THE REMBRANDTS

I don’t walk around handing out titles like 90s-est.Band.Ever willy nilly. It’s a big call, and I’d worry about waking up to a spurned Rob Thomas crouched at the end of my bed licking my toes (seriously, could his face be any more rapey?). But we live in an exciting age of digital convergence, where multimedia crossover is of extreme importance, and that’s why I feel confident in handing the title to Los Angeles’ The Rembrandts. There’s ubiquity, and then there’s the ubiquity that only comes with a sitcom tie-in.

Not Ian Thorpe and David Spade.

TONIC

Never trust people who say there’s “no such thing as bad music”. They’re hippies and they’re full of shit. Bad music is real and it’s everywhere. That is no doubt a dubious attribute – I’m fairly sure Mix 106.5 is never going to retire the Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis cover of “Cruisin’”, and I’m not happy about the flashbacks to 14-year-old me I get when I hear it. If getting a nostalgic hit of Wheatus or the Barenaked Ladies makes your day, though, it’s a mad cheap thrill. No specialist record stores, laborious eBay bidding wars or hours of record browsing required. All you have to do is walk into your local Sanity and cast your eyes around the room and if you’re feeling charitable, observe a moment’s silence for all the faces in the room who are now flipping burgers.

One particularly epic fail (24-foot failboat) of the last fifteen years is Tonic. Tonic were three super hot young dudes who recorded the most-played rock song on radio in 1997. You couldn’t go anywhere near a speaker without getting an earful of “IF YA COULD OWNLEH SEE THE WAY…” Their story is basically the Marie Celeste of 90s post-grunge guitar rock. They could have been the next Nickelback! Or the previous Nickelback! (I’m not sure how the chronology works there!) Instead, they stuck it out for two more albums after post-Lemon Parade, licensed If You Could Only See to Australian Idol’s Dean Geyer, and vanished.

CRAZY TOWN

It’s hard to think of a band more suited than Crazy Town for my first post on this blog.

Remember Crazy Town? They were the LA jocks who ruled the Billboard Hot 100 for three golden weeks in 2001 with a little slice of awful called “Butterfly”. It sampled the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Pretty Little Ditty”, its chorus made Fred Durst look like a poet (“Come my lady/Come come my lady/You my butterfly/Sugar baby”), and, incidentally, it was basically everything that was wrong about music from about 1999 onwards.