WATCH Magazine - Winter Issue '99
It's the End Of the World As We Know It... and New Radicals are going to kick your a$$!?!
"Just when you thought songs with great melodies, gut-wrenching hooks, and an edge to cut your teeth on had disappeared, along comes New Radicals to kick your A$$!"
So reads the tag-line on the advertisement promoting the debut release by virgin pop group New Radicals.
Now really: you've gotta be careful when you threaten to be that cool. The last pop personatity to promise that kind of legitimacy was MC Hammer, and as memory serves, he was definitely NOT too legit to quit.
Does the tag-line make the potential listener want to check out the radicals? Sort of. Does it sound interesting? Sure. But what's more interesting is the album title itself: Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too. Not to mention the fact that the guy sitting in the lotus position on the album cover is ovscuring his eyes with his Huner S. Thompson-wannabe hat. Not the mention the fact that the guy has a bar-code on his hand. Not to mention the fact that he's the frontman of the band.
Meet Gregg Alexander: 28-year-old wunderkind, mastermind, and according to his managers, maga-find. Ignore the guy's age: New Radicals is the second (singed) act that Alexander has led. So what's the story, born-again glory? Who are these "NEW: radicals, are they mocking society or themselves, is there a secondary agenda, why should we care, and CAN they kick our A$$?
Sitting on his A$$ in sunny California, Alexander's ready to use the phone the same way he's been using his album: as a weapon. "The immediate New Radicals reference is to just this last generation born into the end of the millennium and all the insanity that's going on, several decades into the computer age and the whole technological age, and how information has gotten to a place," Alexander spits out at machine gun speed. "[It's about] information, the media pontificating on everything and overanalyzing it ten seconds after it happens to the point that it's invalid right away. [It's about] the way culture runs these days. It's about people hopefully having a backlash about that, people being more cynical about it."
Traditionally, radicalism is best known as a political approach to life. Among the most (in)famous radicals are French Revolution-leader Robespierre and American independence-declarer Thomas Jefferson. But radicalism can be social, too. So can brainwashing. So can music...
"Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too is a more subersive record than anything out there right now," maintains Alexander, "but it's emotional currency is melodies and lyrics that, hopefully, will uplift people's spirits and make them feel a lighter step in their walk and make them have a different mood over the course of 45 minutes."
True enough the subversion to which Alexander refers abounds on the album. On "Mother, We just Can't Get Enough," he derides the horrible conditions of social security, the banks and the phone company all in a total of four lines. One song later ("You Get What You Give") and he's laying witness to the demise of health insurance, the FDA, big bankers, fashion mags, celebrities, the rich and other topics that "no one with a brain is believing." New Radicalism also touches on drugs ("I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending"), the hypocrisy of non-conformists ("Jehovah Made This Whole Joint For You") and a whole host of problems with the world, from sexism to politics to investgative reporting (on the title track, centerpiece song "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too" especially). And, just like the best most effective subversion, it comes in a mighty enjoyable package.
Hot current single "You Get What You Give" is a textbook perfect pop song. Of it, Alexander explains: "Theres a feeling in America, and maybe Canada as well, that mankind is infallible even though all these horrible thing have happend in the last 50 years, [yet] everything always seems to pull through." It's a happy song that predicts a positive view for the f u t u r e.
Or is it? Alexander can't resist the idea of injecting a little bit of his cynical New World Order millennial angst. The song ends on a sour not, attacking health insurance scandals, fake computer crashes, cloning, and fake rock stars. In the last category, Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson all get mention. Whether it's simply because the name pairings rhyme or not is unknown, and Alexander won't say. He doesn't like specifics when it come to one-on-one conversation. But that's fine: his generalization is entertaining on it's own. "Everything seems to pull through," he continues. "On the other hand, we seem to to be oblivious to the fact that over the history of mankind, the s*** invariably hits the fan." Isn't this happy/sad double-take a contradiction?
Alexander disagrees: "The music is celebratory, but with the album lyrically, there's something brewing underneath the kettle." Or to put it another way, it's like "hitting the gas as the car speeds off the cliff," he says.
Even some of the love numbers, such as "Mother, We Just Can't Get Enoguh," offer constant references to all things millennial (and therefore apocalyptic) such as the need for social security numbers and credit cards to make even a simple phone call. By definition, they are those things that our present generation is beginning to accept in commonplace terms (as well as consider to be conspriacy-related) as we approach the end of the millennium.
"You Get What You Give" touches on some of these topics (as noted above). Particularly interesting is Alexander's accusation in regards to "Fake computer crashes." Does he think that the Year 2000 bug (a.k.a. the Y2K bug) is a hoax? Much of the technological world certainly believes that when the clock turns over, computers around the globe are going to be disabled, possible down for good.
"Potentially all those things could happen," he admits. "[If so,] then everybody's just gonna accept what happens because we've all been trained in this society to accept whatever cards we're dealt. Everybody's just gonna accept whatever the person the news channel tell them to believe."
Which, as Oliver Stone knows, isn't always the truth. And somehow, one gets the feeling that Alexander has a stash of cash and canned goods hidden in a sub-basement somewhere.
"It's hysterical that everybody's bought into the whole computer crash," he laughs. "It's just another example of everybody just taking what we're given to eat. It's perverse how computers in 20 years have gone from being what the nerds in high school were into and all of a sudden now, if you're not up on it, you're gonna lose big time. How it ties into the millennium: the number [2000] is just a big turning point psychologically in the history of mankind. That's all."
We'll just have to wait and see. As the saying goes: time will tell. It isn't only Alexander's lyrics that focus on this fear of self-destruction through ignorance in modern society. Throughout the CD's inlay card, Alexander is portrayed numerous times with barcodes on his skin in various places. The commodity-driven symbolism is obvious. But Alexander's message is deeper: he's riffing off the fact that religious tracts currently being handed out on the streets of major urban centre detail the use of barcodes on hands and foreheads as a modern-day "mark of the beast," setting the stage for the Apocalypse detailed in Revelations. Secular circles draw the line back to the government and the fear of a New World Order that would be able to track all individuals, not so much a physical end of the world as an end of indiviuality, and therefore a spiritual apocalypse.
"We're all going to essentially be a barcode," Alexander states. "We are already. We may have barcodes physically on our person in fifteen years. And as outragous as it sounds right now, if there was a good enough reason concocted by the media, everybody would buy into it."
Clearly, this man believes in government conspiracy, or at the very least watches The X-Files.
"People can draw their own conclusions," he says, skirting the question. "People need to start drawing their own conclusions and talking to everybody a lot, because the big secret weapon that people in our society underestimate is the ability of change from talking on a regular basis. I'm certainly not in the loop enough to know exactly what's going down in situation A, B and C, but I could say there's enough word of mouth and enough precedence of what man has been capable of over the history of mankind to say, maybe all's not well in the world of people being able to have health insurance or get a good education or any of the injustices that, for one reason or another, pervade society and are allowed to fester the way they do."
So when you're ut there dancing your A$$ off to New Radicals, remember that the true message behind the music is to not allow yourself to be spoon-fed, but to get out there and question what's happening. And remember, there's a solution.
"Be aware of [the problem]," Alexander stresses. "Feel passionate about it. Talk about it. Share information and have conversations aobut it and make that the topic of conversation a little bit on Friday night in addition to everything else people talk about. The closest thing we have to a solution at this point in human history is public outrage."
However, he does admit that constantly thinking about the world's problems is not really a healthy alternative.
"I go out and party," he concedes. "I hate the word 'party': I go out and cause trouble and rough things up a bit. If we think about these things all the time, then we also have potential to go off the deep end!"
~ Austin Clarke ~
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