opinion piece with a headline titled “You Can Be a Different Person After the Pandemic.” The title pretty much sums up the idea the article is presenting; you don’t need to be a certain way or live a certain life if you’re not happy with your station in life. Our lives are not set in stone. It’s an article that, despite its general sentiments, only made me think of two men and two men only.

Garth Brooks and Chris Gaines.

I say two men, but really I only mean one man because the thing to remember is that Garth Brooks is Chris Gaines.


Even just saying that name out loud or showing a photo of the man in question elicits a roar of thunderous laughter among a certain group of people. It’s an album that lives in such infamy that when Brooks teased that the album would eventually be available on streaming services, CD and vinyl a month before that New York Times article was released it sent chills down the spines of many folks, myself included. Even now when the name Garth Brooks comes up people often ask if he was the guy who did that Chris Gaines album. That’s his legacy to the many of the most casual listeners on the surface, and I want to make it clear; Garth Brooks wasn’t just some guy who decided to put on a costume and cosplay as someone else, he was a multi-platinum, muti-diamond-selling artist from 1989 to 1999. He’s sold more records than many artists and bands whose careers and music are deeply imbedded in the American musical canon, and when you see some of the names in question it just reinforces the main question; what the fuck happened to this guy?? How is he still getting the shit kicked out of him for this?? How did this guy become the subject of a Family Guy punchline?? How does one of the best-selling artists of all time get relegated to being the subject of a question by a friend asking how come they don’t know a single Garth Brooks song?

(For the sake of transparency I’d also like to be upfront about the fact that a large chunk of what I learned and what I’m going to be sharing comes directly and indirectly from Chris Gaines: The Podcast because of course there’s a podcast about it, why would there not be? I’d highly recommend giving it a listen though because it’s really fantastic stuff.)

Well, for starters, he was a country artist and I’ll be the first to admit that many of my friends who I talk music with sort of recoil when they hear “country” and they act like it’s a dirty word when in reality it isn’t, and it’s far from it. Garth Brooks is a damn good artist and he absolutely earned every single award he’s racked up in his career, but when you’re in a genre that’s got acts like Florida Georgia Line and Walker Hayes muddying up the waters it’s hard to not look at the genre as a joke on the whole.

Second off, the year was 1999 and Garth Brooks was the biggest country star of all-time. As previously stated, he had 10 years of mega success with his music and it wouldn’t be too hard to believe that nobody around him was going to tell him “no” on what seemed to be an obviously bad idea. I can only compare this to if Lady Gaga decided she was going to make a heavy metal album under a different alias but still had the “Lady Gaga” name attached to it. But the point I’m trying to make here is that Garth wanted to branch out, and no one was going to tell him he couldn’t, right?

Well, you have to consider that at the end of the day Brooks was still the top-selling country artist. No disrespect towards country music as a whole obviously, but even with all those records sold and the massive audience he built up he was always going to be a major league guy on a triple-a ball club at best. 1999 comes around and it’s time for Garth to step up to the plate and prove he can branch out and make it into the upper-echelons of musical superstardom.

Actually, more than anything it’s telling that for this entire thing Garth felt like he had to put on a costume and come up with a whole character and backstory at all just to be able to do something a tad bit different from what he usually did. Maybe he felt cornered into just being Garth Brooks and this really was his way of branching out and being able to explore the non-country side of his sensibilities. I don’t know if it’s ever been fully confirmed but if someone told me that was the case I’d fully believe it.

…which is what I would say if any of that was the case. Garth actually swore up and down in various interviews that this wasn’t him trying to break from country music, this wasn’t an attempt at crossing over into pop, this wasn’t an “alter-ego” and this was just him playing a character for a movie. That’s not really that weird at all. But trying to get people familiar with the character of Chris Gaines before the movie came out? THAT is a very fucking weird train of thought to have though. Not once have I seen a movie and thought to myself something along the lines of “oh, but I need to know the entire backstory of this person before I go into it. Tell me more about Randall Graves, what drew him to RST Video??” Realistically it’s more than likely he was just used to banging out an album a year and when he got the green light to do the movie he started making the music and didn’t want to just sit around with it because the process of making a movie was long and boring. I can only speculate though.

Also while it’s on my mind I’d just like to say that doing research for this one has been a bit weird because the lines between Garth and Chris get blurred at times, so I may refer to the real-life canon of Garth Brooks and the in-universe canon of Chris Gaines as one in the same at times. Reading through the album’s liner notes establishes a world of oddly specific details about his career and anecdotes such as albums staying on the charts for 200+ weeks at a time (not a typo, by the way) and how this was the start of a new major era for the life of Chris Gaines, but in the real world a lot of what happened after the fact informs what happens now when I’m digging around and doing research trying to write this article. To that end I’d just like to say upfront that, spoiler alert, both sides of this story do not have a happy ending. I mentioned that the album isn’t available on streaming services and that’s partially due to this unhappy ending, so I had to actually go and actually buy the CD off eBay in order to give it a proper listen for this review, it’s also where I got the liner notes for the album from, but also it feels like Garth’s people did as much as they could to actively sweep as much of this album and its subsequently related pieces off the internet. Even trying to find anything on YouTube feels like heavy lifting because there just isn’t much of anything there outside of a plethora of video essays, a single music video, the occasional thing related to Gaines that isn’t directly Chris Gaines and the occasional video of Garth directly talking about the project. For all intents and purposes despite his promise of giving the album a new life on digital services it feels like he’s still somewhat embarrassed by the project and doesn’t get how so many people love the album even after all this time. This is all a very roundabout way of saying that because of this when I speak about individual songs on this album I will not be able to link to videos for it as I normally would unfortunately (with the exception of the lead single which we will get to in a bit) but I’ll do my best to provide something for you.

Alright, now that I’ve gotten all that out of the way let’s try to kick this shit off.

The year is 1999 and Garth Brooks is the biggest country star of the decade, and really the biggest country star of all-time one might argue. Before Chris Gaines entered the picture the lowest any of his singles had peaked on the country charts was at #23 and even then it was a cover of an Aerosmith song. Every album peaked at #1 or #2 on the country music charts as well as being certified diamond and gold. Aside from that one droop into the 20s and one song that peaked at #19 on the singles charts he had unparalleled success and was the country guy. He had all this success with the charts, the certifications, and multiple world tours under his belt but there was one thing Garth had not conquered yet; the big screen.

Enter Chris Gaines.

For his major foray into the movie industry Paramount and Brooks worked to develop the ideas for and flesh out the character of Chris Gaines for a movie centered around the character called The Lamb. Allegedly the movie was going to center on an obsessed fan trying to investigate the mysterious death of Gaines while piecing his life together with the majority of the story being told through flashbacks. Brooks built up this elaborate backstory about the life of Gaines that included everything from dead friends to contract disputes, from disapproving parents to sex addiction and even a bit about facial reconstruction surgery. It’s a bizarre story to put it gently and it’s the sort of thing that would have gotten spoofed to hell and back in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (Side bar: In a way it’s a bit bizarre to see all the biopics out in the world now that still follow the ridiculous formulas set up the way Walk Hard presented them, but if anyone needed a reason to shy away from the “formula” in the current era, just show this soul-patched man and that should do it).

For this album Brooks teamed up with the legendary Don Was (of Was Not Was fame) and a stable of songwriters to put together a “pre-soundtrack” to the movie that was eventually going to become The Lamb and presented not just a collection of songs, but the aforementioned elaborate backstory with completely fleshed out details about every aspect of his life. In March of 1999 this idea is shared to the public in a press conference that not only features Brooks and Was, but also the folks who are helping make this movie come to life. After that the chatter dies down a bit we don’t hear much publicly about Gaines but the wheels have been in motion in making this character become a public icon.

Around this time Brooks joins up with the San Diego Padres and plays on the team at spring training. No, that is not a joke. It was for his charity and apparently it did pretty well though so maybe I should stop being an asshole about it.

We eventually do end up getting our first hint of what’s to come and what the country superstar has chosen to do a few months later in the middle of a particularly tumultuous summer for Garth Brooks when on July 19th Garth, as Gaines, releases the first single off the upcoming album, entitled “Lost In You.”

So far what we’ve read is a bit of a bizarre story, yes, but people will be able to gloss over it if the music is any good, right? So let’s see if we can forget that, at least publicly, Garth looks like he’s losing his goddamn mind and give this song a listen.

Well… it’s… actually not that bad. It’s a smooth pretty lowkey little song that talks about falling head-over-heels for somebody and being in love with them. In the context of the Gaines universe this is one of two songs specifically recorded for the Greatest Hits CD and it truly does sound like a nice little hit. In fact it ended up peaking at #5 on the Billboard charts and gave Brooks his only appearance on the Billboard Hot 100, which is a bit of a big deal because this single ended up causing quite the stir for a lot of radio stations; country radio didn’t want to play it because it wasn’t country and pop stations didn’t really want to play it because it was Garth Brooks. History has given this song a fairly positive legacy though if Donald Glover covering it is meant to be any indication at all. I like it, I’ll give this a thumbs-up, if this is the sorta stuff to expect from this strange Gaines character then you know what? It can’t be that bad.

It is a bit odd though because everybody involved made such a big deal about how the character of Chris Gaines was supposed to be a rocker and was in a rock band before he became a big rock star and has the whole rock star aesthetic and yet the first song we hear to promote the album is actually a gentle little R&B-influenced number that wouldn’t have felt out of place on the softer radio station my grandma used to listen to when I was a kid growing up in the early-to-mid-00s. A bit of conflicting messaging going on? Absolutely, but the song is nice so it’s something I’m personally willing to overlook.

Two months go by, it’s now September 28th, 1999 and Garth Brooks in… The Life and Times of Chris Gaines gets released in stores for the general public to buy and listen to. You get home, you crack open the CD, read the 20-something pages of liner notes that accompany the album, put the CD in the stereo system of your choice and the first song that comes on is a track called “That’s The Way I Remember It.”

Let’s get acquainted with Chris Gaines.

Alright. Well. This is… okay, I guess. It’s kinda mellow, which makes sense in the context of the Gaines universe because it’s off his then-most-recent album Triangle. I’m still waiting for the “rocker” thing that’s been advertised to come out. Lyrically, it’s a love song about how no matter what, he’s going to remember the unnamed love interest the song is dedicated to. If you read the liner notes he mentions that he originally wrote it as a downer song but then when he “wrote” the music the lyrics didn’t fit anymore so he changed it up to be more in line with something the Beatles would write. It’s not exactly a standout track or interesting way to open the album up, but it’s something. I will say that for an artist such as Garth who was mostly known for a booming low voice, hearing this soft gentle high voice is… interesting.

After this is “Lost In You,” we heard this one already, we know how it sounds. In the context of the album it’s actually a good follow-up to “That’s The Way I Remember It.”

Up next we’ve got “Snow In July,” this is another Triangle song.
It opens up with this… well… kinda funky little riff. Maybe this is the “rocker” thing I keep hearing so much about? Well, yeah but no. The song has more of a backbeat and a bit more energy but he’s still channeling his best Matchbox 20 here. Lyrically it’s about a good relationship that’s gone bad and presents this clever metaphor for it by saying “it ain’t even cold baby, how could it snow in July?”

Actually, I’ll give this one a thumbs up. It kinda gives off Weather Channel background vibes which is oddly appropriate, but I also kinda like those types of songs anyway.

Up next is the final Triangle song on this so-called Greatest Hits compilation. It’s called “Driftin’ Away.” It’s another gentile ballad of a song. It’s got these pretty acoustic guitars, some electric piano underneath the surface and a stiff drum machine to back it all up. The lyrics talk about loving someone but feeling yourself drifting away from them. It’s a fairly relatable concept, it just falls flat because the music is this dainty little backing track that’s afraid to give any sort of dynamics to it. That backing drum absolutely kills this song, though. It’s dated and not even in a kitsch way either.

The next track is “Way of the Girl,” a song off the Apostle album. Immediately we’re treated to some slap bass and stabby guitars playing around with a synth lead. The guitars and bass sound really good on this one. It’s a shame that it took us five songs to get to something with even the slightest hint of a “rock” edge to it. Hell, Garth hits these vocal inflections on the second verse that absolutely rip. The lyrics here are a bit questionable in parts, like this piece here…

“Some made it for money
And some made it for love
Some made it for romance
My baby’s all the above”

Chris Gaines, “Way of the Girl” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Chris, Garth, baby, honey… what? Is this chick someone you like or what? That “made it for money” bit throws a weird wrench in the whole thing.

Okay, if those are the first lyrics I’m questioning, we’re not that bad here.

Next track.

“Unsigned Letter” follows this, another Apostle song, and honestly? Yeah this one rips. It kinda feels like a Great Value Everclear song but I also like Everclear. It also reminds more than a little of the “lite-rock” songs I heard growing up. The guitars are nice on this one too. Some folks compared it to The Wallflowers, and yeah that kinda tracks.

The lyrics tell about an infatuation Chris has with a girl who takes care of him after his in-universe “accident” (…we’ll get to that later.) He offers this detail in the liner notes that they’re still good friends but deep down he “still wonders what she would be like if she ever let go.”

Wow, dude. Just… wow. That’s deep character development right there.

“It Don’t Matter to the Sun” comes after that. In-universe, it’s a song that Chris’ dad used to sing to his mom all the time and then when his father died there was no one around to sing it to her so this is a real recording of a fake cover song which is… bold. Lyrically though, holy shit this is a fucking downer.

It don’t matter to the sun
If you go or if you stay
I know the sun is going to rise
Shine down on another day
There still be a tomorrow
Even if you choose to leave
Because it don’t matter to the sun, oh baby
It matters to me
It ain’t going to stop the world
If you walk out that door
This old world will just keep turning ’round, turning ’round
Like it did the day before
Because see to them it makes no difference, ohh
It just keep on keeping time
Because it ain’t going to stop the world out there
But it’ll be the end of mine

Chris Gaines, “It Don’t Matter to the Sun” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Even the back half tries to lighten up the mood and still fails miserably. I don’t hear a love song in this, I hear an absolute bummer of a song. If I sang this to any partner I’ve had I’m pretty sure I’d hear the same thing.

It should come as no surprise though that a few artists have actually covered this. It’s a nice song with a real soulful delivery to it, and honestly it bums me out that none of the covers were by Motown or soul/r&b artists. It’s got that special something to it, but those bummer lyrics sure aren’t it. It’s also the closest that Gaines gets to Garth on this album which explains why it’s considered a highlight all these years later.

Don Henley covered this song with Stevie Nicks though, and you know what Don Henley is? An asshole.

Alright, so we’re about halfway through this record and honestly, the only thoughts that cross my mind are that it gets better as it goes on, but that also I’m not particularly attached to any of these songs aside from maybe “Unsigned Letter,” and “It Don’t Matter to the Sun.” I kinda have a soft spot for “Lost In You” as well but it’s not a huge soft spot. Aside from that this album so far is kinda “meh,” but as I said, it gets better as it goes on, I hope that remains true for the rest of the record.

Also I should note that these songs go in more-or-less reverse chronological order, so we’re getting the more mature Chris at the start but it walks itself back further and further in time. I remain intrigued. Onward!

And onward we get to… well… this is the one. This is the most bizarre track on the album. Maybe that doesn’t say much considering otherwise this album as a whole so far is as bizarre as beige paint but this one is called “Right Now” and is in fact, one of the few tracks I can properly link here for the time being. Enjoy.

The liner notes state that this is, in short, a song about “senseless slaughtering of innocence, and the countless opportunities for peace wasted.” He mentions that he “isn’t a preacher” and he “doesn’t do anthems” but he felt compelled to do one. So, what does Chris have to say about the state of the world?

“Maybe it’s the movies, maybe it’s the books
Maybe it’s the government and all the other crooks
Maybe it’s the drugs, maybe it’s the parents
Maybe it’s the gangs, or the colors that we’re wearing
Maybe it’s the high schools, maybe it’s the teachers
Tattoos, pipe bombs underneath the bleachers
Maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the crack
Maybe it’s the bible, or could it be the lack”

Chris Gaines, “Right Now” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Huh. Alright.

Guys…


…why is Chris Gaines rapping on this?


This is so out-of-place on this album, but it should come as no surprise that in-universe it was another song specifically recorded for the Greatest Hits record. So yeah, a song recorded for the Greatest Hits is the weirdest one on here so far. Go figure.

The hook is the strongest part of this song though by a country mile though. He claims he “joined the current events of the 90s with the ‘give peace a chance’ of the 60s” and pleads to “please, love one another” which he also says in the chorus.

Come on people, now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another, right now…right now

Chris Gaines, “Right Now” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

It should be noted that this chorus comes from a song called “Get Together” by The Youngbloods. I can’t tell if it’s a direct sample or just an interpolation but I will say his voice sounds damn good on that hook. It doesn’t speak well to the song though when the strongest part of it isn’t even something Chris wrote in-universe though, but that’s just me. Does the next verse get better?

“Okay, maybe it’s the papers, maybe it’s the family
Maybe it’s the internet, radio, TV
Maybe it’s the president, maybe it’s the last one
Maybe it’s the one before that
Maybe it’s the athletes, maybe it’s the dads
Maybe it’s the sports fans, agents, fads
Maybe it’s the homeless, aliens, immigrants
Maybe it’s life, don’t tell me that it’s imminent”

Chris Gaines, “Right Now” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Wow, that’s awful. Third verse, maybe?

“Maybe it’s the fallout, maybe it’s the ozone
Maybe it’s the chemicals, the radiation, cell phones
Maybe it’s the magazines, maybe it the next page
Lotteries, fast food, bad news, road rage
Maybe it the unions, big business
Maybe it’s the KKK and the skinheads
Maybe it’s the daughters, maybe it’s the sons
Maybe it’s the brothers of the mothers or the guns”

Chris Gaines, “Right Now” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Nope. Last verse?

“Maybe it’s the parks, maybe it’s the sex
Maybe it’s the talk shows, maybe it’s a reflex
Maybe it’s the taxes, maybe it’s the system
Judges, lawyers, prisons
Maybe it’s the Catholics, maybe it’s the Protestants
Maybe it’s the addicts, and the hippies and communists
Maybe it’s a fashion, maybe it’s a trend
Maybe it’s the future… maybe it’s the end”

Chris Gaines, “Right Now” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

OH MY GOD, DUDE. STOP.

What’s the point of trying to say to love one another if you’re gonna spend the entire song pointing the finger at everyone and trying to figure out why the world is fucked?? That’s not very “love one another” Chris!

I’m gonna be honest, I loathe that the great hook is overshadowed by this weird-ass speak-rap that he’s doing on this song. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if people heard this and were immediately turned the fuck off by “Chris Gaines” and thought Garth lost his goddamn mind. I read a couple reviews that suggested this was Garth trying to take the piss out of all those super serious “artists” who had to constantly write something with a “message” and that this is all satire. I wouldn’t go that far but it’s still a strange choice of a song.

The weirdest parts of this story have yet to come though despite the weirdest part of the album being that.

I wanted to clock the fuck out after that but this is an album review so we have to keep on truckin’ I suppose.

Please tell me something good comes after this.

Well, after that it’s “Main Street.” It’s a song about leaving your small town and experiencing what’s out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if a pop punk band got their hands on this and gave it a spin, it’s kinda got that energy even though this song has Matchbox 20-Lite/”adult alternative” energy to it. This is also kinda more in line with something Garth probably would’ve done on his own honestly, there’s still that subtle country twang to it that comes out just so.

Alright, that’s a way to recover from the trainwreck of “Right Now” at least.

“White Flag” follows this. It’s another love song, but more specifically it’s comparing love to a battlefield and how he’s “sending up a white flag.” Huh, if only there was a song about almost that exact thing. I like the little funky vibes it gives off though, and Gaines certainly isn’t phoning it in on the vocal delivery here, he goes full-throat on a few parts and it really sells the song.

Up next is “Digging for Gold” and it’s exactly about what you think it’s about.

“They married on a fancy yacht out on the water
He knew she was young enough to be his daughter
There’re always questions in the heart of millionaires
Would she make heartfelt promises if the money was not there”

Chris Gaines, “Digging for Gold” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Uhhhhhhh

“And he said, do you love me, baby, do you want me to hold
Or are you just digging for gold
Do you care enough to give me your heart and soul
Or are you just digging for gold”

Chris Gaines, “Digging for Gold” (Greatest Hits, 1999)

Yeah, exactly. Hey Kanye, don’t watch the anime if you haven’t read the manga, am I right?

Musically this actually reminds me more than a little of Sting and The Police, and I kinda like it because of that. The drums kinda have that Stuart Copeland feel to them, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Sting give it a go and do his own version of the song at some point. The guitar actually rocks on this, and the switch up in tempo and vibe from verse to chorus is pretty neat too. Alright, this is the “rocker Chris Gaines” I was waiting for. Hello there!

Are we almost done with this album?

Well, “Maybe.” That’s the name of the second-to-last track at least. It’s a cross between a ballad and one of those adult alternative songs you’d eventually hear on the radio a few years later. It’s an alright track, but it’s nothing too particularly fascinating. The lyrics are another “I love you but you’re bringing me down” type of song. It gets very Beatles-inspired near the end, but in a good way. The way the orchestra and guitars mesh together in particular is nice.

We’re finally at the end, this last song is called “My Love Tells Me So” and, as should be noted, is not actually sung by Chris Gaines. It’s sung by the song’s real-world songwriter Gordon Kennedy taking on the role of Tommy, the singer Crush, the band Gaines was in before his solo career took off due to the young, tragic premature death of Tommy. He claims this is just the “demo version” but that the label liked it so much they wanted to use it as it was on the Crush album. As such, this song is dedicated to Tommy and in honor of his memory. It should be noted that in-universe this song was recorded and released in 1986, which stands out because it’s a verrrrry Beatleseque song which feels more in line with 1966 than 1986, and admittedly the resemblance to a typical Fab Four song is kinda creepy. I like the way the bass moves on this song in particular, it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

But that’s how we end the record, on a positive upbeat note, pretty polar opposite to most of the album before it.

Okay, so it wasn’t a particularly great record but it sure as shit was far from the disaster I was anticipating it to be after years of hearing about this album like it was some urban myth or something. Honestly I think my major complaint about this record is that it’s far from “rocking,” but for what is basically an adult alternative album it’s alright. It does get under my skin just a little to hear about the Gaines character being written as a rocker and then most of the album straight-up doesn’t rock like that at all. That’s just a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things though, so whatever. Also if I’m being honest here it’s weird that the record covers the “in-universe” era of 1989-1999 and yet it all sounds like late 90s adult alternative and lite-funk. I guess I should’ve expected less here? Also it’s a bit of a long album but at 56ish minutes it felt like an eternity of listening and even after a few listens that feeling doesn’t go away.

The album gets released on September 28th, 1999 and if my research and timeline is correct then the very next day on NBC there’s a special that airs where Garth plays some songs off the Chris Gaines record and talks about the project in between songs, including some background on the character of Gaines. I think it’s actually a pretty neat special and Gaines really brings his A-game with the live performances of the songs he sings, including how he gets so into it on the opening of “Snow In July.” The performance of the batshit-crazy “Right Now” that closes it all off is pretty great, too, honestly. In truth, maybe he would’ve been an alright actor considering Garth really tries his hardest to sell these songs on stage as his own in spite of not writing a single damn piece of music or lyrics on this thing. As a reminder; he wrote nothing here and all the songs were handled by someone else in a stable of songwriters.

One small thing, though. On this TV special Garth Brooks did these songs as himself, not as the Chris Gaines character. Sure, he doesn’t wear his signature cowboy hat for these and in between songs he mentions how this is “going to be a little different,” he gets that “not everyone will want to come along for the ride,” and is overall a pretty cool sport about all of it but I personally believe that it would make more sense to do the songs in-character as Chris Gaines if he really wanted to promote the character and get audiences more well-acquainted with him like he said he wanted to, though he says “you’re gonna see a lot of Garth Brooks in Chis Gaines.”

…we get that wish eventually for a portrayal. Sit tight though, this is a long story.

After the album release and the NBC special, the reviews are in. CNN says “it takes a certain amount of courage for a star so firmly niched in one idiom to risk, if not fortune, at least the nature of his well-established fame in a venture of this kind” in what is otherwise a generally mixed review that amounts to “it’s alright in parts but I don’t know about all of this.” Allmusic gave it 3 stars out of five, The A.V. Club gave it a mixed review, famed critic Robert Christgau gave it a “dud” rating and never elaborates why, and it even got some favorable reviews whose articles are unfortunately long gone. I think the only ones who really ripped into it were Rolling Stone, and even then it’s just “eh, it’s weird, but he tried something different.”

The critical consensus is very middle-of-the-road, but the listening public in general just asked, “what even is this? and who is this even for??” It’s a fair question and it doesn’t help that on this album there were some conflicts with getting it on the radio; as I previously stated, country stations wouldn’t play the songs because they weren’t really country, and pop/rock stations wouldn’t play it because it was Garth Brooks. Honestly I think people would’ve let this whole weird public display slide if the music was up to par and honestly not a lot of it really is. It’s a weird concept for a generally “meh” album and people were turned the fuck off by it.

Audiences were generally confused by Garth Brooks at this point but he had a few more promotional tricks up his sleeve to try and drum up more awareness for Gaines; the first of which being a November 1999 appearance on SNL (featuring this wonderfully chaotic clip) where Garth Brooks hosts the episode as himself but then later on he finally dons on the wig and does what would be his only public appearance as Chris Gaines where he performs “Way of the Girl.” It’s a particularly weird and surreal moment but it’s also kinda funny as hell. You may remember the episode for this skit but there’s also one lesser-known skit where Tracy Morgan starts ripping into Chris Gaines right to Garth’s face and the whole time Garth is mortified by some of the comments Tracy is making that kinda adds to the “Garth is Chris” of it all. Some of it hasn’t particularly aged well in regards to Tracy’s homophobic punchlines, though, so view at your own risk.

The other promotional item he did was a VH1 special similar to Behind The Music which was released near the end of November 1999, and… I’m going to be honest, this has got to be some of the funniest shit I have ever seen. It tries so hard to portray the tragic backstory of Chris Gaines through a VH1 light (and to be fair, this is a story that, again, includes dead bandmates, romantic strifes with managers, label issues, a dad passing of cancer, a deadly car crash that almost killed Gaines, facial-reconstruction surgery, sex addiction, and a case or two of arson,) but the Chris Gaines character is so hard to take seriously because they throw almost every single goddamn rock and roll cliche you can think of in there. This is like if Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was an entirely serious movie and wasn’t trying to take the piss out of the biopic genre. I found myself laughing the entire way through this special, and if you want to join me in laughing all over again, please be my guest. Also WHY is Billy Joel in this?? Brooks may want this buried but this shit should be on display in a museum.

After this, well, there is no more Chris Gaines to speak about. The audience reception to the character coupled with the album only going 2-times-platinum in America (which was bad compared to the diamond-selling certifications Garth was earning the entire decade before) killed any further development of The Lamb and therefore killed any reason to keep pushing Chris Gaines onto the public despite the alleged commitment to record the soundtrack to The Lamb as well as “one more Gaines album.” The whole Chris Gaines saga is something that Garth would have liked to bury in the past if it wasn’t for the recent promise that Greatest Hits was eventually going to be “released on all formats” as well as streaming alongside “new music.” Maybe Garth is finally embracing that side of himself again.

The aftermath of this was, say it with me now, disastrous for Brooks and his career. If you go on Wikipedia and look at where each of his singles had charted before this album was released, you find a lot of “1s,” “2s,” and “3s.” Afterward he wouldn’t sniff the top of the country charts save for a lone song from his follow-up album which did in fact hit #1. He would put out a Christmas album shortly after the Gaines record was released, probably because of the lack of Brooks-like sales numbers from the album, and would only release one album a few years later before taking an extended hiatus where he wouldn’t release another album of all-new material until 2014. I’m not going to say that the Gaines backlash caused him to go into an early retirement but he also never fully recovered from the disastrous consequences of it all and there’s a very clear line of demarcation in his career that this album caused.

Personally, I suspect that his career may have gone differently if he had fully committed to publicly treating the Gaines character as a separate entity from the bigger-than-life persona of Garth Brooks. He only ever did one performance in-character and the rest of the time he was promoting the album as himself with his name attached to it, and that couldn’t have done any favors for the record-buying public who kept wondering what this was all even supposed to amount to. It wasn’t just “Chris Gaines” as it should’ve been, it was always “Garth Brooks is Chris Gaines” and he never quite stuck the landing with it.

Through all of this though, I fully believe it’s important to give Garth his flowers and applaud him for this bold break from what made him Garth Brooks even if he fell flat on his face, because he still managed to unintentionally pave the way for others to do similar things. It may be easy to forget but you may notice that Taylor Swift went off in a pop direction herself after however long of being a country goddess/”it-girl” which paid off for her in the most beneficial way possible, and she did it all-the-while publicly continuing to stay true to herself. Even now there’s plenty of folks out there who have so many kind things to say about the Chris Gaines album and wish Brooks would still make The Lamb. There’s all that backstory to dig into plus the extra 2+ decades of time since that album came out. All I’m saying is there’s still time, Garth. Embrace the campiness of Chris Gaines once more.

And hey, who knows, maybe it would’ve been nice if we got to live in the alternate universe where Garth Brooks put out an album under an alter-ego pseudonym and eventually got to live out his dreams of movie stardom while continuing to occasionally make new Brooks and Gaines music. Unfortunately we live in the here and now, and what we have is the hope that Brooks will make good on his promise and unleash this puzzling piece of musical history onto the world at large once again. I hope it comes sooner than later so I can get lost in it right now.

This is Harvey VD reminds you to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers! Peace.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “Hefty Fine” by Bloodhound Gang

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…………………you know, before we dig into this one I think I might need to clarify something; that photo is not a joke.

That is the actual cover for the actual album.

I feel like if I really wanted to get into why this album “ruined” Bloodhound Gang I could just point to this album cover and ask, “any questions?” and we would all say “nope, point taken.”

But it is my job as a critic to give the albums I review an honest assessment, so here we are.

The Bloodhound Gang.
When you talk about Bloodhound Gang, peoples’ minds typically go to one song, and one song only: “The Bad Touch.” The song as well as the video both perfectly encapsulate the 90s in one short 4-minute time frame; a video featuring the band in literal monkey costumes causing mischief and mayhem around Paris, France while being soundtracked by a Euro dance-pop song that gave us the iconic chorus of…

“you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

Bloodhound Gang, “The Bad Touch” (1999)

That line still gets people of a certain age group going in 2022, 23 years after its release. It was even referenced in “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem less than a year later at a time when Eminem was probably near his absolute peak as an artist. For all intents and purposes that song is their legacy which would lead many to write them off as a one-hit wonder (which ignores that their song “Fire Water Burn” was also a hit on the alternative music charts, but I digress).

It’s hard to imagine it now considering this pseudo-one-hit-wonder status but Bloodhound Gang were big in the 90s and early 00s, and by big I mean biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig. They played big festivals, their second album One Fierce Beer Coaster went gold in the US and their third album Hooray for Boobies went gold AND platinum in multiple countries, you google Chasey Lain (…for all intents and purposes I’d look that up in an incognito tab) and the main results are not about the pornstar herself, but for their song “The Ballad of Chasey Lain”. That is absolutely insane. I guess to put it in a modern-day perspective it would be like if The 1975 wrote a song about Ivy LeBelle and it got so big that it turned her into just a reference point for that song. The internet is for porn and that shit doesn’t just happen, but it did for Bloodhound Gang.

So for all of that and for their legacy to have been reduced to one song I couldn’t help but wonder “what the fuck happened here?” The answer might be real easy depending on how you’re looking at it; they were a doofy joke band with lyrics that absolutely would not fly if they came out now and both time and the general listening community have just moved on from them. There. Plain and simple. Now I don’t need to keep writing about this.

This is Harvey VD reminding you to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers! Peace.

…hold on, that can’t be right. Their greatest hits album, appropriately titled Show Us Your Hits chronicles the band and it shows that their history more or less ends in 2007 alongside a song they released on that comp which came out in 2010. Hooray for Boobies came out in 1999, there isn’t just 11 years of music and history missing from the group, what happened?

Well if Hooray for Boobies came out in 1999 and they had a pretty decent legacy at that point, and Show Us Your Hits came out in 2010, so really there’s only one assumption that could be made; the answer can be found in 2005’s Hefty Fine, their follow-up to Hooray. Right?

I went investigating further.

…actually before we get too deep into this I just need to say something up front; I think one thing that definitely didn’t help Bloodhound Gang was the length of the wait for Hefty Fine. Six years. Five if you’re counting when Hooray got a wider rerelease And this wasn’t in the era of streaming and unlimited content to tide us over, this was in the very early days of the internet and at a time when 6 years felt like 6 centuries. The shift in culture and humor certainly didn’t help as well, especially when one realizes that an entire new century came, a national tragedy happened in America and it reflected in how we consumed entertainment as made evident in how by some measures Freddy Got Fingered is the last real piece of pre-9/11 humor, and that thing is an experience from start to finish.

A lot has happened in the band as well, most notably that their drummer Spanky G who had been with them on Beer Coaster and Hooray left the band shortly after recording Hooray (but still appears on the album cover) under what has generally been considered mysterious circumstances (with many assuming it was the bullying he endured by some of the band members, primarily their bassist Evil Jared Hasslehoff, as evidenced in their DVD One Fierce Beer Run) and has now been replaced by the appropriately-titled Willie The New Guy, who appears in some of the music videos from the Hooray album. Aside from that the band has still remained with the main core of lead vocalist Jimmy Pop, guitarist Lupus Thunder, the aforementioned bassist Evil Jared, and turntable/backing vocal/hype guy DJ Q Ball. It’s not the first time that the band has had a lineup overhaul or a changing of members, but Spanky G’s drumming really gave off a certain vibe on the two albums he was around for, so what Willie would bring to the table with the group was still uncertain.

So after 5 years and a lineup change the wait is over, and Bloodhound Gang have a new album coming out called Hefty Fine, but before the album comes out we’re treated to the leadoff single from the record, called “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo.”

Alright, five years in the making now, let’s see what Jimmy and the boys have come up with.

Huh. Well, that’s… something I guess.

Something feels off about the lyrics though.

Vulcanize the whoopee stick
In the ham wallet

Cattle prod the oyster ditch
With the lap rocket

Batter-dip the cranny axe
In the gut locker

Retro-fit the pudding hatch, ooh la la
With the boink swatter

Bloodhound Gang, “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” (2005)

Hmmmm….

FOXTROT!
UNIFORM!
CHARLIE!
KILO!

Bloodhound Gang, “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” (2005)

wait…

Foxtrot
Uniform
Charlie
Kilo

Bloodhound Gang, “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” (2005)

…oh those boys.
If it’s not obvious, the song is pretty much this. Two verses of sexual innuendo, two choruses of doing the NATO alphabet spelling for “fuck,” and then this wonderful outro where they say…

put the you-know-what in the you-know where

Bloodhound Gang, “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” (2005)

…but that’s not surprising by any stretch of the imagination. Lyrically this has almost always been their jam so it’s not much of a surprise but it does feel kinda low-effort. It might come off as laughable to a lot of folks who may consider themselves listeners of a more sophisticated taste but deep down there’s always been a lot of good lines in Bloodhound Gang songs that would actually come off deep and profound when taken out of context. Even a lot of those out of context lines are pretty clever and interesting, but that’s just my two cents. Here they basically give you a bunch of innuendo for the exact same thing and then wrap it up with the title of the track. There’s no substance here is what I’m getting at. I do find something funny though about doing verses of innuendo before the choruses say “I don’t want to beat around the bush.” Ironic, eh?

Musically there isn’t much going on here, either. “Foxtrot…” is a fairly straight-forward pop-punk jam with beefy chords, a singalong chorus, synths to add a little bit to the sound and a neat little riff to go with it all as well. I will say that it’s nice to have the first single off this album be a song with the full band playing on it unlike most of the singles off Hooray which mostly highlighted the “Jimmy Pop Show” factor of the group and in turn sort of erased the other personalities of the band and what made them all so great in their own regards.

So “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” gets a thumbs-up from me, it’s not awful but I guess I could’ve expected a little bit more. I wouldn’t skip it if it came on a playlist of Bloodhound Gang songs.

Alright, that came out in August of 2005, the full album arrives a month later. After years of waiting between Bloodhound Gang albums you finally open the CD, pop it in the tray, and the first thing you hear is this…

…a fucking skit.

You know what, it’s an 8-second skit, let’s share it here for those of you who don’t click the links.

Jimmy Pop: “Eminem’s gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, well me too! So fuck Will Smith!“

DJ Q-Ball: “That don’t rhyme”

Jim: “Drats! …haha”

Bloodhound Gang, “Strictly For the Tardcore (Skit)”

…you know, that line is way more relevant than I could’ve ever imagined it being in the current year, except for the fact that the song being referenced here was already five years old by the time this album came out. Incidentally the song in question is also the one where Eminem referenced Bloodhound Gang, so maybe it’s a “thank you” of sorts?

But that’s still not exactly a thrilling opening note for a record. To be fair neither is the follow-up track and the first actual song on the album, “Balls Out.”

You know, for 2005 this song is severely out-of-date with that crunk rock opening and the nu-metal influences that are all over it. I don’t want to say crunk was never popular because that’s Lil Jon erasure and we don’t do that around these parts, but this song is trying way too hard to keep up with the heavyweights of a genre that was way out of vogue by then. Hell even with the second wave of “angry white boy metal” bands that came up around the time Limp Bizkit more or less killed the first wave of nu-metal single-handed when they released their 2004 album (and probable future feature on this blog) Results May Vary, why the band chose to go this route for a song is beyond me.

Lyrically the song is supposed to feel braggadocious, and it does, but it falls flat in the execution. Even Jimmy Pop’s screaming on the chorus feels like he’s phoning it in and that’s not something you wanna do on a song like this. What’s more, a lot of folks have actually called this Bloodhound Gang’s worst song ever, and I’d be somewhat inclined to agree which says a lot considering I could never really get through Use Your Fingers and they’ve done way worse metal pastiches like “Yummy Down On This.” (Yes, I will personally die on that hill if I have to.)

That was a painful stretch to get through, “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” comes after that and we know how that song sounds already since we heard it before right? Right? Great.

Up next we get to my personal favorite off the album, “I’m The Least You Can Do.” You know what works about this song and why it’s so interesting to me and me personally? It has dynamics. It has parts. Identifiable moving parts. Not just “verse, chorus, verse, chorus, everything chugs along at the same speed” parts, like actual identifiable things go on for the entirety of the song. The piano riff absolutely rips, the way the real drums interact with the drum machines works way better than it should, the guitars aren’t severely out-of-place on here, and the synth choices here are A+. Lyrically it deals with Jimmy Pop being a bit more desperate than usual as the title of the song is uttered in the chorus.

I’m the least you can do
If only life were as easy as you
I would still get screwed

Bloodhound Gang, “I’m The Least You Could Do” (2005)

The other joke here is that the girl in question is really dumb. Really that’s the only joke in the song, and even then it’s not that much of a funny one. I should clarify that I’m not one of those people who would clutch their pearls if they heard Bloodhound Gang lyrics for the first time, but if this was my first impression of the band I really would’ve given myself a headache with how often I roll my eyes back. With that said this is still a noticeable improvement over “Balls Out” and is one of the better songs on this album by a couple country miles but that’s still not exactly a high bar to clear.

After this we get a short little song called “Farting With A Walkman On.” It follows the Moby trick of repeating something over and over again but each repeat adds a new element to the table. The comparison to Moby here is probably spot-on depending on who you talk to but ironic considering the name of the album was supposed to be Heavy Flow before they found out that was the name of a Moby song (various members have expressed disliking Moby in the past) so they switched up the title to avoid any association with him. Unfortunately the lyrics are the same verse repeated a couple times, which is great when you’ve got a strong verse or at least a couple funny lines to work with but some of this stuff is not great.

I know you’re gonna play me
when you get wind
I heard you’re full of shit, so
I’ve been duped again
but if you cover your ass
with the same old song
you might as well be farting
farting with a walkman on

Bloodhound Gang, “Farting With A Walkman On” (2005)

I guess the second half of that verse is alright but it’s not that strong of a punchline to lean on and repeat three times before going into a guitar solo. There’s an idea here but it feels like an incomplete idea.

The next track is another skit called “Diarrhea Runs In The Family” and consists of one of the band members going to the bathroom for about 30 seconds. I’m not linking it. If you wanna hear someone pass a bowel movement, that’s all on you, my dear reader. Some even say that’s the album in a nutshell.

We’re about halfway through this record and all I can really think is that this album so far honestly sounds way too fucking depressing to be a Bloodhound Gang album. What the fuck is going on here? How does a band go from bangers like “Mope” to funeral dirges like “Farting With A Walkman On?”

Well, in the six years between Hooray and Hefty a lot has happened in the band’s career that doesn’t even dive into possible label-artist politics that might have possibly delayed the release (this album was recorded between 2001 and 2004 but wasn’t released until a whole year later, why’s that?)

Jimmy Pop, as well as the band as a whole, has not only crossed over into his 30s but has allegedly gotten to a stage in his career where drug addiction has gotten the best of him. Jimmy in particular has started battling depression and the medicine he’s on for it has started to make him feel fatigued, which explains why he sounds so depressed on these songs and why he’s phoning it in on them as well; he’s not phoning it in, he’s just tired. As someone who also fights with his own depression and the effects of it I absolutely feel for him in a way I didn’t expect to. It also explains why this album has been described by some as his “angry” record, because once you read into the lyrics of a lot of these songs, there’s a lot of venom and malice directed at unspecified people and it’s so unlike the band as a whole. (Usually their malice is directed at various groups in a punching-down moment or two or way too many I don’t want to get into here). On Hefty Fine Jimmy Pop just sounds bitter at life.

So we’re halfway through this album, where do we go from here?

Well… have you guys ever heard of this wacky television series called The Simpsons?

Make no beef about it, The Simpsons are a pillar of American pop culture and a show that Bloodhound Gang have a soft spot for. They’ve put Simpsons references in their songs before, they even have a song at the end of One Fierce Beer Coaster where Jimmy Pop does his best impression of Homer Simpson, and of course there’s the “holy macaroni” line at the end of “Mope” that closes out the clusterfuck of a song. Surely there’s gonna be more Simpsons shenanigans on this record at some point, right?

Enter “Ralph Wiggum.”

The second half of Hefty Fine kicks off with yet another pop-punk romp all about everyone’s favorite comic relief and one-liner machine, the titular character of this song. The pop-punk stuff is alright so far, I guess, but the lyrics are where this band has always shined brightest. Surely Jimmy Pop will give us some lyrical gold here, right?

…well…

I’m going to Africa

Yes ma’am

I’m a brick

Was president Lincoln okay?

Mittens

There’s a dog in the vent

Chicken necks?

I pick Ken Griffey Jr.

I fell out 2 times

I’m pedaling backwards

This snowflake tastes like fish sticks

We’re a totem pole

Dying tickles

I hear a frankenstein lives there

She’s touching my special area

Go banana!

Bloodhound Gang, “Ralph Wiggum” (2005)

…Jimmy Pop didn’t write any lyrics for this. He just searched through piles and piles of Simpsons scripts, grabbed his favorite lines, and arranged them accordingly.

You know, for all my bitching about some of the lyrical choices he’s made on this album so far, I’d still say that some of the best parts of Bloodhound Gang are the lyrics through and through. I still quote the chorus to “Take The Long Way Home” a lot and even considered getting a tattoo of it once because it’s a straight-up great line. I’ve combed over some of this stuff off Hooray For Boobies for hours on end before just to fully grasp everything being spoken about because yeah, sure, you’ll get a song where the hook rips off Pink Floyd, but then the deeper dig shows a fantastic amount of wordplay going on. One Fierce Beer Coaster has more than its fair share of great lyrics as well, and there’s even songs further down this album that have great lyrics (so no it’s not all bad here). But to have the lyrics all revolve around one-liners that have been taking out of context is just a poor choice all around. The crazy part about this to me is that I’m in the minority with this opinion; a lot of fans of the group even now still say “Ralph Wiggum” is the highlight of the album for them. Different strokes for different folks though, right?

Up next we get “Something Diabolical,” one of the few “serious” songs Bloodhound Gang ever did. This one features that style of baton-passing on the mic between Jimmy Pop and DJ Q-Ball that has made for some of Bloodhound Gang’s best material in the past, it can’t fail here, right? Well, it can’t but also it can. I’ll come out and say that I like the idea the song is trying to present here, and I like the feature from Ville Valo of the band H.I.M. (who released some things on Pop’s vanity label at one point) on the chorus, but ultimately this song feels both unfinished and way too long at the same time. It’s the longest song on the record, clocking in at a little over 5 minutes and it gives us barely anything outside of “heh, satan, am I right guys?” and a vaguely moody backing track. Even in trying to bring in a guest vocalist to bring something to the track, Valo just feels shoehorned in here. This isn’t Bloodhound Gang material point-blank.

Another skit follows this. It’s stupid. We’re not talking about it.

After the dumb skit is a song named after their home state of “Pennsylvania,” and even though it was never released as an official single to promote the album a little bit of extra research shows that they started a campaign to make the track the official song of the Keystone State. See? That’s nice, it’s always cool to see bands do songs about their home state and bring a little bit of that hometown pride out, right?

Uhhhh… how do I put this?
Read this for yourself.

We are “Cop Rock”
We are Screech
We are Z. Cavaricci
We are laser-removed
Tasmanian Devil tattoos
We are third string we are puck
We are special people’s club
We are the half shirts with
Irreverent spring break top ten lists

Bloodhound Gang, “Pennsylvania” (2005)

…ohhhhh god.

We are munsoned we are squat
We are flashing twelve o’clock
We are spread out butt cheeks
Pulled apart so just the air leaks
We are “ishtar” we are tab
We are no right turn on red
We are the moustaches
The Beatles grew when they dropped acid

Bloodhound Gang, “Pennsylvania” (2005)

…what the fuck is going on here?

So they don’t really like their state so they made a song comparing it to all of the worst things in the world. I’ll admit, this is pretty clever and genuinely one of the only times where the pop-punk thing they do actually works. I also really like the chorus because it still reeks of that “Jimmy Pop is depressed” thing but it feels fun. The song overall feels fun. This is what I expected when I pressed “play” on this album, not the stuff that came before this. This is top-tier Bloodhound stuff.

The funniest part, and truly one of the most Pennsylvanian lines, comes at the end, too, by which point I’m audibly laughing way harder than I’d like to admit.

Girl do you even know what a Wawa is?
Do you even know what a Wawa is?
Girl do you even know what a Wawa is?
Do you even know what a Wawa is?
I’m in a state of P-fuckin’-A.

Bloodhound Gang, “Pennsylvania” (2005)

I mean c’mon, anybody who’s talked to anybody from PA knows that at some point Wawa always factors into a conversation, it’s just the facts of life. The drummer in one of my previous bands is from PA and he’s brought it up multiple times (mostly in regards to saying it’s better than Sheetz) and it feels like the specific reference that was needed to drive home the regional flavor of this song. A-fucking-plus, Jimmy.

After that we get the second official single off the album, “Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss.” It’s got that danceable backing beat on the drum machine, a noodly guitar loop, sexual innuendos out the ass and plenty of synths to work with. I kinda like this fine enough, but it’s got one glaring problem with it; this song is trying way too hard to be “The Bad Touch 2.0.” Catching lightning in a bottle once is rare, twice is damn near impossible and they’re trying so hard to tempt fate here. Even the title is made to sound like the noises one makes when they try replicating that europop dance beat like the one prominently featured in “The Bad Touch.” That song was already kinda stale in 2005 on its own because that sort of music was no longer en-vogue like it was back in the free-for-all era of the 90s, so the fact the band revisited that sound on a new song was just a bad idea. They’d do another rehash of the formula on the 2007 song “Screwing You on the Beach At Night” that feels infinitely funnier on just the song along before you get into the music video. Also important to note this was released as the second single a couple of months after the album’s release when it was more-or-less already dead in the water, and likewise this single did nothing on the charts in America despite managing to chart in other countries that were more open to their shenanigans.

The final track on the album is the third and final single off this album entitled “No Hard Feelings.” The song didn’t chart anywhere and didn’t even get a music video which doesn’t help the single much either. In my opinion it’s one of their best songs, bar-none. When I mentioned that this was Jimmy Pop’s “angry” album, it especially comes through on this song. Lyrically it’s a breakup song that takes the attitude of “well fuck you, too.” There’s a lot of gems in this song too such as…

Maybe you got screwed, but I dumped you
Cause you ain’t nothin’ but trash
I put out despite the, fact that you’re like a
Hawaiian Punch mustache
Right under my nose

Bloodhound Gang, “No Hard Feelings” (2005)

If I want to be repeatedly shit on
I’ll go make Dutch porn

Bloodhound Gang, “No Hard Feelings” (2005)

Maybe it ain’t your birthday
But then again ya know I wouldn’t give a fuck
When what I shoulda got is over ya sooner so now
I’m just gonna wrap it up

Bloodhound Gang, “No Hard Feelings” (2005)

but not every line on here is a winner.

I’m missing you like a hijacked flight on September 11th
I don’t know who got on you but I’m not wrong in thanking them

Bloodhound Gang, “No Hard Feelings” (2005)

WHOA WHOA WHOA HOLD THE FUCK UP HERE.

Look, I like edgy humor as much as the next guy but I don’t personally like 9/11 jokes, especially since it’s a very real thing that happened where a lot of people died and it was used as propaganda for a boondoggle in the middle-east, and I DON’T LIKE THEM IN 2005, 4 YEARS AFTER THEY FUCKING HAPPENED.

Okay, that’s one really bad line. I’ll live. I’ll cringe but I’ll live.

Aside from that one line I really like this one. It’s kinda got this interesting little backbeat going for it and it’s got a nice blend of electronica and grunge influences. The guitars absolutely rip on this thing as well, and when they come back in on the bridge the entire mood changes with it. The song also ends on a beautiful guitar solo that perfectly closes the album off, too.

That’s the album proper unless you listen to the last skit that closes it out. Yes, another skit.

I think really that’s my big gripe with this album; there’s 13 tracks on this thing, 4 of which are skits. Skits on albums are rarely if ever funny, and really the only welcome part of it is that opening skit as a nod to the Eminem reference. So there’s 9 actual songs on the album. Out of those 9 songs, there’s maybe 5 that I personally like (“Balls Out,” which in spite of all my bitching I kinda have a soft spot for, “Foxtrot…” “I’m The Least You Can Do,” “Pennsylvania,” “No Hard Feelings.”) Take away the skits, the songs that sound unfinished, and the overall bad songs, and you’ve got a 5-track EP. Basically people waited 6 years for an EP. If I’m a Bloodhound fan during that time, I’d think that’s insulting.

I feel like at some point in these articles I always say “the fallout from this was bad” but this one is flag-raising in just how bad the fallout from it really was. It only peaked 10 positions lower than Hooray for Boobies did on the charts, but unlike Hooray, Hefty Fine didn’t certify anything in America, and only got certified gold in Austria and Germany. It peaked at 24 which isn’t bad but it fell out of the charts almost as quickly as it came up, and didn’t feature any singles that charted in America. That’s bad compared to the success of Hooray and its singles.

One of the things the band said in previous interviews was that it was nice that their label Geffen Records didn’t want an immediate follow-up to an album that was, by all accounts, an absolutely smashing success, but the downside of that was just how much the cultural zeitgeist changed in the years between albums. In various interviews the band also more or less admitted that they knew the album was shit and that was probably what did them in with their fans who waited 5 years for 9 songs, but at least they can admit that no matter how sarcastic they tried to make those comments come off. A select group of reviews from RateYourMusic all gave the album pretty bad reviews so there’s a bunch of vocal fans who didn’t like it. Hindsight has given the album a bit more charm to the group’s fans and a lot of them have also said they actually really like the album a lot and that it was never gonna be a particularly loved album regardless of how good it was gonna be. Fair play to them.

The real issue was always going to be with critics though.

The band have always said they didn’t care about good reviews because “the only bands that get good reviews are bands like Dave Matthews Band” so that was never gonna be their bag, and critics were never big Bloodhound fans in the first place either. Even their best work got reviews that could be summed up as “eh, it’s okay, I guess” but things were about to get bad.

Critically, Hefty Fine absolutely booooooooombed.
Allmusic gave it a 2.5/5, Billboard gave it a negative review, PopMatters gave it a 2/10, HotPress gave it a 0/5, IGN gave it a 3/10, and all these reviews give the exact same general consensus; “the joke isn’t funny anymore, and fart jokes have never been funny so why did they do these?” That’s just sharing some of the kinder reviews. All of this also helped contribute to giving it the hefty honor of making it the second-worst reviewed album of all-time on Metacritic with a lowly metascore of 28, only 7 points off from the poorly-reviewed Playing With Fire by Kevin Federline and 8 points worse than Results May Very by Limp Bizkit. That’s absolutely insane. That is absolutely fucking insane.

I find it kind of insulting that the album got this much critical bitchslapping and yet history hasn’t even relegated it to any of those “worst music of all time” albums, it doesn’t have an infamous following the way something like Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs might, it doesn’t come up on any Wikipedia articles about “music considered the worst” like how the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack does and really this album is an artifact that the world has done its best to leave in 2005. For a band who had a hit song about fucking, that was explicitly about fucking, to have their follow-up album get forgotten like that is absolutely nuts.

What happened to the group after the release of the album, I can’t quite tell you. What I can share is that guitarist Lupus Thunder and drummer Willie The New Guy both left the band in 2007 and 2006 respectively and were both replaced by members of a band called A. The group spent the better part of 10 years trying to, and unsuccessfully work on a new album until the long-awaited follow-up Hard Off came out in 2015, and the general consensus there was that it wasn’t a good record either, even by the standards of many Bloodhound fans. I sometimes wonder how much the negative press of Hefty Fine factored into the longer wait between albums. The band kinda fizzled out after the released of Hard-Off and though Jimmy Pop has popped up as a guest artist here and there in various songs he’s more-or-less stuck by the admission that he’s retired, though bassist Evil Jared Hasselhoff has said he’d still consider himself a member of the band.

Personally, I don’t like to whine about “cancel culture” because it’s not the big old boogeyman that many want to make it out to be, and the general conversation about how “[thing] can’t happen now because everyone’s a bunch of snowflakes” or whatever is dumb because there’s always this implication of “I don’t like that I can’t punch-down without getting called-out anymore” but genuinely Bloodhound Gang is, both musically and lyrically, simply a product of a point in time, plain and simple. They also say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I’ll absolutely judge this album by its cover.

On an unrelated note, these days it’s actually pretty fun to follow Lupus Thunder on Instagram in particular because he’s always sharing nice historical photos of the group back when he was a member. They all seem pretty content and happy with what they’ve all done, and sometimes having the guys on social media share the memories themselves is just as good as the concept of a Bloodhound reunion tour.

Who knows though? Maybe one day Jimmy Pop will come out of “retirement,” reunite with Lupus and Willie, grab the others, and do one last tour for the sake of doing it all over again one more time. If they don’t they’ll still have a heck of a legacy and two albums that will probably continue to have their share of vocal critics but whose sounds are as great now as they were then. They wouldn’t want it any other way.


This is Harvey VD reminding you to get your balls out, and kick out the ROUGE!, motherfuckers! Peace.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: “Slow Motion Daydream” by Everclear

Everclear.

Yes. Everclear.

In case you didn’t get it: Everclear.

I feel like talking about Everclear in the context of things getting “ruined” might feel a bit too obvious to audiences of a certain persuasion but they’ve been on my mind a lot. In fact, they’ve been on my mind since I heard them last year on a road trip with a friend of mine where we drove out to Syracuse just to see what was out that way and he brought along his copies of Sparkle and Fade and Songs From An American Movie Vol. 2.

Up until that point my impression of the band came from “I Will Buy You A New Life” and even then I was still skeptical about this band featuring a doofy-looking older guy whose blonde hair felt way too out-of-place with the rest of his whole vibe. Come the end of that road trip I found myself listening to as much Everclear as I possibly could.

Just one thing though; most of Everclear’s musical and historical canon stops dead in its tracks around 2004 with the postscript of “they transitioned to being a mostly touring act who occasionally records.”

So yes they had recorded new material but it was all with the general vibe of “I don’t recommend listening to it.” Something about that felt off, and I couldn’t place why it did. It wasn’t until I started working on these articles and spoke with a friend about what to do after the Radioactive piece and the crossroads I was at; write about this album that is being read right now, or write about something whose aftermath was disastrous due to critical trashing that was so bad it’s often called one of the worst albums of all time.

My friend said, “I know Everclear for ‘Father of Mine’ and I’d honestly like to know why I don’t know more of their songs.”

Fine, I’ll take it. You’ll find out what the other album is next month.

Anyway, back to Everclear.

Everclear’s story is not a pretty one but somewhat shockingly it’s also barely a well-documented one. Sure there’s interviews with band founder and singer-songwriter Art Alexakis, but to dig into the history of the group all I could really find that talks more extensively about them were a series of oral histories from the Willamette Week website, which I’d honestly suggest checking out if it’s what you’re into. What the fuck, man? These guys had one of the biggest albums of the 90s, how are they not getting more love or at least the benefit of archiving? I digress. In both these oral history articles though I found myself overwhelmed with two underlying and recurring themes; Art Alexakis is an asshole, and the city of Portland, Oregon does not like Art Alexakis or Everclear by extension, both for a whole variety of reasons. I will not be getting too deep into the anti-Art sentiments, but I will touch upon them because unfortunately they do inform a large chunk of this story.

The year is 1998. Everclear, consisting of the previously mentioned founder and main songwriter Art Alexakis, bassist Craig Montoya, and drummer Greg Eklund decide to take a break following the success of their album So Much For The Afterglow alongside the growing tensions between the band members. Within the next 2 years Art Alexakis would go on to do some solo shows and eventually start working on what was originally supposed to be a solo album featuring the touring members of Everclear backing him up.

Eventually following unsatisfactory sessions, the main lineup of Everclear is brought in and the solo album is reworked as an Everclear album. That album would be titled Songs From An American Movie Vol. 1: Learning How To Smile and it would go on to go platinum as well as reach #9 on the Billboard albums chart, though it would also sell half of what Afterglow sold, raising minor red flags, but it still sold platinum so that’s not bad, right?

It gets worse.

Remember when I mentioned that they made a Vol.2? That came out in November 2000, four months after Vol. 1. The important thing to remember is that this was done at the insistence of Alexakis, who wanted to put out both albums to highlight the two different styles of the group. This resulted in mass confusion and overexposure of Everclear because even just a few months before Vol.2 was set to release there were still singles from Vol.1 that were just hitting the radio, which meant promoters, DJs, and the record-buying audience were all confused as to which album was being promoted and which singles paired up with which album. As a result of this mass confusion Vol.2 only sold upwards of 250k copies and was only certified gold in Canada. When both American Movie albums failed to gain more traction the band took another break after what would’ve been their first tour of the UK since 1998 got cancelled.

The band as a whole would remain inactive for the rest of 2001 while Art Alexakis would go on a 12-date solo tour in 2002 before reconvening with the other two pieces of Everclear to record their sixth album Slow Motion Daydream. The band worked and prodded away at the album and at one point presented a version of it to the head of Capitol Records before they would go back and record a few other songs, all of which would get included on the new album while others got scrapped.

What happens next I can’t 100% confirm though it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be true, the only spot I’ve read this in was Wikipedia and the only other source that could even vaguely confirm this was the Daily Eastern News, but the release of Slow Motion Daydream had a tough road ahead of it.

You see, it had a lot to do with 9/11.

No that is not an edgy joke. It had a lot to do with 9/11.

In the promotional lead-up to the album Capitol Records had their eyes set on the perfect lead-off single; “The New York Times.” It’s a “state of the world” song but it has strong undertone about the sadness Art Alexakis felt reading and hearing about the news of the September 11th, 2001 attacks that happened just a year beforehand.

“That’s not a song about one specific thing. It ties in the economy, the election of 2000, 9/11 of course – you can’t write music and not be effected by 9/11 – the abduction of Laci Peterson.”

-Art Alexakis, SongFacts interview 2003

So it’s definitely more of a “state of the world” song but 9/11 is absolutely a major part of the inspiration and it radiates from the song. Capitol felt that radiation and felt it would be the strongest first impression of Slow Motion Daydream. I personally agree, it’s a pretty song with a strong set of lyrics and though Everclear were never really much of a “ballad” band, they absolutely nailed it here.

The lyrics in particular become more poignant when you think about what’s happened in the 20+ years since that horrific day, especially when Art sings

“When I think about what happened it just makes me crazy. When I close my eyes you seem so alive. I really think about you I want to believe we can make things right”

-Everclear, “The New York Times.”

I don’t believe we ever truly “made things right” and it makes me want to go give 2002/2003 Art Alexakis a hug.

Okay, so Capitol Records wants to make this the first single, it seems like a no-brainer, right?

Art had other plans.

You see, during this solo tour he did in 2002 he had premiered a new song off the upcoming record which had gotten an abundance of positive audience reception and was eventually recorded for Slow Motion Daydream. He believed in this song and he fought tooth and nail to make it the first single off the album. Eventually Capitol wavered and went with the song Alexakis chose as the lead-off single.

Let’s hear what Art was willing to live and die by.

…you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.

THIS was what Art Alexakis was willing to fight Capitol over.

…actually, I think this is okay. I THINK.

“Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” would become the lead-off single on January 14th, 2003. Makes sense as a lead single, it shows that Everclear have a bit of a sarcastic snarky side to them.

“Yeah, I used to be a dancer at the local strip club,

But now I know my right wing from my wrong.”

“I know I used to be a real wild child,

But now I am a Volvo-driving soccer mom.”

-Everclear “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” (2003)

…but then you go and read interviews or hear what Art has to say and it feels like the exact opposite of what the song is about.

“This is a song about definitions, about being defined by people, allowing yourself to be defined by other people’s standards. It’s very junior-high to be able to say ‘that person’s this, that person’s a slut, that person’s that.’ It’s understandable in junior high school, it’s just unacceptable in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. People doing it is not right, so it’s kind of poking fun at them and people who allow it to happen to them.”

-Art Alexakis, 2003 SongFacts interview

…is it though? Is it really poking fun at them?

Don’t get me wrong, I personally believe it’s a perfectly fine song, but maybe don’t go singing stuff like this on the bridge…

“where do all the porn stars go when the lights go down?

I wonder where all the porn stars go,

Cause when you need one, they are never around.

I think they moved out to the suburbs,

And now they’re blond, bland, middle-class Republican wives.

They’ve got blond, bland, middle-class Republican children,

And blond, bland, middle-class Republican lives.

Where do all the porn stars go when the lights go down?

I think I know where all the porn stars go?

They all become Volvo-driving soccer moms.”

-Everclear, “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” (2003)

…and then turn around and say “oh this is about not judging others.”

Anyway, this became the lead single and after that Capitol stopped promoting the album and single almost immediately. “The New York Times” would go on to become the album’s second single later on in the year but by that point the damage had certainly been done. We’ll get to that later.

Is the album itself bad? Let’s give it a proper listen.

It’s March 11th, 2003, you run out and grab the new Everclear CD, you pop it in your stereo, and this is what opens up the journey you’re about to take.

…okay, those opening guitars are ripping off “I Will Buy You A New Life” pretty hard there.

It’s actually somewhat insulting, but if you can look past that you’ve got a pretty okay opening track which immediately goes into the next song, “Blackjack.” For those not in the know, “Scary John” is a reference to John Ashcroft, whom at the time was the US Attorney General for the Bush administration and was a major supporter of the USA Patriot Act which has been controversial almost from the get-go for a whole pile of reasons I’m not going to get into here. For those not in the know about what a “blackjack” is, it’s not referring to the card game, rather a club that primarily is used to beat people up and crack their skulls open. The lyrics prominently featuring the phrase “American dream” in them which doesn’t make it an inherently political song despite the idea that Alexakis thinks it does. The music is pretty cool, though. The heavier guitars didn’t work so much on American Movie Vol.2 when Everclear kinda sounded like every bro-metal band from the mid-00s but here they absolutely work, especially with the guitars sounding like how a good cathartic punch feels.

After that we get the best song on the album, “I Want to Die a Beautiful Death.” Pretty early on in their careers Everclear got plenty of comparisons to Nirvana and while “Santa Monica” isn’t too far off from Kurt Cobain’s worldview and the type of music he made, Art Alexakis was no Kurt Cobain which was fine because Everclear tended to their own direction and kept their eyes on their own work. On “I Want to Die a Beautiful Death” he channels Kurt’s jaded view of the world in an almost uncomfortably perfect way as he sings “I don’t care, I just want to die pretty” before a sea of guitars and fuzz swarm in over the chorus. It’s an oddly optimistic take on the idea of “dying young so you can leave a pretty corpse.”

“Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” comes after that, and we know how that sounds already.

“Science Fiction” is up next. It’s alright, I guess. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly great. I don’t have much to say about it aside from “I wouldn’t skip it if it came on shuffle.”

What’s after that? “New Blue Champion,” and though it definitely reminds me a little bit of some of those dude-rock ballads like the ones Nickelback made back in the day, where this rises above those generic ballads is that Art Alexakis has a way with words. It’s truly and genuinely his strongest point as an artist, in part because he had at least 5+ years on many of his contemporaries in terms of age, and with that added age came some added wisdom. Go crack open the lyrics to anything from the Capitol years and more than likely you’re gonna find either a really good character story, inspirational lines about a better life being on the horizon, or something that will pull at your heartstrings more than you’d probably expect.

“TV Show” follows that. A few people have pointed out that the lead vocal melody sounds more than just a little bit like “I Will Buy You A New Life,” which is the second time a song on this album has done that and it brings up what one of Everclear’s weaknesses was on this album; most of the album sounds like it’s just trying to rip off earlier Everclear songs… and look, I get it, you write how you write and everyone has their signature quirks as a writer, but whether he knows it or is only doing it subconsciously Art Alexakis is absolutely trying to rip off his earlier material and repackage it as new Everclear songs.

“Chrysanthemum” come up after that and uhhh… did we really need this song? It’s a 98-second song and it feels as if it goes almost absolutely nowhere. It might sound harsh but I’ll explain why in a little bit.

After that it’s “Sunshine (That Acid Summer)” where the album ultimately gets its name from.

“You twist and turn in a slow motion day dream

You twist and turn in your own sweet hell”

-Everclear, “Sunshine (That Acid Summer)” (2003)

This just feels like a leftover from American Movie Vol.1 that also features Art looking back on his past and wishing he could go back to “the old days,” whatever those may be while also adding a bit of bittersweet vibes in the lyrics. I can’t really say much else about this song, it tries to go for this psychedelic grunge thing that doesn’t fully work because there isn’t much of a strong hook to go with the song.

Up next we get “A Beautiful Life,” another one of my favorites off Slow Motion Daydream. It features some of those sublime Alexakis vocals while the music oh-so beautifully builds up into a perfect crescendo. My favorite part, personally, is how well the band works with the backing orchestra that plays alongside them on the track while Art’s lyrics can be perfectly be summed up with…

“I don’t care where we go

I don’t care what we do

As long as I can be with you”

-Everclear, “A Beautiful Life” (2003)

…but it also shows one of the flaws in the song. Even when it’s a love song and talking about you, it’s really about what Art wants.

That type of complaint aside, it’s the sort of song that gives the album a second wind before it crashes into “The New York Times” and ends the album proper.

That one-two punch is my favorite part of the record, but also annoys me because of one thing; it’s how the album ends if you don’t count the hidden track “White Noise.” I don’t. “A Beautiful Life” and “The New York Times” feel like the rewards for sitting through an exceptionally slumpy middle of the album and could’ve been the start of a run where the album gets better, but alas that’s it.

The band recorded a few other songs that didn’t make it onto the album; “The New Disease,” “Happy” and “Sex With A Movie Star (The Good Witch Gone Bad).” Maybe I’m just a really bitter critic but if “The New Disease” and “Sex With A Movie Star” had been included on the album or replaced a couple of the nondescript songs it would’ve made for a stronger record. It might have even been one of Everclear’s better records. As it stands “Sex With A Movie Star” is one of my favorite Everclear songs, and it was relegated to being included on a greatest hits package.

My biggest complaint ultimately about this album is that the middle feels like it shouldn’t be there at all. The album is only 40-something minutes long and roughly 15 of those minutes are spent on songs that bog the record down more than anything, and at 11 tracks, only about six songs being really “worth” the listen seems to suggest the band was much more interested in shitting something out and calling it a day. I wish I could be more harsh on this album but that would mean putting more effort into criticizing it than they put into writing it.

Alright, that’s the album. So how did Slow Motion Daydream “ruin” Everclear?

Simple.

Most reviews of the album were particularly lukewarm if not outright negative, currently holding a 57/100 rating on Metacritic. The harshest review came courtesy of Stylus, and this particularly melodramatic but damning bit of journalism.

“Each successive album has just added to the pile of disappointments. Miserable radio-ready singles, generic hard rock, the same damn melodies showing up on every record. Now, it’s all over, and this review is my farewell to a band who played an important role in my formative years. This is it, the last time I’ll willingly listen to an Everclear record — it’s finally sunk in that they’ll never be returning to the youthful exuberance of old.”

-Ed Howard, Stylus, 2001

It nails the downfall of Everclear almost perfectly.

For whatever it’s worth though a lot of fans now seem to like the album, but it’s mostly in the context of “well it’s not that bad,” or “the middle kinda lacks a bit but there’s still strong stuff on there,” and with that I fully agree, it’s just an album that never quite lived up to the potential it had artistically.

Unfortunately the album didn’t live up to commercial standards though. When Capitol stopped putting in the effort to promote the album due to the head-butting between them and Alexakis the sales numbers ended up looking pretty sad. As of now it has only sold roughly 105k+ copies, and even though it peaked at #33 on the Billboard Hot 100 it pretty much dropped off the charts immediately afterward. “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” hit #30 on the US Alternative Chart but that would be the last Everclear single to do any sort of charting until 2015. When I say they tanked I mean they taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanked.

The final nails in the coffin were that five months after the release of the record, in August of 2003, Greg Eklund and Craig Montoya both split from Everclear before Art left Capitol Records altogether a year later. Art would call the breakup a “mutual decision” and there seems to be no reunion in sight but all involved parties seem alright with that. Art would reform the band with a whole new lineup and release Welcome To The Drama Club in 2006, The Vegas Years in 2008, a covers album, and In A Different Light in 2009 where he rerecorded many of Everclear’s greatest hits before doing that trick again with Return to Santa Monica. Of course there has been new material in the form of the Invisible Stars and Black Is The New Black albums, but they’re nothing particularly interesting to write home about.

In the immediate time after the most commercially successful lineup split, Art went through a divorce and a bankruptcy It’s a lot to go through for any person and I say that from a point of experience.

Looking back on Slow Motion Daydream, Art doesn’t seem to think fondly of it, even going so far as to say in a feature with The Morning Call back in 2007,

“Even though there are some great songs on Vol. Two, I feel like the whole record sounds like I’m tired and drained … I needed to recharge my batteries before making another record … I wish I had done that.”

“I had people in my band telling me they wanted to do a really rock record … so I wrote really heavy songs and some of those songs on that record, I think, are some of the best songs I’ve written … but you’ll never hear them because the whole record on the whole, my heart just wasn’t really into it. … it doesn’t sound like Everclear to me.”

-Art Alexakis, The Morning Call (2007)

Well, Art, if it’s any consolation it does sound like Everclear, but it sounds like a hollow shell of the band’s former glory days.


It’s not necessarily a sad ending for Everclear and Art Alexakis though. As I mentioned near the start of this, the band transitioned into more of a touring and legacy act who rely on a lot of those 90s nostalgia touring circuits, and speaking of; they’re even on a tour celebrating their 30th anniversary right now as I type this out. Alexakis seems to be doing alright for himself in spite of everything he’s been through, and for that I applaud him!

On a final note: I know that Art Alexakis, for all intents and purposes, IS Everclear, but it’s hard to not see Craig and Greg’s absence as having taken a huge dent in the band’s legacy and sound, especially seeing as how they’re all credited as co-writers on all those songs. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll bury the hatchet and they’ll give us a new album or a reunion tour, and some day I hope they do, but until then the memories and legacy of Everclear stay firmly held in the late 90s and early 00s for all to see and hear. We’ll always have “Santa Monica” though, and that song fucking rips.

Let’s watch the world die together.

This is Harvey VD saying thank you for reading, and remember to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers! Peace.

THE ALBUMS THAT RUINED US: RADIOACTIVE by Yelawolf

Hey everybody, Harvey VD from the band ROUGE! here! We’re gonna try something a bit different on the blog and start adding some more variety to break up the monotonous flow of announcements and statements, so in the style of the TRAINWRECKORDS series that is produced by YouTuber and music critic Todd In The Shadows we’re gonna share our own stories about albums that maybe didn’t “kill” an artist’s career but definitely left a line of demarcation in them, alright? Alright? Cool. Let’s move on.

There’s a difference between “White Rappers (c)” and “white guys who rap.” “White Rappers (c)” tend to appropriate the style of rap for a demographic that doesn’t normally listen to rap because “all they talk about is sex, drugs, and violence” while listening to folks like Eric Clapton, 80s punk, or any given hair metal band, but in the end all you get is fairly cheesy pop music with some mediocre rhymes over them (see: Jack Harlow or early Mac Miller). They think it’s “real rap” or whatever but won’t listen to someone like Kendrick Lamar or A$AP Rocky because it’s “too ghetto” or whatever other racial codeword one could throw in.

Meanwhile “white guys who rap” are simply just rappers trying to make it in the genre while also acknowledging that they’ve got it a bit easier because of their race (think Beastie Boys post-License To Ill or late-period Mac Miller). They’re just focused on their craft and that’s really it, more or less.

Sometimes you get artists who teeter-totter between both categories (…dare I say Jimmy Pop from Bloodhound Gang?), sometimes you get artists who switch categories as their career progresses (see again: Mac Miller), and sometimes you get artists trying for one category while winding up in the other.

That last part is the story of one of those rappers, so buckle up because we’re in for a funky-ass ride.

The year is 2010.

A 30, soon to be 31 year-old rapper by the name of Yelawolf has released his major label debut project, a reworking of his Trunk Muzik mixtape (which he released earlier that year) and is now called Trunk Muzik 0-60. Across 46 minutes the album spans a wide variety of hip-hop subgenres and features a nice little list of artist cosigns including those of Atlanta rap legend Gucci Mane, Houston legend Bun B and Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon. The project is released to some critical acclaim and he continues to build his profile by working with a wide variety of artists. A few different reviews that I could find name-check Eminem as a comparison and it’s not exactly hard to see why. Both rappers are, well, white, both came from rough backgrounds and both worked hard to get their way to their respective stations in life. Both rappers are also story-tellers; when Yelawolf raps about how he grew up in the rough parts of Gadsden, Alabama or raps about selling crystal meth out of a trailer park it strikes a few similar chords to a few different Marshall Mathers songs, and much like Eminem, Yelawolf has a fair share of songs that send chills up and down the spine.

Trunk Muzik 0-60 was released in November 2010, a solid 10 months after the original version was released and it helped build up a taste of Yelawolf to the general music-listening public. Between then and February 2011 there was more than just a little speculation (in part due to the comparisons laid out among many others) that Yelawolf was going to sign with Shady Records, the label run by Eminem, and sure enough in the March 2011 issue of XXL Magazine there’s Yelawolf alongside fellow Shady signees Slaughterhouse and the big man himself. A little while later that year, Yelawolf appeared alongside 10 other rappers for the XXL 2011 Freshman Class, an annual feature the magazine does to highlight up-and-coming rappers to watch out for. Featured in that year’s class alongside Yelawolf were a handful of other rappers who definitely made their mark in one way or another whom you may have heard of (Meek Mill, Big K.R.I.T., Mac Miller, YG, Lil B, and Kendrick Lamar). Though Kendrick Lamar had released Section.80 that year and was a year away from releasing his classic Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, Mac Miller released his first official studio album with Blue Slide Park and The BasedGod was always going to have a strong online following, there was a lot of particular hype for Yelawolf especially after being seen as a protege to Eminem, arguably one of the greatest rappers of all-time. What was this white guy who rapped that came from Alabama going to drop on the world and make his mark with?

We get the answer to that on August 8th, 2011 with the debut single from his upcoming project Radioactive, the name of the song is called “Hard White (Up In The Club)” and features a guest appearance by Lil Jon.


….wait, Lil Jon?

YEAHHH!

As it turns out, the guy who made the certifiable banger “Get Low” had been in the next phase of his career with a solo album in 2009 (appropriately titled Crunk Rock) was still getting himself onto plenty of tracks including another pairing-up with Yelawolf on a song for, I kid you not, a solo album that Travis Barker of Blink-182 fame put out in early 2011. But enough of that; it’s the summer of 2011, you’re following Yelawolf and trying to find out as much as you can about the guy, and this song comes out and is the first proper introduction for his new upcoming album.

Let’s see what these two have brought to the table together for this momentous occasion.

Actually this is alright, I give it a thumbs-up. Having Yela’ over some more aggressive drum beats tends to work in his favor and this song especially highlights how he could work in the context of both poppier material alongside his business-as-usual rap flow. I kinda like that little vocal loop they use as well, honestly.

Alright, so the single drops in August and peaks at #17 on the bubbling-under hip-hop charts for Billboard, the music video for “Hard White” comes out in September, and in October the second and final single from the album comes out before the album comes out in a month.

The song is called “Let’s Roll” and features our good friend Rob Ritchie AKA Kid Rock on the hook. It’s a bit lighter and poppier than “Hard White” but is pretty much what I would still expect from a Yelawolf song; it’s got those rattling hi-hats and snappy 808 drums, fairly gentle piano and Kid Rock’s hook fits perfectly with the mood of the song. A pairing like Yelawolf and Kid Rock is more like what I would’ve expected as the lead single since it feels like an obvious pick and it gives that redneck hip-hop fusion a bit of a run for its money. Overall this song is perfectly fine. Again. Perfectly fine.

From what I could find “Let’s Roll” didn’t hit the charts either but it did manage to get a gold certification so maybe that’s not bad for a follow-up single, but the real question is how will the album as a whole sound? The two singles that were released for it don’t sound much like each other though they feature two good performances from our leading man on both songs.

Well, it’s now November 21st, 2011 and Radioactive is out in its entirety, so let’s listen to the album in its proper form. You go to the store and buy the CD, you pop it in your car and the first thing you hear is this…

Alright, that’s more what I was expecting from the guy who made “Get The Fuck Up” and horrorcore classic “Pop The Trunk.” It’s rightfully sparse and forces you to focus more on the actual rapping on display instead of the production behind him, and it’s a good way to open an album up (especially for an artist who knows a thing or two about opening up a project).

Up next is “Get Away” featuring guest appearances from Shawty Fatt and Mystikal. The beats on it are pretty and sparkling in part due to the sampling of “Strawberry Letter 23” by Brothers Johnson (which I’d recommend listening to anyway) and Shawty Fatt works over this as well. I’m still a bit fence on Mystikal’s contribution but I don’t hate it necessarily, it just feels so out of place compared to the other verses that came before it.

“Let’s Roll” and “Hard White” come after that, we know those songs since we already covered those, right? Right? Cool. Let’s move on.

“Growing Up In The Gutter” follows those two, and honestly it’s one of the stronger songs on the album. The buzzsaw synths used on the chorus along with Yela’s screams really act as a nice piece of dynamics alongside the quiter/gentler sounds of the verses. Lyrically Yela’s verse takes inspiration from “Children’s Story” by Slick Rick as he talks about a child who is abused by her father who also is picture as Lucifer himself. The mention of the “twin box spring” makes it clear where this child’s family is in terms of social/financial class which helps set the exposition of why outside the abuse life is such a nightmare for this child. The guest verse from Riitz features a chilling set of lyrics as well, but his vocal delivery feels a bit detached from Yela’s, who immerses you into what’s going on in the song. Here it just sounds like Riitz is kinda going “yeah is that fucked up or what?” A short film about the song came out in 2012 that’s equally as chilling as the song itself.

After that we get “Throw It Up” which features Three Six Mafia member Gangsta Boo and finally gives us the appearance of Eminem that we all basically knew was coming, right? The track is produced by Eminem alongside WLPWR, one of Yelawolf’s main producers and let me tell you, it absolutely sounds like Eminem’s fingerprints are all over the track with that little piano loop that is featured prominently throughout. The song is one of the strongest as everyone brings their A-game here including Eminem on what is definitely a reminder that he wasn’t as washed-up and over-the-hill as his “haters” would like you to believe.

So we’re six tracks into a fifteen track album, so far everything has been good, right? And it’s going to stay good, right?


Well, it was fun while it lasted, but allow me to introduce you to the point where this album goes fully off the rails and never fully recovers.

You see, at the end of “Throw It Up” we get something of a skit (which are rarely welcome on rap records in general, let alone on a rap record from 2011) where Yelawolf calls Eminem up after he records his verse, and the two share this exchange.


Eminem: Urm, yo, you know what I was thinking, man? I think the one thing that er… that the album don’t have that might be missing is like er… a song for, like, for girls

Yelawolf: Uh, what do you mean? For like bitches?

E: Nah, girls. Like a love song

Y: [awkward pause] No?!

E: We need one!

Y: Like—love song, love song?

E: Yeah, man, bitches like love songs!

In an interview with Complex Magazine where he talks about the making of the album, Yelawolf straight-up says this about the song “Good Girl,” and I quote;

I fucking did not want to do this record. I was totally against the song. All artists have one or two of these records in their career that they’ll record and be like, ‘I don’t know about this shit.’ Then their whole team will be like, ‘Dog, I’m telling you.’

-Yelawolf

and BOY DOES IT SOUND LIKE IT. His energy almost instantly drops when he’s rapping on here. Don’t get it twisted, the beat itself is nice but man, he sounds like someone put a gun to his head and told him he had to record this. The lyrics are so bad, the hook is so bad, and the song as a whole outside those beats is so bad. Unfortunately for him, he later goes on to mention in that article that Eminem really liked the song and so it wound up on the album. Yela specifically requested that skit at the end of “Throw It Up” to make it clear he didn’t want to do this but that he had to do to appease Eminem and the higher-ups at Shady Records. Not a good sign when you’ve gotta do something explaining “I didn’t want to do this but here we are” on an album.

Before we can get too much further into this I think it’s important to provide some background into Eminem in the year 2011 and the run-up to his part in Radioactive. After all, he’s the reason we’re even here so let’s talk about it.

In 2009 Eminem releases Relapse, his first album since 2004’s Encore. It’s the first record he’s made after fighting his battle with addiction and it pops up plenty on the album in many ways/shapes/forms, and even includes the return of his Slim Shady alter-ego. The album’s reviews are mixed to put it gently, and Eminem admitted that he wasn’t necessarily paying attention to what average listeners were and weren’t listening to these days so his next effort, 2010’s Recovery was released to slightly more favorable reviews but also featured songs like “Love The Way You Lie” which were way poppier than many of the other greatest hits of Marshall Mathers. But, “Love The Way You Lie” is a #1 hit and Eminem & co. are probably thinking they can get Yelawolf some radio hits with a similar formula, but one of the major differences between Eminem and Yelawolf is that Yelawolf at least knows this shit doesn’t work. Eminem’s vocals on those poppier songs he does don’t fit in with anything at all, it’s like trying to make a rose grow in concrete; sure we can appreciate the idea here but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. But again, it’s 2011 and Eminem is the one calling the shots so what he says is the bottom line.

It’s a shame, too, because of the fifteen songs on here there’s at least a solid six or seven tracks that all give off the vibe of “you have to follow the formula.” It comes out at you especially hard on songs like “Made In The USA” which features a Rhianna-like singer on the hook, the same can be said of “Write Your Name” which also features a Rhianna-like singer on the hook over gentle piano beats. There’s also “The Hardest Love Song In The World” which sounds like a fucking joke title that even the fucking Bloodhound Gang would’ve looked at and said “no.” The lyrics are far from “hard” too which makes the whole song feel even cheesier than it already is. It really gives off this whole “how d’ya do, fellow kids?” vibe and let me tell you, I don’t like it. Then there’s songs like “Radio” where there’s a message there in theory about the lack of quality content on the radio. Incidentally that song did not become a single but I guess he can find consolation in that there’s a lot of folks on YouTube who still really love this song 11 years later so good for him, I guess.

Alright, is there anything good on the back half of this record or do I just keep bitching about it?

Well, I like “Animal” and the hook that FeFe Dobson provides despite the dated dubstep production that came courtesy of Diplo. It’s one of the only times on the back half where Yelawolf sounds alive and energized. Yelawolf and FeFe ended up getting married in real life too so I guess it’s a nice bright spot on this album. I like “Everything I Love The Most” and that Billy Joel interpolation that’s being used on the hook as well as some of the lyrical content. If Yela was going to make a “love song” at the insistence of the higher-ups this would’ve been the perfect song to have as the obligatory “love song” because it’s not as obvious as the other songs that get thrown together on here. There’s also “Slumerican Shitizen” which features Travis Barker on drums and a pre-Run The Jewels Killer Mike doing a damn good verse about for-profit prisons. It’s also very much yee-haw as hell and when I went into this album I was expecting some more songs along the lines of that instead of what we got. It would’ve been possible to make stuff that didn’t feel so generic and cheesy, but instead we have almost half an album’s worth of tracks that I’d rather skip than keep listening to.

The album ends with a song appropriately titled “The Last Song,” and it’s a little closing ballad featuring beatbox drums and a piano while Yelawolf raps about his absent father and how he had to learn to be a man in spite of his dad not being around to teach him how to be one. Yelawolf is no stranger to heart-wrenching songs, he did it beautifully on Trunk Muzik 0-60 with “Love Is Not Enough,” where he puts his heart on his sleeve albeit from a somewhat angry perspective about a girl who left him for “some college graduate,” so it’s no surprise that this song is alright. However even with the lyrics talking about what I guess could be a happy ending, he’s big and famous now and he doesn’t need his dad, it still feels like a weird way to close the album off, but it also feels like the only way to close the album off. An album of mishmashing and compromise could only end with a ballad like that.

Alright, that’s the album in its entirety. What now?

The album was a relative chart success upon release; it peaked at #27 on the Billboard Top 200, #6 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and #4 on the Top Rap Albums chart while selling 41k its first week. As of now it’s sold upwards of 200k copies so it’s not a complete and total failure, right?

Let’s see what the critics have to say.

Okay, XXL Magazine gave it a 4/5 “XL” review, AllMusic gave it a 4/5 review and noted it as an album pick, noted rap magazine The Source gave it a 4/5 and labeled it a “near classic” (though unfortunately I can’t find the review and am going off Wikipedia’s word for that), and Paste gave it a 7.2/10 in their review as well. A whole lot of positive reception here, that’s got to mean something, right?

Wellllllllll….

That was most of the positive reception to this album, overall a lot of critics were more brutal to it than I could’ve ever been. Popmatters and Sputnik Music deliver brutally honest takes, the former mentioning, “the end result is an album during which the main protagonist seems unaware of what’s going on, playing second fiddle to the ruminations of backseat A&Rs and misguided grasps at populism” while the latter laments “his album is simply a case of a young artist’s talent and vision being compromised by the wishes of his new bosses to make an album that can relate to the general public at every possible level, or something.” Independent simply says “it seems a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.” The AV Club points out much of the same, and that “for an uncomfortable seven-song stretch, the rapper seems so alienated from his own album” and I could not fully agree more. The most amazing thing though is that this album provided me with a Pitchfork review that I found myself agreeing with, which feels more likely than I would’ve initially thought, especially when they say “the worst part isn’t the songs themselves, but that the album didn’t have to go this route. Outside the sagging middle section, the subject matter and production will be nothing new to those familiar with Yela’s music; his voice and perspective remain sharp and unique, and he certainly hasn’t lost any of his technical skill. The guests (Mystikal, Killer Mike, Three 6 Mafia secret weapon Gangsta Boo) are also otherwise the type of people that should be on a Yelawolf album, rappers from whom he pulls his vocal style or sharp wit, or to whom his fans likely also listen. … This isn’t Yelawolf’s first foray into trying to make pop songs or songs for women, but it’s by far his worst.”

At the end of the day it’s easy to try and forget that those bad songs even exist, but they’re also a large part of why Yelawolf went on to crash and burn so hard. But what exactly happened that leads to him going that way? Well, after the album is released he says in so many words he made the record the label wanted him to make and not the one he wanted to make so he felt compromised by the label and didn’t want that happening again.

He also made a big deal about how his next proper album was going to be the sound of what he wanted Radioactive to sound like but in the meantime he gave us a handful of projects that range from interesting (the Travis Barker collab EP Psycho White), to just okay (the mixtape Trunk Muzik Returns which does in fact have some good stuff on it), to the out-right questionable (a collaborative EP with Ed Sheeran (????) called The Slumdon Bridge that was released right in 2012 when Sheeran was starting to put out his own records but a few years before he became a household name).

Depending on who you ask Radioactive was the moment Yelawolf’s career crashed and burned and then never fully recovered the way it could have. When he started he was simply a white guy who rapped in a way that drew comparisons to Eminem and whose lyrics paralleled living in trailer parks and hick-towns and living in ghettos and slums in a way that was thought-provoking and showed that we have a lot more in common than we all think, but with Radioactive Yelawolf was forced by Shady Records to become a White Rapper (c) chasing after pop hits, and that simply wasn’t him. After talking to a friend whom as long as I’ve known her has been a self-proclaimed Eminem Stan, she echoed a lot of the feelings I had about this record and how Eminem handled Yelawolf’s career in general; he was a rapper who had a lot of potential to be great but was pushed aside as another White Rapper (c) and never got his proper due. And it’s a fucking shame. At least now Eminem is in the “White Rapper (c)” phase of his career so it all evens out I guess.

Remember when I mentioned that Yela would say after Radioactive came out that he was going to make the records he wanted to make and not the ones he had to make? Well he did make good on that promise, and while Radioactive may have dealt a critical blow to his career, the story of how Love Story helped deliver the final fatal blow is best left for another time.


Cheers, and kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers,
Harvey VD of ROUGE!