If you listen to this song like you have never heard if before you might not hate it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIyJ9gl16No
Or maybe you still will.
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I tried listening with new ears, just to this performance, without thinking about what I know of how this sounds or how much audio wallpaper it may have been in my life.
It's much worse than I would have imagined.
Echoey guitar thing: Okay, SY-like feedbacky thing. Then it dies.
"What, What", Counting out, etc. These guys are going to be annoyingly British, aren't they?
Then the guy in the Sen-Dog bucket hat starts singing and he is annoyingly British. He sounds like Thom Yorke gone pop.
Did he say "Purple Mercedes Benz"? He just wants in with the Dipset.
They must be a studio band, buckethead doesn't seem to want to make this a performance, just keeping it at "recital". Here, this is our song, we are performing it, live, in front of an audience.
OK, first chorus. "You got the music in you." This must be some anthem affirming disaffected teenage youth, or perhaps if I dig deeper, a skewering of such an anthem in the guise of an anthem, where, like the Boss's "Born in the USA", the song is guaranteeing itself misuse. I hope that's it, the skewering, but I doubt I'll have caught enough of the verses' lyrics to know for sure.
Or that song "We were only Freshman." That was the same way, I think. Eh, I don't care enough to go back and figure that out for sure. I think that was on the radio at the same time that this was, but I'm trying to forget what I know about this song.
Or maybe I don't want the irony. That's almost the easy way out, isn't it? Through the ironic distance, writers don't actually have to be for or stand for anything. No one's actually making non-ironic songs affirming our disaffected youth unless Billy Corgan's still working it. I haven't check in on him in a while, but he's probably still doing it. He'll probably be non-ironically affirming teenage angst when he's making solo acoustic records in Rick Rubin's livingroom 40-plus years down the line.
Korn worked that too, who knows where they are now. Limp Bizkit had the same sound as Korn but were so very ironic with their George Michael covers. Korn's music came from the anger of the picked-upon, beat-up loser. Jonathan Davis actually cried on record. Limp Bizkit was the sound of the bullying jock, picking on the loser that Korn represented. Why then did Korn help promote Limp Bizkit? "Here's music that sounds a lot like us, but its for the pricks our fans are afraid of and have revenge fantasies about." I bet it was because Fred Durst was gonna beat up Davis and sleep with the girl he liked if his band didn't have Limp Bizkit open for two consecutive tours. That or they were both on the same label.
Crap, back to the New Radicals...
I strongly dislike this keyboardist/backup singer. Probably the plucked eyebrows.
I'm not convinced that Sen-Dog is not actually Billy Corgan. Well, except for the voice and letting others play their instruments.
Falsetto/screaming muppet voice at 2:15 is not flattering your song, fake Corgan.
And whatever off-singing from there to the chorus is worse. I take it back, you're not not just reciting the studio version. But that doesn't automatically mean that your live version is better than a recital. [This is where I turned it off the first time, until I re-read Hitman's challenge.]
The rapped verse doesn't do much for me, either (other than annoy). I wish I could make out more of the words (perhaps only to mock), but I did hear "Richard Branson" rhymed with "Shirley Manson." I guess that's better than going with Shirley's sister Marilyn.
("Richard Branson" was a pretty obscure reference in the US whenever this song came out, right? Or did I just learn of him late?)
Then the guitar starts doing something cool, only to have the song trash-can to an (early?) ending.
Overall...
I give it a "3"
Positives: for not introducing me to a horrible once-forgotten earworm, and making me think more favorably of Billy Corgan.
Negatives: more guitar? Nothing that makes me want to listen to that song, or anything from that band on purpose. (But not that I'd feel a need to change the station, I guess that sense of wallpaper was appropriate.)
I checked the release date (Nov 1998 or March 1999). When thinking of British pop-rock of the 90s, I like to compare things to what Primal Scream was doing at the time. Having released this, they were recording this. Primal Scream wins this round.
Also, while looking up the release date, I read the Wikipedia pages for both the band and the single. I'll just say that my assumptions were off about a lot of things.
Korn is teaming with brostep dude Skrillex to make some sort of unholy amalgam of dubstep, rap, and alt metal. It's going about as well as one would expect.
I sort of disagree with you re: this song, but then again, I never hated it. This performance didn't give me anything particularly new to think about, but even then, it's a solid song that probably deserved "one hit wonder" status (and I mean that in the best possible way... gotta have that first hit to be a one hit wonder, after all).
I was gonna say that Korn sounds no different than when I listened to them.
But then the first half of the chorus sounds so MOR, probably just to offset the F-word in the second part of the chorus.
Just realized that Korn is like Linkin Park but one vocalist does both parts.
But overall, that's 98% what I expected a Skrillex remix of Korn to sound like, based on hearing three Skrillex songs (who owes a lot to the Aphex Twin and Squarepusher), and very little Korn since 1998.
FWIW, I was really impressed with Korn's debut, thought Life Is Peachy sounded like the finished tracks from the Korn sessions that weren't good enough to make that album (plus the Ice Cube cover, which I felt b/c I thought it was the best song on the Predator [Note to self: import CD of The Predator to iTunes to validate this, perhaps "We Had to Tear This..." is better]). Despite a pointless appearance from the Pharcyde's Tre and 12 opening tracks of silence (why 12?), I thought Follow the Leader was their best, but also the culmination of what they were going for. I quickly got bored with it and moved on. I was quite surprised about a year later to find out that the band had been the darling of TRL from about the last time I played the disc for myself. I had no idea how that happened.
I have a Korn t-shirt with "Rev 105" on the back. The radio station handed them out to the line at the First Ave show on the first Korn/Limp Bizkit tour. (They were on different labels. Durst probably had naked pictures of Davis's mom.)
I take a lot of crap from some of my younger co-workers, but I still have Korn on my iPod. I would add Untouchables (their 5th) to the list of worthwhile Korn albums (presupposing that you're open to the idea of a worthwhile Korn album). The percentage of good songs to filler tips over 50% on that one, something that I'm not sure any of their other albums (save their debut) can boast.
After that Brian Welch left the band and I haven't given their last few albums much of a chance.
Korn?
😉
If I knew AMR was going to put this much work into an LTE I would have put much more work into choosing a video for today.
As for everything AMR has to say, well, I don't know that I can really disagree with much. I would say that as far as teenage anthems go, this fit the bill. To be fair, I don't know that I would go as for as youtube user strertchcity
Yeah, that isn't quite right.
I would go a little higher than a 3 but I can't get down on someone for viewing it as such.
Just hit me at the right time: away from the computer all weekend, but just a bit too caffinated to go to bed yet.
Freshman was on the radio in fall 1996 and spring 1997 because I was a freshman in HS at the time.
OK, I was a freshman at Augsburg.
Richard Branson has been on the scene for many years. I remember him from the '80s/'90s with his hot air balloon record attempts.
As I looked it up on wikipedia when the song was released, the primary lyrics were:
"Beck and Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson." So he made the lyrics more British for Jay Leno?
Also, guy's not British.
Don't think I've ever spent that much time analyzing a song before. I don't really disagree with anything in it, but I tend to save my exhaustive analysis for things that last longer than four minutes (that what she said...awww yeah)
I gave it a four. I still think the song is okay, but this live version just sounds awful.
I remember enjoying this song quite a bit my freshman year of college. I even remember thinking how "cool" it was for him to insult Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. Now I find that this song was supposed to be deeper and those references were throw-away celebrity press baiting lines for the media & pop-culture. No wonder this was their only single. You can't write a catchy pop tune for pop radio with pop lyrics interspersed with political themes and expect stupid teenagers from suburbia and small-town U.S.A. to pick out politics as the point of the song. Now I feel a bit disenfranchised and stupid...
Then again, I do remember enjoying this song and I didn't hate it upon review. I'll give it a 6.
ug. i couldn't stand this song when it came out (aided by the fact that cities 97, to which i was a captive audience, played it over and over again). i'll try and give this an objective listen when i get home.
nope. still don't like it (and yeah, that was a pretty awful performance to boot).