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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
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