Author: MR90

Another inessential Smash Mouth cover. Not that any of their covers should be considered “essential” to anyone who isn’t disturbingly attached to the Shrek franchise.

I had assumed that this live rendition of “Brian Wilson” came out after “One Week” to cash on its freak success, but turns out it came out six months before. Either way, the crowd singing along to the lyrics doesn’t help, nor does that super crisp acoustic guitar that screams 1998.

Imagine if instead of getting into European club sounds in the early 90s, U2 simply decided they wanted to sound like The Cult. Also features the lyrics from “Wild Horses” for no apparent reason.

I would say that my tolerance for this band has fluctuated like crazy over the last 40 years, but really I thought they were tremendously cool up until 1992, and then didn’t listen to them much at all until my son became a teenager and went through his Chili Pepper phase, which seems to have replaced a Rush phase for all 13-year-olds discovering rock music. That phase didn’t include this tune, as it seems like even new school Chili Pepper fans don’t need to hear Anthony Keidis’ megaphoning in an O’Jays cover.

First of all, credit to U2 for contributing a song to a Cole Porter tribute album created to benefit AIDS research. Red Hot + Blue sold over a million copies and started an entire series of benefit albums, something that likely would not have happened had one of the largest bands in the world not been a part of it. Also interesting is that this is the first example of U2 messing with the electronic sounds that would define them in the 90s. Too bad that this song is pretty painful to listen to. The keyboards sound oddly sinister, Bono’s vocals don’t always match what the band is doing, and it’s twice as long as it needs to be. It’s good they got it out, but seems like their achtung was elsewhere.

Admittedly this sort of danceable industrial rock isn’t my bag baby, but this one is particularly irksome. It starts off like Depeche Mode’s “World in my Eyes” (fine), then adds chintzy fake horns (annoying) and a guy yelling, “Baby, come to daddy! Daddy’s come to baby!” (creepy).

As the singer on of two of the three most played Clash songs (at least on these shores), and two massively popular Big Audio Dynamite tunes, Mick Jones had a huge hand, and key voice, in what Modern Rock radio sounded like in the early 90s.

But instead of doubling down on his punk bonafides in 1994, Jones dropped the “Dynamite” from his band’s name and returned with an incredibly unmemorable song about how hard it is to write a memorable one: “Looking for a song/About 3:30 long/A song that I can sing/It don’t need no complicating theme…It ain’t as easy as it looks/Coming up with all these hooks/Remember that it has to swing/It don’t need no complicating theme.”

As anyone who ever listened to the Clash can tell you, sometimes it do need a complicating theme.

If you lived in New York and looked remotely Jewish, you were most definitely approached by Orthodox men during the High Holidays asking, “Are you JOO-ISH?” with the goal of blowing the shofar for you. You can ignore them of course, but for the extra pushy ones, my wife had a better response, which was: “I don’t believe in religious extremism of any kind.” It caught them off guard, and made them think for a second or two, which is an eternity of self-reflection for a zealot. As for these Jars of Clay songs, I too don’t believe in religious extremism of any kind.

One time at work, an art director showed me a graphic he made and asked, “Does this look like a swastika?” My response was simply, “Andy, if you have to ask…” I feel similarly about “Push.” Not that the guys in Matchbox 20 (aka Matchbox Twenty aka matchbox twenty) have Nazi ties, but like “Date Rape” and “Sex Type Thing” (two of the biggest modern rock adjacent hits of the 90s that aren’t among these 1,638 songs), it’s a song that can easily be misinterpreted to be pro-abuse, or at the very least male dominance, by the very people that might enjoy listening to it most.