But as unrealistic as those statements may be, consider this request from Swedish-American singer Eagle-Eye Cherry:

Save tonight
And fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow
Tomorrow I’ll be gone

This Billboard #5 hit comes on all earthy and sensual, like a badger yoga instructor, and then hits you with this doozy of an ultimatum: “Pause time,” says Eagle-Eye Cherry. “Find a way to postpone the dawn, and if you’re unsuccessful, I’ll leave you.” What kind of man would make such a request? Who would make their lover interrupt the fabric of space and time instead of just cancelling their trip? Worse, who would reward such behaviour with worldwide sales of more than four million?

Largely the UK, Sweden and France, as it turns out, although the United States deserves some of the blame as well.

Check the vid for this staple of the Woolworths Radio playlist:

The Save Tonight video

Sometimes when considering art it’s helpful to understand the artist’s motivations. Context can enrich and shed light on the meaning of lines like “There’s a log on the fire / And it burns like me for you.” So what kind of emotional place was Eagle-Eye Lanoo Cherry (LOL) in when he wrote Save Tonight?

Well, in 1995, his father, the legendary free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, died of hepatitis at age 58, so he packed his shit up and moved to Stockholm where he recorded Desireless, the album that featured Save Tonight. So whyfore Save Tonight? Actually, it’s still fairly unclear, since Eagle-Eye probably wasn’t burning like a log for his dad (or indeed referring to him as ‘girl’), and he moved to Sweden with his girlfriend – BLATANTLY NOT LEAVING HER BEHIND IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM.

What IS understandable is the way Save Tonight’s bland, generic heartbreak resonated with the record buying public. It became a massive hit in Sweden, so Eagle-Eye Cherry took it back to the US where it became a massive hit again, and he was named the face of black music in Sweden, despite actually being an American who’d lived there for less than two years! Holy career trajectory, Eagle-Eye!

In 2000, Eagle-Eye Cherry released his second album, Living In The Present Future, which featured this single, Are You Still Having Fun?

The Are You Still Having Fun video

The bio on Eagle-Eye’s MySpace page claims that Living In The Present Future repeated the success of Desireless, which is actually a straightforward lie – it sold fewer copies in all the countries that had bought Desireless except the US, where it didn’t sell at all. After it tanked, Eagle-Eye took some time off to “sort through a lot of stuff”.

That period of reflection apparently yielded a resolution to keep making beige, middling pop-rock, and in 2003, Eagle-Eye Cherry released Sub Rosa. It included a song called, This Paralysis, which someone has thoughtfully used as the soundtrack to this House fan video:

If you thought that was some shit-hot originality, SUCKED IN – you have the same brain thoughts as Eagle-Eye Cherry!1 Re: Sub Rosa, he said, “If you asked me on the first two records who I’d like to be compared to, I’d have said Neil Young or Tom Petty. But if you asked me the same question on this record, I’d have to say that I don’t know. That’s exciting. It’s almost like the first two albums were in mono and this one is in surround sound.”

You’d think that a musical talent so prodigiously original it transcended the definitions of ‘mono’ and ‘surround sound’ would never be without a new release. Actually, all Eagle-Eye’s put out since Sub Rosa is 2006’s Live And Kicking, a live album released exclusively in Brazil. Wikipedia promises a new Eagle-Eye Cherry album in late 2009 – but if it comes, we’ll probably have the new John Mayer album anyway. Thanks for the music, Eagle-Eye.

Cut my life into pieces
This is my last resort

Ever get so mad you feel like the only way to deal is to shred an abstract concept? Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix can relate.

Suffocation
No breathing
Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding

Ever get so confused about the verb “cut” you need to first define “suffocation” and then declare your nonchalance about the entire scenario? He can relate to that, too. Heck, look at the guy’s motivation.

When Papa Roach first got way more famous than they ever deserved with that song, Last Resort, and its accompanying album Infest, Mr Shaddix was using a different name. He called himself Coby Dick, and he claimed it was because he was a distant relative of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.

If that story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s how the King of Yuppie Electronica, AKA Richard Melville Hall, AKA Moby explains his moniker. Same story, but earlier. Which means dude got beaten to the punch by MOBY. It should be no surprise he had such a grudge against the world. Also, his name was Coby Fucking Dick.

Coby Dick, courtesy of AwkwardBoners.com

Still, there’s one thing Papa Roach got right in their abomination of a career. Like so few of their peers in nu-metal, they recognized it was a genre on the way out. 2002’s Lovehatetragedy, the follow-up to the monstrously successful Infest, featured only one track with rapping, and by the time album number three rolled around it was hammy, melodramatic singing all the way.

Time and Time Again was the lead single from 2004’s Getting Away With Murder, an album that the NME noted had probably been written in “purple ink in diaries with little locks on”. PRO TIP: that track is notable for the fact that if you take away all of the lyrical clichés and ProTools overproduction, you’re left with an acoustic recording of a young woman singing Kumbaya.

At the time, fans of the band criticized the album for its comparatively soft sound, which apparently wasn’t enough to stop them from buying 1.2 million fucking copies of the record and saving Coby Dick from the welfare queue for a little longer.

LOL.

As with so many other shit-average FM rock bands the US has churned out in recent years, Papa Roach’s career after their one big hit is kind of a mystery to us in Australia. Natch, this doesn’t mean they weren’t able to find plenty of suckers to buy their shit: in fact, after Getting Away With Murder went platinum, Papa Roach released The Paramour Sessions, which was recorded in a rural Californian mansion on Slipknot’s suggestion and sold nearly half a million copies. They toured with Guns ‘n Roses and Motley Crue, and were the subject of a string quartet tribute album called Perfect Murder: Strung Out on Papa Roach.

A string quartet album? What the fuck is the target market there, right? Actually, I’m not sure. But if you’re wondering where the hair-metal connection is, why, it’s with the misogynistic bombast on this track, Hollywood Whore, from their freshly-minted Metamorphosis album:

Without wanting to get all sanctimonious on you: it is a fucking travesty that that song is from an album that came out only three months ago. I’ll save you the pain of having to watch the whole thing yourself: it’s about a young woman of loose morals. She’s got no soul, she’s a white trash queen with a plastic smile, and Coby Dick would like to “kick her teeth in”. The track ends with Dick telling her “Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya, honey”.

There’s a lot of terrible bands on this blog, but not many of them are anything more than musically offensive. Papa Roach are, and they’re also the band who are the most successful post one-hit-wonder. So, if there’s one heavy-handed fucking moral those genre-bending, sexist jerks Papa Roach can teach us, it’s that musical trends will come and go, but foul-mouthed arseholes degrading women are forever.

Here’s the video for 3 Doors Down’s signature travesty, Kryptonite:

Dense, right? In case that song’s meaning escaped you, here’s 3 Doors Down frontman Brad Arnold explaining the sitch to SongFacts:

“That song, seems like it’s really just kind of like asking a question… It’s like, “If I go crazy, will you still call me Superman?” It’s asking, “If I’m down, will you still be there for me?” But at the same time, “If I’m alive and well, will you be there holding my hand?” That’s kind of asking, “If I’m doing good, will you be there for me?”

I hope you feel fucking enlightened.

Recently, there’s been a spate of resurrections of bands that you’d think would be satisfied with how much they’ve soiled popular music already. Creed: about to release a new album! Limp Bizkit: in the middle of a world tour! Not 3 Doors Down, though. To people who give a shit about music they might be just that band who released the Superman song a few years back, but to most of the red boxes in the below illustration, they’re a chart-busting superband whose last two albums steamrolled to the top of the Billboard 200.

WTF, right? If you’re questioning how a band who are nine years past their peak in a genre that’s seventeen years past IT’S peak can still go platinum: your query is reasonable. Basically, it’s like this:

Ooh, look! They’re playing at Tim’s Toyota Centre in Prescott, AZ! Such a great space! And Harrah’s Casino in Council Bluffs, IA – lemme tell you, the acoustics there are second to none!

You might also notice that they’re selling VIP packages to the show in The Woodland. And putting on a fanclub-only show in El Paso. And there’s the thing: 3 Doors Down earn their keep through endless tours of Bumfuck, USA. They’ve reached a critical mass where they can play a show just about anywhere and be sure to attract hordes of pickup truck enthusiasts and high school sweethearts desperate to break up the Coors Lites on a Saturday night with a rousing singalong, and if it’s to a song that was on the American Pie 2 soundtrack, so much the better.

OBLIGATORY BAND HISTORY: Formed in 1994 in Escatawpa, Mississippi; named in Foley, Alabama, when they saw a sign on a decrepit building that read “Doors Down” and added a ‘3’ to correspond with the number of people in the band; released their debut album, The Better Life, in 2000; it sold three million copies so they made another album, Away From The Sun (2002), which also did OK; then another one, Seventeen Days, in 2005; and another onkjhdgzsdkl;j8 wha?

They also started a charity called The Better Life Foundation (“we want to give to as many children as possible, the better life”) which raised a million dollars for shit that got ruined in Hurricane Katrina. I was hoping to say “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN” somewhere in this post, and now I can’t. Thanks for nothing.

That’s 3 Doors Down’s ode to the National Guard, featuring NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. How fucking USA is that?

According to their official website, 3 Doors Down are currently working on their fifth album, to be released Spring 2010. It’ll be recorded without original drummer Daniel Adair, who left the band  in 2005 to drum for Nickelback. DIVERSE. Fortunately, he was replaced in 2005 by Greg Upchurch, formerly of Puddle Of Mudd, who apparently answered a classified in the Clusterfuck Monthly.

FUCKING MINT. It’s a muscle car. Why is it a muscle car? I don’t know. There are no references to muscle cars in the song. There’s an amazingly shameless shill for Keds shoes and a completely unrealistic scenario involving a babe called “Noel” (traditionally a man’s name, but evs), who leaves her gun-totin’ boyfriend on prom night for singer Brendan B Brown, even throwing two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby, to sweeten the deal. But no cars. There’s also thunderous, Weezer-esque pop-punk riffery, the most annoying falsetto in the world and the phrase ‘teenage dirtbag’. Basically, it’s the best karaoke anthem ever. Get outta heah, Jon Bon Jovi.

But as much of a perfect storm of terrible as Teenage Dirtbag is, it doesn’t excuse the rest of Wheatus’ career, starting with their third single: a condescending, pointless ode to their roadie, Leroy. The song featured lyrical gems like “He’s got the dirtiest shoes that I ever seen / Chew on a blunt, wipe his butt with a magazine”, while the video was loaded up with slow-mo black and white footage of Leroy, um, being a roadie. I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING – “It’s probably contextual – Max is isolating lyrics to make the song seem more inane – there’s probably layers of meaning and metaphor that culminate in a poignant reflection of the band-roadie relationship.” Well, it’s not, I am, but there isn’t and it doesn’t. It’s also not very funny.

Wheatus was formed in 1995 by Brendan B. Brown, the cross-eyed one in the Bono glasses. They fucked around for four years before signing with Sony/Columbia, who released Teenage Dirtbag, their debut single, in 2000. It went to number 1 in Australia and Austria (clearly why Americans get the two countries confused), number 2 in the UK, Sweden and Germany and peaked at number 7 in the US. Here’s the thing I don’t get: around the time Leroy was released, Wheatus had a massive falling out with a Sony A&R rep who was trying to craft them in Gorillaz’ image, as if Wheatus were ever going to be anything but a one-hit wonder. WTF? Wheatus were vibin’ like a one-hit wonder like crazy. Nobody expected them to back up, and they never did, just like Alien Ant Farm. Remember Alien Ant Farm’s follow-up to Smooth Criminal? Of course you don’t.  They had the stench of death.

The only person aside from the A&R guy who didn’t realise this was Brendan B. Brown, who continued his random acts of punk rock defiance by refusing to lip-sync on Top Of The Pops. Sony responded by burying their second album, Hand Over Your Loved Ones, and dropping them from their roster. Burn.

Synopsis of the following seven years: Hand Over Your Loved Ones was re-released independently as Suck Fony; Wheatus’ third album, 2005’s TooSoonMonsoon, tanked without the help of a major label; in 2006 basically everyone except Brendan B. Brown quit the band; he recruited more people and toured the UK in 2007 with Bowling For Soup and Army of Freshmen, before late last year embarking on two projects of impressive offensiveness: firstly, the score to April Showers, a film about the Columbine massacre; and secondly, an EP series entitled “Pop Songs and Death” featuring this gem of a single:

See what they fucking did? THEY CHANGED IT FROM BLACK PRESIDENT TO BLACK PRECEDENT. Except, uh, I’m not sure if it counts as wordplay if the meaning of the phrase stays exactly the same.

The first EP in the series will be released in Apple Lossless, MP3, WMA, FLAC and Full Resolution Analog 1 bit DSD Super Audio Master format snore snore which makes me want to cry for humanity.

Calls to Wheatus’ label, Montauk Mantis, could not confirm or deny if Brendan B. Brown still wears those stupid fucking glasses.

Sugar Ray might not have slapped their bass guitars as hard as, say, The Rage Against The Machines or Incubus, but they took the pretty-boy appeal that Incubus’ Brandon “Shirtless” Boyd had going on and jocked it up with tatts, bucket hats and goatees. BOOM. Instant commercial appeal. How could they go wrong?

Actually, they started out using the name “The Shrinky Dinx”, so that was pretty fucking retarded. But then they changed their name to Sugar Ray and wrote a song called Fly which was so ingeniously inane (SAMPLE LYRIC: “Everywhere I go, people stop and they see / 25 years old / My mother god rest her soul.” Wut?) that it actually went to number one on the Billboard charts TWICE: from August 2 to September 20, 1997 (bookended by Matchbox 20’s Push and Smash Mouth’s Walkin’ on the Sun) and then from October 18 to November 22 (bookended by Foolish Games, by Jewel, and Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. What the fuck were you doing, 90s?).

The “Fly” video

Sugar Ray were so pumped with their own songwriting abilities that they included Fly twice on their 1997 album Floored. The single version included alleged reggae “artist” Super Cat shouting poetry over the top of the track, and I’m talking classical shit like “Like a birdie in the sky I’m so high / High high high high higher than a fly”. The radio edit didn’t. Frontman Mark McGrath explained that:

[Atlantic] figured that they might be releasing it to a pop radio station and this is sort of when you suck corporate cock- when they have ideas & they sort of stick to them. They thought that having the Reggae flavor on ‘Fly’ would turn off some Dubuque, Iowa pop station, so we have both versions available.

Remember, this was in 1997, before people had properly figured out that adding superfluous reggae guest stars to your white boy frat rock was the exact kind of music that cunts like to listen to.

After their follow-up single RPM tanked everyone thought Sugar Ray were the biggest one-hit wonders EVAH. They were wrong.

The “Every Morning” video

In 1999, Sugar Ray released Every Morning. It was so similar to Fly that most people thought it was the same song, and jumped at the chance to buy it in massive quantities again. It topped the Billboard Modern Rock charts for a month and a half before handing the throne over to the band’s follow-up single, Someday. Between them, the two tracks helped sell three million copies of Sugar Ray’s third album 14:59.

After that, shit got a little bit tough for Sugar Ray. Their next album, Sugar Ray, went gold in Canada but it was just the start of a long slide downhill. Its follow-up, In the Pursuit of Leisure, completely tanked, and in 2006 Atlantic Records released them from their contract. Mark McGrath was forced to seek work as an American Idol guest judge. He currently makes ends meet as the host of Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search For The Next Doll.

In May 2008, Sugar Ray announced on their MySpace blog they were working on a new album with Josh Abraham, an LA producer who will one day burn in hell for producing records for 30 Seconds to Mars, Velvet Revolver, Staind, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Static-X, Orgy and Crazy Town (seriously – can you believe the nerve of that motherfucker?) The album is due for release Summer ’09. Here is a photo from their blog of Mark McGrath in the studio with someone whom I can only assume is Josh Abraham:

REMEMBER HIS FACE, PEOPLE. You may one day need to kill him.

Straight outta Nassau, the Baha Men burst onto the scene in 2000 with breakout travesty Who Let The Dogs Out.

If nothing else, Who Let The Dogs Out proved that world music didn’t have to be bland shit that “open-minded” old people listened to; it could also be vulgar, hi-NRG trash that sounded a bunch like the Vengaboys.

Unfortunately, Who Let The Dogs Out didn’t prove nothing else. It also proved to the world that Australians don’t know shit about music, by taking out the number one spot on the Aria Top 40 charts THREE WEEKS RUNNING. That’s kind of like if the U.S. Government decided to junk the constitution and give George W. Bush a third term.

It maybe could have been kind of excusable if Who Let The Dogs Out was big news overseas as well. But it wasn’t. It achieved #1 in Australia alone. The closest it came elsewhere was in the UK, where it spent a week at #2. In the United States it topped at #40 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Post-Who Let The Dogs Out, things went a little quite for the Baha Men. Their 2001 album, 2 Zero 0-0, tanked. Actually, so did their 2002 album, Move It Like This, and 2004′s Holla!. In fact, if it wasn’t the support of the Disney Corporation, there’s very little chance that the Baha Men would have survived at all.

People talk a lot of smack about Walt Disney and how he was a jew-hating fascist. Whatever, the dude invented Minnie Mouse. What red-blooded American male wouldn’t invent that minx of a cartoon rodent given an animation studio and millions of dollars? What I can’t forgive him for is founding a company that would one day prop up the careers of the Baha Men by featuring their music in films and on compilation CDs.

Since 2000, their songs have appeared on the soundtracks to Shrek, The Little Vampire, Rugrats in Paris, Rat Race, Scooby-Doo, Garfield: The Movie and The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. They also appeared on three Disneymania compilations which, FYI, are a cash cow of epic proportions where they get Disney-friendly stars like Aaron Carter and the Jonas Brothers to record covers of songs from Disney movies. On 2001′s DisneyMania 1, they covered Hakuna Matata from the Lion King; in 2004, they recorded It’s A Small World for DisneyMania 2, and in 2006 they did some song from Lilo & Stitch no one gives a shit about for DisneyMania 4.

And that’s basically been it for the Baha Men. They’ve had this massively obnoxious image up on their official website since last year, and while they officially still have a recording contract with EMI records, it’s looking more like their 15 minutes is finally up.

The misspelling thing was their badge of pride, though. It started with the granddaddies, Korn, who took a humble cereal grain, added a K and flipped that R backwards. They passed on their Midas touch to Limp Bizkit, who sired the likes of Staind and Puddle of Mudd.

Cutest couple ever!

This tactic helped the already ridiculously popular rap-rockers bag extra fans. Those who weren’t drawn in by the fat-with-a-ph beats could dig the high Scrabble scores they racked up with letters like k and z dropping all over the joint*, or the fact that their out of touch, middle-aged parents thought they were listening to Corn and Limp Biscuit. (*FACT: the only time you can play a proper noun in Scrabble is when it’s the name of a nu-metal band.)

The “She Hates Me” video.

Possibly the sorriest of the bros that Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst hauled out of the trailer park is Wesley Scantlin. In 1993, Young Wes started Puddle of Mudd with some other dudes from Kansas City. They released two albums, Stuck and Abrasive, in between playing with every gross grunge band that came through town. Then, one fateful night on the 1998 Family Values tour, Wes Scantlin handed a copy of Abrasive to Limp Bizkit’s security guard, and he gave it to Fred Durst, and Fred Durst listened to it on his Walkman or some shit before calling Wes and telling him to ditch the band and move to LA, which he did, and recruited a new band to record Puddle of Mudd’s major label debut, Come Clean.

NOW YOU KNOW.

The “Blurry” video.

That album eventually sold five million copies. Sorry, that should have read FIVE MILLION FUCKING COPIES. The sales came mostly off the back of “Blurry” (2002) and “She Hates Me” (also 2002), and to quote Dr Tobias Funke, I don’t want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn’t help. Americans were in a bad place. They went running to the first Cobain-y redneck they heard. C’est la vie.

What it did was set Puddle of Mudd up for a fall. How do you follow up a record that sold five million copies? In 2003, Puddle of Mudd dropped their Kid A, Life On Display. It was a sprawlingly unambitious work; an epic of remarkable mediocrity, which even reviewers as tolerant to shit as Rolling Stone felt comfortable taking a shot at, saying “the predominant emotion transmitted by these tired, hookless tunes is a kind of skull-banging numbness.” It sold less than a tenth of Come Clean, and drummer Greg Upchurch intensified the burn by leaving to join 3 Doors Down. Ouch.

In 2007, Puddle of Mudd released Famous. Why they even bothered is a mystery until you check out where the singles from it charted: the 2007 single “Psycho” reached number 6 on Canada’s Billboard Hot 100, and in 2008, “We Don’t Have To Look Back Now” charted at number 32 in New Zealand’s Top 40. ATTN: Canada and New Zealand! Just because you dudes have an inferiority complex and weird accents it doesn’t mean you have to listen to the worst music in the entire world! That is completely overkill!

In a recent interview with Attitude TV, Wesley Scantlin  revealed that Puddle Of Mudd would be recording their sixth album THIS MONTH for a Summer 2009 release. GET EXCITED.

Why do you want people to know this, Richard Blankenship?

In case you haven’t listened to commercial rock radio lately, “Lullabye” was the falsettoid abortion that Shawn Mullins hit paydirt with in 1999:

The “Lullabye” video.

Basically, it’s a song about some Hollywood brat with rich parents who gets a little bummed about the “devils in this angel town” snore snore. Big fucking deal, right? Living in Los Angeles and having too much money is an easy fix. It even gets you out of jail.

Then you take a closer listen to the lyrics at the start of the song and, oh man, it’s like the rabbit hole opens right up:

“She grew up with the children of the stars
In the Hollywood Hills and the boulevard
Her parents threw big parties
Everyone was there
They hung out with folks like
Dennis Hopper, Bob Seeger, Sonny and Cher”

WHAT THE FUCK? What kind of parents let their kid hang out with Dennis Hopper and Cher? Suddenly, “Lullabye” is the tragic story of systemic child abuse. Don’t even think about the fact that this poor woman is having to deal with some cornball beardy (i.e. Shawn Mullins) singing “Everything’s gonna be alright. Rockabye.” at her. It’s too depressing. And certainly don’t ever try to comfort anyone by saying “Everything’s gonna be alright. Rockabye.” to them. That line is way less soothing than you might think.

Unsurprisingly, Shawn Mullins’ career took a dive after “Lullabye”. He managed to get his follow-up single, “Shimmer”, on the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack album. In 2002 he formed a soft-rock supergroup with Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge, called The Thorns, and in 2004 he played benefit concerts for US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on the campaign trail.

This is actually kind of amazingly fitting, since Matthew Sweet is to dad-rock what John Kerry was to the presidency, or Dawson’s Creek was to teen dramas – kind of well-known, but never really interesting enough for anyone to really give a shit about.

The “Beautiful Wreck” video.

In 2008, the Australian Olympic Team humiliated the entire country by choking in Beijing, and even worse, doing it to the tune of Shawn Mullins’ “Shimmer”, which it chose as its official anthem. It was a bad year for Shawn Mullins: aside from soundtracking the disgrace of a continent, he accidentally named his 10th (?!) studio album, Honeydew, after the bland filler fruit that plagues lovers of fruit salad everywhere. OOPS.

Finally, Shawn Mullins’ MySpace Bio says he is an “active observer of life and translates life into song. “ He can be seen below, observing life.

To get just a little bit poetic, Barenaked Ladies had their roots in crap, were fertilised with a nutritious crap formula and grew into a mighty crap maple tree in 1998, before wilting into a gnarled and decomposing crap shrub from 1999 onwards. They’re the band responsible for the empirically-verified worst rhyming couplet of all time: “Chickity china the Chinese chicken / You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin’.”

FYI, One Week, the Barenaked Ladies’ zany tale of relationship woes which spent a coincidental one week at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998, also contains the whitest rhyme ever: “Hot like wasabe when I bust rhymes / Big like Leann Rimes / Because I’m all about value.”

It was taken from their eighth album, Stunt, released ten years after singer Ed Robertson and guitarist Steven Page hung out at a Bob Dylan concert in 1988. They decided that they had better things to do, like come up with band names, since the concert was “lame” and “horrible”. In literature, this would be described as ‘foreshadowing’. The gold they came up with was “Barenaked Ladies”, which OBVIOUSLY didn’t warrant them never speaking of it again.

Their first single, Be My Yoko Ono, was released in 1992 and turned out to be a massive hit in Canada. As if they hadn’t already done enough damage, they used the coin they made from it to finance their first album, Gordon.

In case I need to spell this out for you, their popularity in CANADA, where they are from, earned them enough CANADIAN DOLLARS to record more music. The blame falls squarely with you, Canucks.

According to the band’s official biography, the second single from Gordon, entitled “If I Had $1000000″, inspired a tradition of fans bringing pre-cooked Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to their live shows to throw at other fans, which is firstly WTF? and secondly the worst thing that could happen to you at a gig due to glugginess levels as well as off-the-scale amounts of forced quirk. Gross.

In 1998, Stunt was released and sold four million copies in the United States. This is understandable, since the US is 10% angry, bagel-eating New Yawkers, 10% LA starlets and 80% frat boys, and starlets and frat boys both like white boy rap. Those records were basically sold off the back of One Week, since the other singles from the album, Alcohol, It’s All Been Done and Call & Answer tanked (except in Canada, where they all made the top 10). Fun fact: Wikipedia says that “As with each of their early albums, the band recorded one song, “Alcohol”, completely naked.” Fucking G-R-O-S-S.

In 2003, Barenaked Ladies contract with major label Reprise Records expired and they chose not to renew it, instead going to Canadian indie label Desperation Records. Recently, they played on the Canadian leg of Live Earth, started an environmental organisation called Barenaked Earth, got certified carbon neutral, released a children’s album called Snacktime! (which included a track featuring celebrities talking about their favourite snacks. FYI, Janeane Garofalo likes microwaved chocolate donuts, while Jason Priestley prefers macaroni & cheese) and held four fan cruises called ‘Ships and Dip’. Also, singer Steven Page got busted for cocaine.

If you feel like being whined to death, you could check out the 5th Ships and Dip cruise, which is sailing from Miami on the 1st of February and also features Sarah McLachlan, Sloan and the Mountain Goats. Please buy me a Barenaked Earth t-shirt if you do.

Anyway, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is a one-hit wonder. There’s certain criteria that have to be filled in order to fit the description of a one-hit wonder, and the most important is how annoying the big song is. Other factors, like whether the band had more than one hit, aren’t that important.

For example, observe Blessid Union of Souls. They sold nearly two million albums off the back of “Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)”, which was annoying on so many levels it was basically a Sistine Chapel of Please-Turn-This-Fucking-Bullshit-Off. It had heaps of super specific pop culture references, like ‘She likes me for me/Not because I look like Tyson Beckford’, at which point I need to point out that Tyson Beckford is massively weird looking. There was also the line about his collection of DVDs, which is pretty LOL because those motherfuckers never saw Blu-Ray coming.

Anyway, if you find those 90s references endearing, you probably haven’t nearly killed yourself wondering what “And I’m so glad I found her once again” means.

The point is that despite being one of those bands that drunk people start saying shit like ‘OMFG! What happened to that band?!?’, Blessid Union of Souls aren’t technically a one-hit wonder because of “I Believe”, their MOR classic from 1995.

Eliot Sloan wrote it when a bitch’s dad made her stop dating him. If you can’t be bothered watching the video, it’s kind of exactly like “Where Is The Love” by the Blackeyed Peas only shittier and more Christian. In an interview with the Celebrity Café, he explained that:

“Well, it’s like… when we did that song, we were just like… there were so many things going on in society. We just wanted to do something positive. We just wanted to touch on a lot of points that society seems to be having a little trouble with as a whole. Racism was one of the things we wanted to distil in the song.”

Dude! Do not distil racism! You are going to get people drunk on pure intolerance and then imagine the hangover they are going to have!

In 2000, BUOS went on hiatus from recording, only releasing one record between then and 2005, a compilation misleadingly titled Blessid Union of Souls: The Singles. Some people thought it was a dick move that several of the songs were just remixes and live recordings of other songs on the record, but they failed to take into account that SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

Blessid Union of Souls released their surprise comeback album, Perception, in late 2005. They then spent three years figuring out how to stiff the few remaining fans they had, finally deciding on a strategy of making them pay more for old songs. Close To The Edge came out in September last year, and Wikipedia notes that “Some fans were disappointed by the album, because eight of its twelve tracks were taken from their previous album, Perception.” Touche, dudes.