Cardigans will go top 10 sis!
The 90's US One-Hit Wonders Rate: WINNER REVEALED - Goodbye, farewell and amen
- Thread starter Ironheade
- Start date
he/him
It sucks to continue to come here and see some of my favorite 90s songs disappear and yet I'm can't throw a temper tantrum because I knew this was all going to happen. There's no shock. But...
Walking in Memphis
Would I Lie to You?
Cantaloop
I Wish
I Got 5 On It
My Boo
Brick
She's So High and others above some of these absolute classics? Uh-uh, no mam.
Shocked to find out they started as hair metal and evolved to...country though. Wow.
Walking in Memphis
Would I Lie to You?
Cantaloop
I Wish
I Got 5 On It
My Boo
Brick
She's So High and others above some of these absolute classics? Uh-uh, no mam.
Shocked to find out they started as hair metal and evolved to...country though. Wow.
Gah! Stop being a prophet!
So, today, we get our last 5 score at a rather late hour...
44. BRICK
Average score: 5.997
Highest scores: 5 x 10 (@pop3blow2 , @berserkboi , @Aester , @unnameable , @CasuallyCrazed )
Lowest scores: 1 x 1 (@Ana Raquel )
Chart positions: #19 Radio Songs, #17 Mainstream Top 40, #11 Adult Top 40, #6 Modern Rock
Year-End Hot 100: N/A
Who? Oh yeah, them...
And so, a third big cult favourite goes. Actually, my high school best friend Byron was a huge fan of Ben Folds, so I got exposed to quite a bit of his music back then, and as a result, there's a lot of good memories associated with him – backing Byron up with sources when he would post on Spacebattles threads of the “is Wario a libertarian?” variety, frantically yelling strategies at each other while 12-year-old Korean kids kicked our asses at Age of Empires II, laughing together at the potato-quality Bionicle stop-motion vids we would make on his phone. (Yeah, we didn't go to the cool parties.) I was expecting “Brick” to hang on a bit longer; it was in the top 40 of the rate for a while, and got some very favourable comments. But, alas, Ben can join Mike Patton and Gibby Haynes in the “rejected cult heroes” bucket for this rate. As they say, though, don't bring ballads to a bop fight when it comes to PopJustice rates, I suppose...
FOR THE LAST TIME, FUCK NO HE IS NOT A LIBERTARIAN, WARIO IS AN ANARCHO-CAPITALIST!!!!
By the time “Brick” hit the airwaves, Benjamin Scott Folds had already been around the musical block a few times. His first serious musical endeavour was a band called Majosha (in which he played alongside future Counting Crows bassist Millard Powers), whose first gig was at a Duke University battle of the bands in 1988, and who would go on to self-release an EP and a full-length album locally, both of which yielded songs that would later end up on Ben Folds Five albums. After that band broke up, he was at a bit of a loose end for a while playing in short-lived projects. He was a jobbing musician for a while: playing in some local bands, working as a session drummer in Nashville, attending the Frost School of Music on a percussion scholarship before dropping out with only one required credit to go, and acting in off-Broadway theatrical troupes in New York. (Apparently, he enjoyed that last one so much that he almost dropped the musical aspirations for it. Oh, for what could have been.) Eventually, the whirlwind of adventure came to an end, as he relocated back to his hometown of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and got the Ben Folds Five together for a more serious stab at a musical career. And the first thing you need to know about the Ben Folds Five is: there aren't five of them. It was in fact a trio, with the other members being bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee. But as Ben himself said regarding the name, “I think it sounds better than Ben Folds Three”. And you know what? He's right. Ben explained how they got signed by saying, “Jeff Buckley was being signed at that time by Columbia and I was talking to Steve, his A&R guy, and somehow we knew the same people or something”. (Funnily enough, while he was living in New York, Ben also used to play at the same cafe where Jeff Buckley made his name: Sin-é, which sadly no longer exists.) That got them a deal with the small independent label Passenger Records, which was owned by Caroline, and gave them the opportunity to release their self-titled debut album in 1995.
They were unlikely hitmakers, were the Ben Folds Five, and it was not so much for the music itself as for the attitude behind it. Alternative rock had once been a music for outsiders, but by now, it was the mainstream. The formula, at least as far as mainstream acts were concerned, was becoming somewhat codified. And here was the Ben Folds Five, a guitar-free trio with a pushing-30 bespectacled nerd on lead vocals and piano, who described their own style as “punk rock for sissies”, and who were unapologetic fans of 70's MOR singer-songwriters like Billy Joel and Elton John in an era when that was about the uncoolest music imaginable. Nevertheless, they quickly found their place as a known quantity, mostly through Ben's lyrical skills. Despite the occasional brush with immaturity, his wise-guy everyman person, skill with turning a phrase and sharp sense of observational humour made him the perfect chronicler of the beautifully, painfully relatable dilemmas of mundane reality. There are few artists, at least since the heyday of Morrissey, who can write with such genuine affection about losers, and it's a valuable skill to have. And though Ben quickly proved himself to be one of the great rock pianists, the Five always had a charmingly ramshackle, loose edge about them, and were determined never to take themselves too seriously, walking such a thin line between sincerity and silliness that, in the end, it seemed there was no difference between them at all. They were a band who seemed determined not to fit in anywhere, too geeky and bristlingly awkward for the mainstream and that bit too ironic and goofy to be hip with anybody, and that, in the end, was what was so great about them.
I want what the guy in the top right is having.
The self-titled album did not chart domestically, though the single “Underground”, a brilliant deconstruction of ideas of authenticity in the indie sphere, cracked the Top 40 in the UK. But the Five did begin to gather a substantial cult following, both for their no-guitars gimmick and for Ben's songwriting abilities. They became the subject of an intense bidding war between major labels, eventually being signed to 550 Music, a division of Sony, to release their second album in 1997. Whatever and Ever Amen was an even better refinement of the formula from the debut, once and for all confirming that they weren't just a gimmick, but that their chosen musical setup was the only one that could properly get across Ben's worldview. They might have had no guitars, but make no mistake, the Ben Folds Five could rock the hell out when they wanted to, and though I've focused all my attention on their frontman, the rhythm section really is quite the wellspring of talent for this band. And yet, it was “Brick”, an uncharacteristically downbeat and serious ballad, that got them radio attention and ultimately caused Whatever and Ever Amen to go platinum. Go figure. Even when you're not exactly the hardest rock band on the block, it's still the ballad that becomes your only pop hit...
So what do I think?
8! So much for “punk rock for sissies”, because “Brick” isn't really any kind of rock for anybody. While I do prefer the Five's more upbeat pounding-on-the-piano numbers, “Brick” really is a great example of a moody, minimalistic piano ballad done right. Most of that comes from the Five's rhythm section. Rather than the distorted bass guitar that usually covers for the lack of guitars in their music, Robert Sledge plays a bowed double bass, and its alternations between slow, deep reverberating lines that just seem to grow bigger, before giving way to foreboding gothic stings, really makes “Brick”. The interplay between the piano and drums is great too, the song being held down by a surprisingly intricate network of brushed snares that keeps the song moving along at a good clip despite its slow pace (and those heavy thumps on the bass drum really make the chorus hook strike home), while a few lonely notes of piano weave in and around them. Together, these few simple yet give “Brick” an almost chamber-classical feel, brooding and heavy with menace, that I really dig. And yet, its musical sophistication is offset by Ben's pleasantly plain-spoken vocals, with such an everyman narrative quality, like he's just your friend telling you a story in a coffee shop, that they're hard not to like. And that comes through in the lyrics. Ben had this to say about that:
Now, I like that they were able to touch on such a hot-button issue, and get it into the Top 20 with neither moralizing for or against attached to it. As well as that, the rather plain presentation of “Brick” really works for this subject matter, making you feel real sympathy for both participants in the narrative. It's a deft piece of work. Conclusion: she's a brick house.
(Man, between this and “The Freshmen”, what's with all the hit songs about abortions around this time?)
Where Are They Now?™
Alternative rock abortion ballads, as the Verve Pipe proved, are quite hard to follow up on, and indeed so it proved to be for the Ben Folds Five. Whatever and Ever Amen produced two more singles that made the Modern Rock chart, both of them just shy of the Top 20: “Battle of Who Could Care Less” (#22), and the vitriolic, hateful yet totally relatable and funny “Song for the Dumped” (#23). Neither of them got any pop radio play, however. And to make matters worse, the Five would scutter their chances of further pop success, unlikely as it had been beforehand, with their next album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which came out in 1999. (For the record: Reinhold Messner is an Italian mountaineer who, in 1991, became the first person to climb Mount Everest solo. Darren Jessee had used the name on a fake ID as a teenager, but the band were apparently unaware of Signor Messner's existence until informed about it by a radio DJ while they were promoting the album. Apparently, he liked the album too, so there you go!)
The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner was a rather different album to the Five's previous two. Perhaps taking note of the success of “Brick”, the record was a lot heavier on the ballads, and the humorous element of the lyrics was somewhat downplayed in favour of a more serious tone. Musically, the album was far less rock-oriented, as Ben started integrating more elements of jazz into his piano playing (and his improvement as a player is perhaps the best reason to listen to that album), and most of the songs were heavy on the horn and string arrangements. But if this rather self-conscious album is a reflection of “growing up”, I wish Ben had stayed dedicated to the everyman concerns of his earlier work a little longer. The single “Army” reached #28 in the UK, only two positions below the peak of “Brick”, but back home, it only reached #17 on the Modern Rock chart and didn't attract any attention from pop radio. Thanks to the album's commercial failure and a desire to pursue different directions musically, the Five amicably split apart in 2000, and Ben went on to his solo career. Too bad we're only really talking about the band, because that's where a lot of the real fun is at.
No frosted tips or wallet chain? OK.
I don't want to dwell too long on Ben's solo career: this is a writeup about the Five, after all, and they aren't considered to be a contiguous discography in the way that the works of, say, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine are. So, I'll just stick with giving you guys a brief rundown, rather than the whole album-by-album breakdown that I did with this rate's other big cult favourites the Butthole Surfers and Faith No More. We shall start, naturally, with his solo debut for Epic Records, 2001's Rockin' the Suburbs, which he recorded mostly by himself, including adding guitars to the equation for the first time. It's a great listen, with all the narrative insight and casual everyman joys you would want from him, and it yielded his second best-known song after “Brick” to boot. If there's a better takedown of the solipsistic teenage angst that characterized so much of nu-metal than the album's title track, I don't know of it. (Plus, you know you're cool when you can get Weird Al Yankovic to direct your single's music video!) I had always assumed it was a bigger hit than it was, but perhaps the stabs at their cash cows rankled the alternative radio programmers too much, as it didn't cross over to the Hot 100 and peaked at a lowly #28 on the Modern Rock chart. This world can be so cruel sometimes.
Three more albums would follow over the next decade, getting to high positions on the album chart thanks to the dedication of his fanbase while continuously going ignored by the radio: Songs for Silverman (2005), a fairly monochromatic return to the piano-bass-drums format with the more downbeat, layered and ballad-heavy sound of Reinhold Messner; the great and underrated Way to Normal (2008), a more light-hearted collection perfectly offset with a more sour, sarcastic edge that is perhaps inspired by his then-concurrent divorce; and Lonely Avenue (2010), an experiment where he ceded lyrical duties to High Fidelity scribe Nick Hornby, not terribly successfully given that they were hardly Hornby's most inspired work and the whole collaboration never quite felt natural, but hey, every musician is titled to the odd dud. They're certainly not all consistent, but they're all highly worth checking out just for the joys of Ben's sharp, literary wit. Sadly, from all of them, only two songs cracked the Hot 100: “Landed”, one of the singles from Songs for Silverman, which made #77, and six spots higher... his joke piano-ballad cover of “Bitches Ain't Shit”. (Sigh.) And that's not even getting into the side endeavours, like recording an EP with Ben Kweller and Ben Lee as (of course) The Bens in 2003, or producing Amanda Palmer's first solo album, or leaking a fake version of Way to Normal before it released as a joke on his fans. To say the least, he is a busy man. Oh yeah, and he co-wrote and produced most of William Shatner's shockingly good 2004 album Has Been, including their legendary, simultaneously absurd, biting, sneering and bloody brilliant cover of “Common People” (in collaboration with Joe Jackson). So how much of a hot take is it to say that I prefer that cover over the Pulp original by quite a way? Seriously though, Ben's arrangement rocks like a bastard. Who knew he had that in him?
Jarvis Cocker approved, by the way.
But the Five couldn't stay apart for too long. They first tested the waters with a one-off concert appearance in 2008, playing in Chapel Hill as part of MySpace's “Front to Back” series, in which artists would play an entire album live; they did The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, and a handful of songs from the previous two records. A return on a more permanent basis came in 2011, when the Five reunited to record some new songs for Ben's compilation The Best Imitation of Myself, and then a solid but safe reunion album, The Sound of the Life of the Mind, the next year. After the tour for the album concluded, they went on a hiatus again, and while in a Billboard article from 2013, Ben floated the idea that they still had some unreleased material floating around that they might turn into a new album, but “not before 2015”, as he put it; he also said that the band had enough material, after writing The Sound of the Life of the Mind, for two more records. As of today, however, nothing new from the Five has materialized, and I wouldn't hold my breath that it ever will.
And so, it was back to the solo work. While Ben always danced on the edge of the world of classical music, incorporating elements of it into his piano playing more and more, in recent years he has dedicated himself to that in a more serious way. He composed a piano concerto with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, which he premiered in 2014, and currently serves as an artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. His classical endeavours are reflected in his most recent album, 2015's So There, which featured both the concerto and a collection of piano-and-orchestra baroque pop compositions recorded with the New York ensemble yMusic. As for the Five's other members, Darren Jessee is the lead singer and guitarist of his own project Hotel Lights, who first formed during the Five's first breakup and have released four albums on Bar/None Records; Robert Sledge is a music teacher in Chapel Hill, and also plays in a band called Surrender Human. At this present moment, it seems unlikely that the band will ever get back together, thanks to Ben's many other commitments and that he seems to be doing just fine on his own. Keep on rockin' in the suburbs, doot doola doot doo.
And he produced the title track of this here record, too. Not so removed from PopJustice tastes after all!
OVER TO THE PEANUT GALLERY
Brickbats
4Roses (2): zzzzZZZZZZZzzzzzzz
Seventeen Days (4): This is… bland. Painfully bland. I always changed the station when this would come on.
ModeRed (6): Another rather dull 'not much happens' song.
Ganache (4): Um...The better abortion song? The piano, cello, drums combo is certainly more interesting than that Verve Pipe dirge. (I have officially been internet poisoned, folks, because I cannot see the word "cello" now without thinking of Lil Yachty. If you don't know act like you know.)
DJHazey (4): Somehow I remember this being more of a Everclear-style bop than what I'm hearing now. This is drippy.
yuuurei (2): Both whiny and depressing, what a thrilling combo. (That's my aesthetic if I ever saw it!)
Empty Shoebox (2): Sad Piano Man is not a great vocalist. Or even a good one. I used to know somebody who stanned this group. I never worked out why. (So you don't want him to SING US A SONG TONIGHT, I take it?)
əʊæ (5): Male Tori Amos need to chill, they have a release called Naked Baby Photos for fucks sake. (Yep, that's their B-sides and rarities thing. With an iconic title, mind you.)
WowWowWowWow (5): I appreciate the fact that Ben felt like he needed to write this song to work through some personal demons, something that I’ve never experienced and never will, and I don’t mind his later release “The Luckiest,” but … this is a lot for one song.
chanex (3): I remember a moment in the 90s where it seemed like Ben Folds was going to be a well-respected major band? Maybe that was just in my head but I'm so glad it didn't happen! (Ah well, at least turbo-nerds like me and Byron like him.)
Rockin' the suburbs
saviodxl (7.1): Were they the Hoobastank of their time? (I'm gonna go with no.)
Filippa (7): A well-crafted song with very personal lyrics. Love the bass. (Best use of double bass in 90's alternative. Take THAT, Barenaked Ladies!)
DominoDancing (8): Very pretty and very sad.
iheartpoptarts (7): Miserable but actually really pretty. (We'll win you over from BopJustice yet!)
Auntie Beryl (9.6): I adore the BFF and whilst this isn’t their best record, it is still amazing. (Yeah, that album's got a ton of gems on it. Seriously check it out if you haven't, people.)
Andy French (9): There are many other songs from this album that I vastly prefer but props to Ben for managing to make a really fucking depressing song about abortion into a gigantic hit. Not everyone has that!
berserkboi (10): This is gorgeous and was the kind of rock ballad I was dying for back in the day!
CasuallyCrazed (10): One of the most impactful heartbreak songs of all time.
unnameable (10): Ben is sadly underrated if this was his only hit. (He sure is.)
pop3blow2 (10): My goodness, this song is a doozy. Ben Folds was a huge influence on me. As a nerdy music kid, who played piano & wrote ‘emotional’ songs, he was someone I really got into & admired. There is such a stark sadness to this song. On some levels, it similar to ’The Freshman’ also in the rate. This one is less ‘angsty’ & more just sad, though. It makes me feel like the cold winter day in the song. In a car, with no heat, going to do something you’re not really to sure about. (I love this commentary. I really do.)
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He/Him
Nooooooooo!!! This feels like my first real loss!
he/him
OH GOD another band I’ve had the “privilege” of seeing live. Although nothing beats the time that Papa Roach from Papa Roach* yelled at me to “get the fuck up!” at a concert. OH EXCUSE ME FOR LIVING THAT I HAD A BUSTED ANKLE
*I assume his name is Papa.
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@DJHazey : This is a sentence I never thought I’d read, much less in relation to this song... Ha!
*sigh*
I’m pleasantly suprised Brick lasted this long. It got dragged pretty bad in the listening party before the rate. I can still play this one on the piano & it gives me the feels. Ben is a talented dude, but it actually seems perfect in a way that an odd ballad about abortion is his only real chart hit. (Though as a fan, my head canon feels like he has more.)
She/Her
Oh man. Ben Folds Five is a well-respected major band in my world! Some of those comments from the low scorers were painful to read. But I appreciate what my fellow high scorers had to say, especially @pop3blow2. The song does feel like that winter day. Very visceral and sad, but beautiful.
Also, I agree Lonely Avenue wasn't great overall, but I really liked its lead single "From Above":
Also, I agree Lonely Avenue wasn't great overall, but I really liked its lead single "From Above":
he/him
Yeah for some reason I really thought it was going to be like Everclear, I don't know why that band popped into my head but they did. I always had a super soft spot for Father of Mine because I didn't have much of a father figure early on in my life, even if the lyrics aren't exactly on the nose it still hit home for me.
It's his joint biggest hit in the UK along with The Battle Of Who Could Care Less - weirdly, both songs peaked at #26.
Shame on all of you for this, it shouldn't have gone this early.
he/him
Oh and both of these bands were favorites of mine growing up. Two of my favorite songs of all-time: Papa Roach's "Broken Home" yet another song that hit home because of really young me and Hoobastank's "Remember Me" which was a stellar example of the 'loser anthem' alternative rock could deliver to us at the time, like no one else could.
he/him
For the record, I’m not a total turn-of-the-century rock grouch; I quite enjoyed myself at the Alien Ant Farm concert.
he/him
Yeah they along with Linkin Park and a few other seem to be a few of the rare examples of bands that some of Popjustice have always been warm to.
I've been slowly building my 1997-2003-ish era of alternative rock playlist on Spotify lately so a lot of this is fresh in my mind. Some day I'm counting down like my all-time 500 songs in a thread for fun, so I'll unleash it all on those willing to enter the thread. Just got to finish selecting the songs and finding a good way to rank them precisely.
Wow, that's actually one on my concert list as well! I caught them at Download Festival... in 2016. They weren't bad actually, but you could sort of tell most of the crowd was just waiting for "Smooth Criminal", so that put a damper on the vibe a bit.
he/him
Attitude and Movies though!!
she/her
Back to the eliminations, as we head off into the uncharted territory of the 6's, surprisingly late in the game. Agh, and it's another good one, so that means...
I'VE BEEN DOWNHEARTED BABE
43. STANDING OUTSIDE A BROKEN PHONE BOOTH WITH MONEY IN MY HAND
Average score: 6.000
Highest scores: 3 x 10 (@pop3blow2 , @Andy French , @Seventeen Days )
Lowest scores: 1 x 0 (@Daniel_O )
Chart positions: #10 Radio Songs, #7 Mainstream Top 40, #19 Adult Top 40, #1 Modern Rock, #32 Mainstream Rock
Year-End Hot 100: N/A
Who? Oh yeah, them...
And another alternative song bites the dust. But it's a fine example of one thing that we have seen surprisingly little of in this rate thus far: an artist who was a blatant one-hit wonder from the start, nothing to match their one hit. Poor old Primitive Radio Gods, eh? Unfortunately, this is another situation where I don't have all that much information to work with – not as little as DJ Kool, but not little enough that I can make an entertaining post out of my dives and attempts to recover information. Most of what I have comes from their Wikipedia page, but the actual source of most of that information isn't actually cited, so I can't track it back to the source and who even knows how true it is. Anyhow, let us attend to the song with the annoyingly long title. (Sorry, Primitive Radio Gods, but when it comes to the “giving things long titles” stakes, I think Fiona Apple's got you comprehensively beat.)
Pictured: a shrine to the primitive radio god.
The story of Primitive Radio Gods begins with the I-Rails, an indie rock trio from Oxnard, who released four albums independently, the first in 1987. None of them ever got any attention outside their local area, though. And to be honest, having had a quick skim of a selection of their material on YouTube, I can sort of see why. Not that it's terrible, precisely, it's just the sort of timid, lightly jangly indie pop-rock, that was a dime a dozen back in those halcyon days right after R.E.M. first broke it big and everyone was scrambling for a piece of that pie. When the masters were already at work, they were never in with a realistic chance of making it big, especially in those days before alternative rock totally became the mainstream. Frustrated with the lack of success they were having, the I-Rails split up in 1990. Afterwards, their frontman Chris O'Connor began recording the material he had written for their planned fifth album on his own, calling the album Rocket and giving himself the artist name of Primative [sic] Radio Gods (a song title from the third I-Rails album, 1989's Nine Songs from Nowhere – but it was spelled correctly on there). But nobody was biting, and a disgruntled O'Connor ended up leaving the music business and going back to his day job as an air traffic controller at LAX.
A movie with a shocking twist!!! (Somebody sell me to Jimmy Fallon.)
But then, O'Connor did end up coming to fame, by way of one of those marvellous instances of serendipity. One day in 1994, while he was cleaning out his house, he came across a box filled with copies of his old demo tape, and in a spur of the moment “why the hell not?” decision, he started mailing them out to every single major label he could think of. To hear him tell it, it was one final act of desperation before turning his back on music for good, and he hadn't expected them to get noticed at all. But a copy of Rocket made its way to New York and into the hands of Jonathan Daniel, an executive at the Polydor-affiliated Fiction Records. He found himself attracted to one song on the tape in particular, a strange little trip-hop number that heavily sampled B.B. King's 1964 recording of “How Blue Can You Get?”. On the strength of that one song, Daniel managed to negotiate a deal with Columbia for O'Connor (his band name now spelled correctly), who got “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth”, the song that had so impressed Daniel, a placement in The Cable Guy (one of the decade's most underrated works of black comedy, for the record, with Jim Carrey giving one of the performances of his career). Shortly after the film's release, a remastered version of Rocket came out, and by that time, the single was well on its way to becoming a huge radio hit. I do love when coincidences turn out well for people, don't you?
So what do I think?
8.5! Wow. You know, this was a song I didn't really know before this rate, but it turns out, I loved it. “Standing Outside” is a fantastic entry into the 90's trip-hop inflected chillout canon. The easygoing lope of the hip-hop beat is offset beautifully by the atmospheric layers of synths piled over it, so subtle and airy that they might almost seem like they're not there at first, yet they are constantly shifting and changing throughout the song's entire runtime. “Standing Outside” is fantastic with a good pair of headphones, as they let you really pick out all the little details that were layered into it, slowly swelling to an almost orchestral feel by the end, before giving way at the climax to roars of in-the-red fuzz guitar. And it comes with a great cascading piano solo to top it off, to boot. The looped B.B. King vocal sample is really cool too, a raw wail of pain that makes a striking contrast to Chris O'Connor's emotionally numb deadpan. And when Chris starts singing along to the “I've been downhearted, babe” at the end, it's a genuinely poignant moment, one that really puts the cryptic remainder of the rest of the lyrics in perspective and ties it all together as a fragmented yet moving representation of a broken relationship that overflows with bitterness and cynical philosophy. Not that any meaning matters too much, when this song is such a rich mine of imagery and sharply observed detail as it is (“you swim like lions through the crest and bathe yourself in zebra flesh” is one I particularly like). So, yeah, I think “Standing Outside” is a really great song. Seriously, this should be memorialized a lot more in the public memory than it is – killer.
Where Are They Now?™
As to why the Primitive Radio Gods didn't get another hit to follow “Standing Outside”, I can point to one major reason: it was the only really good song on the album and the rest of Rocket pretty much just sucks. If you were expecting more “Standing Outside”-style trip-hop, you won't get it, because the rest of it mostly consists of tired, generic and stunningly mediocre alternative rock with absolutely laughable, often preachy lyrics. There are a few more moments where O'Connor has a go with his sampler and tries to recapture the magic, but never very successfully, and never even really interestingly. This is the sound of a band who a) had had a bunch of demos sitting around for a while, such that they were old news by the time they came out, and b) were blatantly just dumped into the market by a label who realized they had one hit single on their hands and nothing else worth noting. So, even though Rocket went gold, the critical brickbats it got were totally unsurprising, including a 1.2 from the then-nascent Pitchfork. The thing that baffles me the most, I think, is the stylistic disparity at play. I can accept a band failing to make lightning strike twice in terms of quality between the one hit and the rest of the tracks on offer, but what I don't get is when they manage to hit on a genuinely creative and fresh sound for that one hit, and yet the rest of the album is absolutely nothing like it. How does that even happen?
About as much lift as the average rocket from Kerbal Space Program.
Also, hint: if you want a second hit, you may not want to release the song entitled “Motherfucker” as your second single.
None of that deterred O'Connor, though, who kept plowing on. He immediately started pulling a full lineup together, including both of the other former members of the I-Rails. It may shock you to learn that “Motherfucker” did not become a success, with mainstream radio barely touching it due to its title, and the band didn't even try with any further follow-ups. As I said, Rocket went gold, but the label quite blatantly wanted to be rid of Primitive Radio Gods as soon as they realized there was no follow-up single and they had nothing they could really promote. As soon as they began writing material for a second album, Columbia suddenly dropped them with no warning. Because Record Labels Are Dicks. Well, actually, no, that isn't always the case, because their own personal Jesus Jonathan Daniel stepped in again and got Primitive Radio Gods a deal with Sire Records. By 1999, their second album, which was to be called Mellotron On!, was ready for release in a few weeks... but then Sire and the US division of London Records underwent a merger, leaving Primitive Radio Gods lost in the shuffle and unable to negotiate a release for the album. Eventually, they got dropped again (Because Record Labels Are Dicks), and eventually managed to release their second album, re-titled White Hot Peach and consisting mostly of songs intended for the unreleased Mellotron On!, in 2000 on the small Boulder-based indie label What Are Records?. And who ran that label, you may ask? Of course, it was none other than the band's old friend Jonathan Daniel! Say this for the man, say he's loyal.
I couldn't find a picture of Primitive Radio Gods' biggest stan, so here's Jonathan Daniel Brown from Project X.
The thing is, I had a brief skim of White Hot Peach, and it's actually a big improvement over Rocket, showing the band growing more of an identity of their own and getting more experimental. If anything, “Standing Outside” would have fit in better on that album than it did on their first. But, of course, the musical uptick that they took did not mean an uptick in their commercial performance. They released a few more pieces of work through What Are Records?, the most notable being Fading Out, an EP containing the intended Mellotron On! songs that didn't make it to White Hot Peach. (They would later compile the originally intended version of that album and release it in 2003.) From then on, Primitive Radio Gods went totally independent. They've released four more albums and a live DVD, which were available through services like Napster and eMusic, and also through the band's own online mp3 store. So I guess you could say they were somewhat ahead of their time: I recall that Marillion adopted a crowdfunding model for their new albums a couple of years before that, but being an Internet-based independent artist to that degree, I think that was a pretty new thing in 2001, regarding that model. Plaudits to them for that, at least. Since the release of their most recent album, 2016's Manmade Sun, it's more or less been radio silence from these guys; they tend to take fairly long gaps between releases anyway, so who even knows what's up with them. But it seems like they can do OK for themselves under the Internet-based model, so there you go.
Now, O'Connor, according to a rare interview (with Songfacts in 2015), is quite reclusive and averse to publicity, which may go some way to explain why he never wanted to be a rock star in the first place, and why his method of keeping his head down led to the commercial doom of the Primitive Radio Gods. In the interview in question, he only really talks about his creation process, influences, method of making music and so on; not much about what was going on behind the scenes. The other interview linked on Wikipedia is from 2006, which doesn't do me much good in tracking them either. Hence why this writeup is a bit short on information, because there wasn't much I could find, and even most of their Wikipedia page doesn't have a lot of citations on it (much of it seems to stem from this https://www.pauseandplay.com/primitive-radio-gods-return-from-one-hit-wonder-land/ interview), while their official website doesn't give me a whole lot to work with other than the aforementioned downloads. So, yeah. This writeup was a bit boring compared to some of the last few, I'm afraid. Sorry.
So it's...
OVER TO THE PEANUT GALLERY
I've been downhearted, babe
DominoDancing (4): Long and boring. (Yeah, the song title's a bit much, I agree with you on that one.)
Filippa (6): There are some parts of the song I really like, but all in all it sounds somehow monotonous.
ModeRed (5): Shuffling beat I like, but not much else follows it.
Hudweiser (5): Nice vocals and piano interlude but otherwise zzzz.
saviodxl (5.9): What a long song title! (It's actually taken from a Bruce Cockburn song title, O'Connor only added the "standing". I don't know what it has to do with anything. - Ed.) Another alternative-rock with some urban elements. It worked for a while and I remember the video was played ad-nauseaum on MTV (at least MTV LA).
Empty Shoebox (3): I imagine it's the kind of song that you let 'wash over you', but that's never been the kind of thing that I like. Especially towards the end when the random noises start coming in. (I'll say this: it's not the best song in the rate for random noises. That comes later!)
iheartpoptarts (3): I’ll hold out for the follow-up 'Motherfucker'.
Primitive radio priests
chanex (8): WOWOWOWOWOW I had forgotten this pseudo jam! Undeniable now that I have rediscovered it! (Pseudo jams are my favourite kind of jams.)
4Roses (7): This makes me so emotional and I don't know why.
Ganache (8): Melancholy bop!
DJHazey (8.5): That "I've been downhearted baby" clip is so haunting and the song is suprisingly a nice chill listen. The "do-do-do" stuff is also very catchy. (The 90's, a good decade for catchy "do do do" songs. I WANT SOMETHING ELSE, TO GET ME etc.)
berserkboi (7.6): Strange, could potentially become something I like very much over time. (GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU GABBA GABBA ONE OF US)
AshleyKerwin (8): This is on a blogger I admire's creep playlist. (...Be right back, making a creep playlist.)
unnameable (7): I enjoyed the lyrics.
Blond (9): The production is so good and the sample at the beginning sounds like something I’d be into. I was initially going to give this a 7 but the more I listen to it, the more I love it.
əʊæ (9): Lovely sample. (B.B. King. Playing shows weeks before his death, in his nineties. What a legend.)
WowWowWowWow (9): I used to wonder if I had made this song up in my head, no one seemed to remember it, and yet here it is. Also, I’m not sure why I thought Dishwalla (the song before this one on the list, in chronological order) and PRG were Australian, but they in fact are very much not.
Auntie Beryl (8.1): Haven’t heard this for years, always liked it. Slightly weird that it was a hit anywhere though. They’re one-hit wonders principally because the follow-up was called Motherfucker. (Too bad Jonathan Daniel couldn't save them from walking into that one...)
Seventeen Days (10): Too bad the rest of this band’s output was garbage, because this song was a damned gem. This is some fantastic trip-hop-laced stuff right here. (Guess this band needed a rocket up their arses...)
pop3blow2 (10): The highlight of the pseudo-spiritual pop movement of 1996. (Indeed. -Ed.) This song just immediately clicked with me. Everything works. The lyrics, the low key chillout production, the sample. I especially love the noisy building fade out. To me, it just always symbolized that this little song from nowhere, was a real moment of clarity, but it doesn’t last... the noise of life just builds back up again at the end of the song. Masterpiece.
Andy French (10): Another one of my favorite ever songs! This rate keeps delivering. For real though, this is a transportative(? is that a word? it is now) experience for me every time I've gone back to it. It's so soothing and melancholy. (Internet searching says yes, "transportative" is a real word... but my spellcheck says no. Then again, it doesn't seem to recognise any word coined after the Carter administration, so who cares what it thinks?)
I'VE BEEN DOWNHEARTED BABE
43. STANDING OUTSIDE A BROKEN PHONE BOOTH WITH MONEY IN MY HAND
Average score: 6.000
Highest scores: 3 x 10 (@pop3blow2 , @Andy French , @Seventeen Days )
Lowest scores: 1 x 0 (@Daniel_O )
Chart positions: #10 Radio Songs, #7 Mainstream Top 40, #19 Adult Top 40, #1 Modern Rock, #32 Mainstream Rock
Year-End Hot 100: N/A
Who? Oh yeah, them...
And another alternative song bites the dust. But it's a fine example of one thing that we have seen surprisingly little of in this rate thus far: an artist who was a blatant one-hit wonder from the start, nothing to match their one hit. Poor old Primitive Radio Gods, eh? Unfortunately, this is another situation where I don't have all that much information to work with – not as little as DJ Kool, but not little enough that I can make an entertaining post out of my dives and attempts to recover information. Most of what I have comes from their Wikipedia page, but the actual source of most of that information isn't actually cited, so I can't track it back to the source and who even knows how true it is. Anyhow, let us attend to the song with the annoyingly long title. (Sorry, Primitive Radio Gods, but when it comes to the “giving things long titles” stakes, I think Fiona Apple's got you comprehensively beat.)
Pictured: a shrine to the primitive radio god.
The story of Primitive Radio Gods begins with the I-Rails, an indie rock trio from Oxnard, who released four albums independently, the first in 1987. None of them ever got any attention outside their local area, though. And to be honest, having had a quick skim of a selection of their material on YouTube, I can sort of see why. Not that it's terrible, precisely, it's just the sort of timid, lightly jangly indie pop-rock, that was a dime a dozen back in those halcyon days right after R.E.M. first broke it big and everyone was scrambling for a piece of that pie. When the masters were already at work, they were never in with a realistic chance of making it big, especially in those days before alternative rock totally became the mainstream. Frustrated with the lack of success they were having, the I-Rails split up in 1990. Afterwards, their frontman Chris O'Connor began recording the material he had written for their planned fifth album on his own, calling the album Rocket and giving himself the artist name of Primative [sic] Radio Gods (a song title from the third I-Rails album, 1989's Nine Songs from Nowhere – but it was spelled correctly on there). But nobody was biting, and a disgruntled O'Connor ended up leaving the music business and going back to his day job as an air traffic controller at LAX.
A movie with a shocking twist!!! (Somebody sell me to Jimmy Fallon.)
But then, O'Connor did end up coming to fame, by way of one of those marvellous instances of serendipity. One day in 1994, while he was cleaning out his house, he came across a box filled with copies of his old demo tape, and in a spur of the moment “why the hell not?” decision, he started mailing them out to every single major label he could think of. To hear him tell it, it was one final act of desperation before turning his back on music for good, and he hadn't expected them to get noticed at all. But a copy of Rocket made its way to New York and into the hands of Jonathan Daniel, an executive at the Polydor-affiliated Fiction Records. He found himself attracted to one song on the tape in particular, a strange little trip-hop number that heavily sampled B.B. King's 1964 recording of “How Blue Can You Get?”. On the strength of that one song, Daniel managed to negotiate a deal with Columbia for O'Connor (his band name now spelled correctly), who got “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth”, the song that had so impressed Daniel, a placement in The Cable Guy (one of the decade's most underrated works of black comedy, for the record, with Jim Carrey giving one of the performances of his career). Shortly after the film's release, a remastered version of Rocket came out, and by that time, the single was well on its way to becoming a huge radio hit. I do love when coincidences turn out well for people, don't you?
So what do I think?
8.5! Wow. You know, this was a song I didn't really know before this rate, but it turns out, I loved it. “Standing Outside” is a fantastic entry into the 90's trip-hop inflected chillout canon. The easygoing lope of the hip-hop beat is offset beautifully by the atmospheric layers of synths piled over it, so subtle and airy that they might almost seem like they're not there at first, yet they are constantly shifting and changing throughout the song's entire runtime. “Standing Outside” is fantastic with a good pair of headphones, as they let you really pick out all the little details that were layered into it, slowly swelling to an almost orchestral feel by the end, before giving way at the climax to roars of in-the-red fuzz guitar. And it comes with a great cascading piano solo to top it off, to boot. The looped B.B. King vocal sample is really cool too, a raw wail of pain that makes a striking contrast to Chris O'Connor's emotionally numb deadpan. And when Chris starts singing along to the “I've been downhearted, babe” at the end, it's a genuinely poignant moment, one that really puts the cryptic remainder of the rest of the lyrics in perspective and ties it all together as a fragmented yet moving representation of a broken relationship that overflows with bitterness and cynical philosophy. Not that any meaning matters too much, when this song is such a rich mine of imagery and sharply observed detail as it is (“you swim like lions through the crest and bathe yourself in zebra flesh” is one I particularly like). So, yeah, I think “Standing Outside” is a really great song. Seriously, this should be memorialized a lot more in the public memory than it is – killer.
Where Are They Now?™
As to why the Primitive Radio Gods didn't get another hit to follow “Standing Outside”, I can point to one major reason: it was the only really good song on the album and the rest of Rocket pretty much just sucks. If you were expecting more “Standing Outside”-style trip-hop, you won't get it, because the rest of it mostly consists of tired, generic and stunningly mediocre alternative rock with absolutely laughable, often preachy lyrics. There are a few more moments where O'Connor has a go with his sampler and tries to recapture the magic, but never very successfully, and never even really interestingly. This is the sound of a band who a) had had a bunch of demos sitting around for a while, such that they were old news by the time they came out, and b) were blatantly just dumped into the market by a label who realized they had one hit single on their hands and nothing else worth noting. So, even though Rocket went gold, the critical brickbats it got were totally unsurprising, including a 1.2 from the then-nascent Pitchfork. The thing that baffles me the most, I think, is the stylistic disparity at play. I can accept a band failing to make lightning strike twice in terms of quality between the one hit and the rest of the tracks on offer, but what I don't get is when they manage to hit on a genuinely creative and fresh sound for that one hit, and yet the rest of the album is absolutely nothing like it. How does that even happen?
About as much lift as the average rocket from Kerbal Space Program.
Also, hint: if you want a second hit, you may not want to release the song entitled “Motherfucker” as your second single.
None of that deterred O'Connor, though, who kept plowing on. He immediately started pulling a full lineup together, including both of the other former members of the I-Rails. It may shock you to learn that “Motherfucker” did not become a success, with mainstream radio barely touching it due to its title, and the band didn't even try with any further follow-ups. As I said, Rocket went gold, but the label quite blatantly wanted to be rid of Primitive Radio Gods as soon as they realized there was no follow-up single and they had nothing they could really promote. As soon as they began writing material for a second album, Columbia suddenly dropped them with no warning. Because Record Labels Are Dicks. Well, actually, no, that isn't always the case, because their own personal Jesus Jonathan Daniel stepped in again and got Primitive Radio Gods a deal with Sire Records. By 1999, their second album, which was to be called Mellotron On!, was ready for release in a few weeks... but then Sire and the US division of London Records underwent a merger, leaving Primitive Radio Gods lost in the shuffle and unable to negotiate a release for the album. Eventually, they got dropped again (Because Record Labels Are Dicks), and eventually managed to release their second album, re-titled White Hot Peach and consisting mostly of songs intended for the unreleased Mellotron On!, in 2000 on the small Boulder-based indie label What Are Records?. And who ran that label, you may ask? Of course, it was none other than the band's old friend Jonathan Daniel! Say this for the man, say he's loyal.
I couldn't find a picture of Primitive Radio Gods' biggest stan, so here's Jonathan Daniel Brown from Project X.
The thing is, I had a brief skim of White Hot Peach, and it's actually a big improvement over Rocket, showing the band growing more of an identity of their own and getting more experimental. If anything, “Standing Outside” would have fit in better on that album than it did on their first. But, of course, the musical uptick that they took did not mean an uptick in their commercial performance. They released a few more pieces of work through What Are Records?, the most notable being Fading Out, an EP containing the intended Mellotron On! songs that didn't make it to White Hot Peach. (They would later compile the originally intended version of that album and release it in 2003.) From then on, Primitive Radio Gods went totally independent. They've released four more albums and a live DVD, which were available through services like Napster and eMusic, and also through the band's own online mp3 store. So I guess you could say they were somewhat ahead of their time: I recall that Marillion adopted a crowdfunding model for their new albums a couple of years before that, but being an Internet-based independent artist to that degree, I think that was a pretty new thing in 2001, regarding that model. Plaudits to them for that, at least. Since the release of their most recent album, 2016's Manmade Sun, it's more or less been radio silence from these guys; they tend to take fairly long gaps between releases anyway, so who even knows what's up with them. But it seems like they can do OK for themselves under the Internet-based model, so there you go.
Now, O'Connor, according to a rare interview (with Songfacts in 2015), is quite reclusive and averse to publicity, which may go some way to explain why he never wanted to be a rock star in the first place, and why his method of keeping his head down led to the commercial doom of the Primitive Radio Gods. In the interview in question, he only really talks about his creation process, influences, method of making music and so on; not much about what was going on behind the scenes. The other interview linked on Wikipedia is from 2006, which doesn't do me much good in tracking them either. Hence why this writeup is a bit short on information, because there wasn't much I could find, and even most of their Wikipedia page doesn't have a lot of citations on it (much of it seems to stem from this https://www.pauseandplay.com/primitive-radio-gods-return-from-one-hit-wonder-land/ interview), while their official website doesn't give me a whole lot to work with other than the aforementioned downloads. So, yeah. This writeup was a bit boring compared to some of the last few, I'm afraid. Sorry.
So it's...
OVER TO THE PEANUT GALLERY
I've been downhearted, babe
DominoDancing (4): Long and boring. (Yeah, the song title's a bit much, I agree with you on that one.)
Filippa (6): There are some parts of the song I really like, but all in all it sounds somehow monotonous.
ModeRed (5): Shuffling beat I like, but not much else follows it.
Hudweiser (5): Nice vocals and piano interlude but otherwise zzzz.
saviodxl (5.9): What a long song title! (It's actually taken from a Bruce Cockburn song title, O'Connor only added the "standing". I don't know what it has to do with anything. - Ed.) Another alternative-rock with some urban elements. It worked for a while and I remember the video was played ad-nauseaum on MTV (at least MTV LA).
Empty Shoebox (3): I imagine it's the kind of song that you let 'wash over you', but that's never been the kind of thing that I like. Especially towards the end when the random noises start coming in. (I'll say this: it's not the best song in the rate for random noises. That comes later!)
iheartpoptarts (3): I’ll hold out for the follow-up 'Motherfucker'.
Primitive radio priests
chanex (8): WOWOWOWOWOW I had forgotten this pseudo jam! Undeniable now that I have rediscovered it! (Pseudo jams are my favourite kind of jams.)
4Roses (7): This makes me so emotional and I don't know why.
Ganache (8): Melancholy bop!
DJHazey (8.5): That "I've been downhearted baby" clip is so haunting and the song is suprisingly a nice chill listen. The "do-do-do" stuff is also very catchy. (The 90's, a good decade for catchy "do do do" songs. I WANT SOMETHING ELSE, TO GET ME etc.)
berserkboi (7.6): Strange, could potentially become something I like very much over time. (GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU GABBA GABBA ONE OF US)
AshleyKerwin (8): This is on a blogger I admire's creep playlist. (...Be right back, making a creep playlist.)
unnameable (7): I enjoyed the lyrics.
Blond (9): The production is so good and the sample at the beginning sounds like something I’d be into. I was initially going to give this a 7 but the more I listen to it, the more I love it.
əʊæ (9): Lovely sample. (B.B. King. Playing shows weeks before his death, in his nineties. What a legend.)
WowWowWowWow (9): I used to wonder if I had made this song up in my head, no one seemed to remember it, and yet here it is. Also, I’m not sure why I thought Dishwalla (the song before this one on the list, in chronological order) and PRG were Australian, but they in fact are very much not.
Auntie Beryl (8.1): Haven’t heard this for years, always liked it. Slightly weird that it was a hit anywhere though. They’re one-hit wonders principally because the follow-up was called Motherfucker. (Too bad Jonathan Daniel couldn't save them from walking into that one...)
Seventeen Days (10): Too bad the rest of this band’s output was garbage, because this song was a damned gem. This is some fantastic trip-hop-laced stuff right here. (Guess this band needed a rocket up their arses...)
pop3blow2 (10): The highlight of the pseudo-spiritual pop movement of 1996. (Indeed. -Ed.) This song just immediately clicked with me. Everything works. The lyrics, the low key chillout production, the sample. I especially love the noisy building fade out. To me, it just always symbolized that this little song from nowhere, was a real moment of clarity, but it doesn’t last... the noise of life just builds back up again at the end of the song. Masterpiece.
Andy French (10): Another one of my favorite ever songs! This rate keeps delivering. For real though, this is a transportative(? is that a word? it is now) experience for me every time I've gone back to it. It's so soothing and melancholy. (Internet searching says yes, "transportative" is a real word... but my spellcheck says no. Then again, it doesn't seem to recognise any word coined after the Carter administration, so who cares what it thinks?)
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he/him
@Daniel_O this is a hate crime
Well, isn't this some shit.
I really hoped thought this would at least make the top 20, so this might be one of the first major shocks to me in the rate so far. I've lost some other 9 & 10 songs I love, but figured they would be eliminated before the top 40, so I took those ok.
This song, though.... come on, now people!
I really
This song, though.... come on, now people!
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