Music
March 16,1999
CitySearch Music!



The New Radicals Are Neither New Nor Radical: Discuss

It may not be worth it to destroy the New Radicals, the peppy little post-alternative nation pop band that have disgusted me ever since the video for their first single, "You Get What You Give," got rubber-stamped as "buzzworthy" by MTV. I got stuck behind it, transfixed and honking my horn, every time I flipped over to Channel 20 early this winter. But the thing is, Gregg Alexander, this callow, six-and-a-half-feet-too-tall mastermind of the band, is getting away with it—the whole flatfooted salesmanship of feel-good anti-consumerism consumerism, i.e., the naked re-purposing of the kind of pop culture critique that got some puritanical graduate students in Chicago a little notoriety a couple of years ago writing a little journal/zine called The Baffler to sell the musical equivalent of the raggedy Visa-card bohemianism retailed by places like Delia's.

Seen the video? Set in a pastel-tiled mall, its three-minute plot line goes something like this: Bored teens revolt and take over said mall. The music starts. Alexander waves his little arms and nods his shaved head. The teens, all impeccably Urban Outfitted, begin chasing businessmen and businesswomen through the mall on Vespa scooters. The teens also release dogs from the pet stores and make extreme demands of the waitress at the food court. Alexander spends a seemingly endless portion of the video riding up and down in a glass elevator, serenading America's unhappy mall rats with these lines: "Don't give up/You've got the music in you." This is supposed to be uplifting.

According to the bio faxed over from MCA Records Inc.—the large record label that released the New Radicals' debut album, "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too"—Gregg Alexander is the real deal: an uncorrupted revolutionary for the Galleria. After passing his formative years in the upscale Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, where he was "the only kid tall enough to confront his conservative teachers," Alexander took off to Los Angeles. He sneaked into the Grammy Awards ceremony, "toting a lit joint," and he walked right up to Eddie Van Halen and Rick James. This apparently caused him to become even more revolutionary. He took to barging into record company offices, jumping up on desks to "howl his songs a cappella." Eventually, his hustle got him a major label deal. Now, according to the corporate bio, Alexander is out to "make mass-media-instigated middle and working-class idealization of the systematically unobtainable American dream of being a heartless, faceless corporate millionaire a shameful act." Whatever that means, Alexander is going to do it on MTV, wearing one of those fishing hats and an inside-out T-shirt with contrasting piping, while occasionally making his eyes go all big and Bambi-sincere at the camera, a la Alanis Morissette.

At a certain point in the video, the rebel teens catch some of those businessmen and put them in the pet store cages. They struggle. Toward the end, the young hipster brigades surround a cornered preppy. When they back off, she emerges, in a daze, wearing a short orange dress, restyled. And here Alexander is, in Spin, daringly reclined on the hood of an NYPD car in his red shirt, smoking his radical cigarette. Somehow he's safe here, even while he talks Radical: "If people don't start using word-of-mouth to talk about real problems, society is in deep shit. A voice on the radio isn't gonna mean anything if a country is bombing the shit out of every place." I'm sure it'll do for his purposes, though.
—E. Carl Swanson

 

"Hi, My Name Is...Stupid Motherfucker"

The first sign of the Universal/Polygram merger's Satanic fallout is upon us: Interscope, once home to some of the most kickin' shit around, has dropped all their good bands to solidify their position as the chief purveyors of the geeky whiteboy homicidal fantasy. They had their Manson and now they have that Eminem clown, putting out another piece of shit that every critic seems to swear smells like a bed of American Beauty roses. The New York Observer—whose musical opinion has never been of any particular note, but still—said that, "Eminem's new thing is the first since Lauryn Hill's new thing." Um, well, to begin with, it's Dr. Dre's new thing—he's the one with the actual music, after all. (And what about the Roots' new thing: "Everything Falls Apart"? Sure, I know it's just a record of solid rhymes, varying narratives, fat beats, intelligent ideas, interesting instrumentation—done with real instruments by the actual people whose names are on the cover. But I digress.) Let us not even go into Rolling Stone's crack-addled claim that Eminem's rhyme skills are on par with L.L. Cool J.'s—too reprehensible to even be dignified with a response.

But everybody's talking about this tired shit. Another kid from the midwest who throws down answering machine messages from his A&R rep telling him to "tone it down" or bratty valley girls saying he's "disgusting" to underline what a tough guy he is. And I've never been big on this whole mistreatment of women in rap music thing—I leave that nit-picking to C. Delores Tucker and various militant feminist associates—but "The Slim Shady LP" pisses me off. Because throughout Eminem's endless tales of violence, it stands out that not one of them is directed at the Man. Hell, any man. No, it's his wife, his mother, some teenager, or some rave girl (memo to Mr. Homie—anyone with any bad in their ass at all does not go to raves, much less admit it) who's getting murdered or raped or drugged or fucked while unconscious. And when Eminem decides to honor the ancient tradition of digging at other MCs, he attacks Lauryn Hill—I guess he's afraid that if he picks on a male rapper, he might get his shit kicked. No one's noticing this, of course, 'cause they figure his little lines about getting his lunch money taken or jerking off a lot let him off the hook—aw, shucks, he's just a dork, go easy on the kid. And that little "My Name Is" song with the $250,000 video plastered all over MTV is so catchy. Yeah, right.

Then there's Eminem's neverending complaint about how no one respects him because he's white. Know what? Get over it. Sure, being "the white guy" ain't easy, but if you've got such prodigious skills, you can earn some respect (ask the Sacramento Kings' Jason "White Chocolate" Williams). Or you should be tough enough to take it, rather than constantly whine about how being white "is like [you] don't exist"—you're pissed off that your color is all people see, but it's all you can talk about. How about exploring the problem a bit, rather than constantly pointing to it as an impenetrable brick wall you've run up against? And what's up with that closing line on the liner notes, "To all the people who never gave me love and continue to deny me 'cuz of what I look like: suck my dick you fucks!!" Hey, I'm not giving you love because, simply, you're the one that sucks. Your flow is unvarying, your themes are old hat, your narratives are redundant, and your vocabulary is even smaller than you claim your cock is. But I guess it's less distressing to believe I hate you for the color of your skin, isn't it?

Still, Eminem's no dummy, he knows who got him this gig: Prominently thanked in the liner notes are the Source, Blaze, Stress, Rap Pages, Vibe, Spin, Hip Hop Connection, Rolling Stone, and various other publications who helped him break out—if his fans had anything to do with his success, he's not letting on in the fine print. So, kid, get back on your knees and keep sucking: Interscope's gotta move 500,000 units before the next shareholder's meeting.
—Lissa Townsend Rodgers


Previously:


Don't Stop the Rock: Two weeks and 20 bands, including Black Sabbath, Rocket from the Crypt, Groop Dogdrill, Jungle Brothers, the Arsonists, Cibo Matto, Cold Crush Brothers, Supernatural, and many, many more.

Valentines Day Music: "Love Is in the Air," "Love Is All Around," "Love Stinks"....

Ask Mr. Diva: En Vogue, Mariah Carey, "When Does a Queen Relinquish Her Right to the Feminine," and the Greatest Drag Queen of All Time.

The Empire Strikes Back: LTR Does Battle With Vengeful Beastie Fans.

I Came I Saw, I Wondered Why I Bothered: The CMJ Wrapup Rant.

The Looming Menace of CMJ (Festival Preview).

Ask Mr. Diva: The Backstreet Boys, Bette Davis, and "Do You Have to Be a Bitch to Be a Queen?"

17 Reasons Why The Beastie Boys Are Wack!

North By Northwest (Not the Movie).

Ask Mr. Diva: The Divahood of Bette Midler, Marilyn Manson, and Lil' Kim, as well as the Secret Disco History of Barbra Streisand.

Dead Elvis: Munching The King's Corpse.

Fear of a Black Planet: The Goth Revival.

Horoscopes for the Week of July 20.

Spice Girls Review, Fourth of July Disasters, an Obscene Love Triangle, and All-Star Hope for our Nation's Future.

Brooklyn Hip Hop, Detroit Techno, Mermaids, Zombies, Lounge Singers, the "Wonderboy Preacher," and Lots of Full Frontal Nudity.

Horoscopes for the Week of June 22.

Courtney Love Sucks and Just a Few of the Reasons Why.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Lounge Lizards, and Afrika Bambataa & the SoulSonic Force.

The Legendary Ginger Spice Rant!

Frank Sinatra & Ava Gardner.



 


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