One Album Wonders (Or, Whatever Happened To The Propellerheads?)

About five years ago, in one of my iTunes running diaries, I touched upon a British big beat techno band called The Propellerheads and lamented that they had never released a follow-up to their 1998 debut, Decksandrumsandrockandroll. Unfortunately, the band has still not come out with a proper follow-up.

Unlike some other bands, there isn’t a really good indication online for what the issue is. Since 1998, they’ve released one new song according to Wikipedia – “Ten Years (Johnston’s Strut Part One),” which was a single track for a compilation in 2003, and is so obscure it’s not even on YouTube. The band’s debut peaked at No. 6 in the UK, and went gold, so it’s odd that there was no second album. They’re one of the ultimate “you’ve heard them, even if you’ve never heard OF them,” thanks to their appearances on The Matrix soundtrack and other spy stuff. “History Repeating” with Shirley Bassey was their one U.S. radio hit.

This got me thinking about some other One Album Wonders (in contrast to One Hit Wonders) floating about in my iTunes collection. From that same blog post, there is New Radicals. Their front man, Gregg Alexander, was strongly anti-corporate and odd, and the band self-destructed as a result. They have one album, the wonderfully-named Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, and they’re best known for the earworm “You Get What You Give.”

The Postal Service was a side project of the guys from Death Cab for Cutie and other stuff. Unlike the first two bands mentioned, they actually did claim for years to be working on a second album to follow up Give Up. However, it never materialized between 2007 and 2012. The band then got back together for some shows in 2013, and disbanded again. How frustrating! (Also, this is somehow the first time I’ve written about The Postal Service, even though they were basically my soundtrack for sophomore to senior years of college. I was probably just burnt out on them for a couple years after…)

There is also the case of the Weezer side project Homie, which didn’t even get to one-album status. They had a single song, “American Girls,” that was awesome and on a movie soundtrack. (Meet The Deedles, a horrible Disney movie that attempted to hijack surf culture and starred Paul Walker.) “American Girls” is peak-Rivers Cuomo, and Homie also featured members of Cake and Soul Coughing. Apparently, there are live performance bootlegs out there, but I haven’t listened to them… yet. (One other “incredible soundtrack song” from the 1990s is “JAR” by Green Day, which was initially only available on the soundtrack for the otherwise forgettable Angus, but has since made its way on to some other Green Day releases.)

Get Dookie on your Wii

Another quickie entry tonight for work-related reasons, although I must admit to liking my entry title for this a lot...

According to Blast and my man Eddie, Green Day is set to have their own Rock Band installment in June. This is great news to me, as Green Day's Dookie was the first compact disc I ever personally bought with my own money. Eventually, that and Insomniac got so worn out that I had to replace them. Even though both are kind of short on length, I like this "quick burst" quality to them.

Like Eddie, I hope that they stick mostly older stuff on the game. While it is a given that the most popular singles will be represented - "When I Come Around" and "Basketcase" and "Time of Your Life" - I am hoping they manage to find some space for "J.A.R.", which was great but initially only available on the obscure soundtrack for the movie Angus that nobody saw. It remains my favorite Green Day single to this day.

The image of the band comes from the Blast article I linked above.

Snobbery

At a certain point, it became very cool to hate things that are popular. I have no idea when this started - I imagine that at some point, people were shitting all over Socrates, clowning him with remarks like, "My life is better unexamined and mysterious, gawd, loser." But in contemporary fashion, it seems to come up most often when discussing musical taste.

Specifically, I was at a party this weekend where some dude was all like, "Third Eye Blind sucks!" I took great offense, because I like Third Eye Blind, and also, it seems like a kind of random band to attribute sucking to. Are they Zeppelin? No, but they make pretty reasonable, popular music, which was this dude's main arguing point - that they're fine if you like popular music. At which point I rightly guessed that he liked Rancid, the Ramones and some other fringe punk band that's very popular with people who don't like popular music, but that for the life of me I can't remember right now. (I was drinking at the time, which helps certain parts of my memory.)

I can trace my firsthand experience with this type of "Popularity sucks!" attitude back to high school, when various factions of friends and acquaintances and not-friends would like and dislike a variety of music for reasons that had little to do with music. The list of the most maligned bands that I can remember probably isn't that surprising - Britney Spears, Eminem, N'Sync.

I also recall joining in without hesitation, but as a result, it meant I covered up my own embarassing musical tastes. For example, it was fine to like Ace of Base because it was ironically cool, but it wasn't cool to admit liking Billy Joel or Alanis Morrisette. The first CD I ever owned was Dookie by Green Day, which is certainly cool and acceptable, but the second was Jagged Little Pill, which isn't, and before Green Day I listened primarily to my relatives' copies of Billy Joel's greatest hits, the Counting Crows and the B-52s.

As I've grown up and matured (I think!), I've come to like my "uncool" musical roots. And, to detest music snobs. It's something I share with Chuck Klosterman, who angrily dismisses people who hate metal in Fargo Rock City. Billy Joel and Alanis are my metal, and as a result, I tend to be more willing to back bands without a lot of critical acclaim than others, I've noticed.

So with all of that as background - Third Eye Blind is fucking great. And I'd rather listen to them than Radiohead or Coldplay any day of the week.