 Live Many long days ago, in the days before my nightly tequila benders turned my brain into mush, there was something wonderful, something fresh and exciting, and it was called alternative music. In the late eighties and early nineties, when people in my general age group began leaving high school for college, an earnest backlash had begun against the slick, mass-produced sounds that were passing for popular music. I won't get into a debate over who "started it all," but bands like The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and They Might Be Giants came along to demonstrate that music could be about things other than not worrying/being happy, getting lost in someone's eyes, and hanging tough. This was the vanguard, and soon more alternative bands arrived to take a piss in the mainstream and do whatever the hell they wanted. And increasingly, they began to overtake the silly pop acts. Once it was clear that alternative music was not going to silently and unceremoniously die off, the inevitable happened. In stepped the record companies, and the term "alternative music" was rendered oxymoronic – it became the mainstream. Record companies began to sign "alternative" acts by the Cuban boatload, and suddenly it seemed any mopey teenager with a goatee and some sour grapes could get a record contract. "What's that – you've got fourteen songs about your girlfriend dumping you? Sign here." Radio stations began springing up overnight, flooding the airwaves with the new so-called "modern rock." Initially, we true believers had faith that good would come of it, but soon enough reality set in: "alternative" became as annoying and plastic, if not moreso, than what it had originally rose up to oppose. Perhaps no band reflects this reality more clearly than Live, and specifically Throwing Copper. The hideous truth about modern rock radio was that once a song became a bona fide hit, it was to immediately be placed into ultra-heavy rotation, assuring that you would hear it at least 438 times a day. For awhile, you couldn't swing a dead cat over your head without hitting a radio wave that had a song from Throwing Copper riding on it. The first of the gaggle of singles to come off this disc was "Selling The Drama," which is a piece of crap of a song that's apparently about a public speaker of incredible power and charisma, no doubt written by preening egomaniac lead singer Ed Kowalczyk with himself in mind. Played on the radio approximately 1,457,972,019 times since its release, this song probably totaled six seconds of audibility on my radio before succumbing to my trademark QuikChange™. The video was also crap, but is notable because it's the only video from the CD in which pretentious bastard lead singer Ed Kowalczyk appears with his long hair and eyeglasses. As for the order of the rest of the singles, I'm a bit fuzzy, but who the F cares? They all suck like an Electrolux. "I Alone" is another of Ed's odes to himself. "I alone tempt you!" he squalls in the chorus. Tempt me to consider first degree murder, maybe. He appears in this video sans glasses, and with his newly shaved head, which he shaved mere days after another pretentious bastard, Michael Stipe, did the same thing. Not that I'm defending Stipe, but at least he turned out some good music once upon a time (though that time is getting hazier and hazier to recall). Kowalczyk can't say that much for himself, and what's more, he ended up looking embarrassingly like Andre Agassi. "Lightning Crashes" is supposed to be an emotional song about a mother who dies during childbirth. I say it was really the result of a drunken bet between pompous ass Ed Kowalczyk and the other band members. "Hey, Ed, you fuckin' @$$hole … betchoo can't write a song with the word 'placenta' in it." "Watch me, you miserable peons," he declared, and went ahead and did it. The last of the singles, "All Over You," has maybe the worst metaphor in music history: "Our love is like water/Being down and abused for being strange" … um, so water is strange, and therefore abused? Ed, you're a fuckin' poet. The remaining tracks are just as preening as the singles; in some cases, even worse. Two of the more reprehensible tracks are "Shit Towne," an diatribe against the band's small home town of York, Pennsylvania, and "Waitress." A sample line from "Shit Towne": "The Weavers live up the street from me/The crackheads live down the street from me/The tall grass makes it hard to see/Past my property." If he wrote these lyrics any later than age 13, I'd be extremely surprised. "Waitress" is even more intolerable, delivering a stern lecture about being more tolerant of the bitchy waitress who served our dinner because she is working a job she hates to feed herself and her family. Ed tells us we should leave some money regardless, since we can afford it, and she "needs to buy aspirin for her pain."Frankly, the subject was dealt with more insightfully by Donna Summer. The rest of the disc is crap upon crap upon crap, a steaming pile, a festering sore on the face of music, et cetera. I think it avoids being, as I've said of other albums, "hideous excrement," merely because there is at least a half a pint of musical ability present in the band. They're "tight," OK? That's as much of a compliment as any band that has a lead singer with such a ridiculously overinflated self-image will ever get from me. This is a band and a CD that have no business moving 400 gazillion copies or however many it did. When bands like this hit it major big, I just have to shake my head, crack a pained smile, and just hope that maybe everyone isn't as staggeringly stupid as I think they are.
Review by Mario Speedwagon |
