Posts Tagged ‘1990s’

I’m too sexy for this blog

Posted: June 19, 2012 in music, Record reviews
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“I’m Too Sexy”
Right Said Fred
1992

“I’m Too Sexy” was the last 45 rpm I ever bought. I don’t mean bought on eBay or at a yard sale, I mean the last 45 I ever bought that had just been released. This was at the Queen Anne Tower Records in Seattle. I returned a couple of weeks later and just like that, the 45s section had disappeared. Eventually even Tower Records disappeared.

(I know they have 7” vinyl records today, but they play at 33-1/3 and they’re called “sevens.” Disqualified.)

“I’m Too Sexy” was a global hit for the shaved-head body-building brothers Richard and Fred Fairbrass, who also performed in the video. The video is a showcase of ’90s hairstyles and timeless male insecurities. A song about male models featuring two shaved-head body-building guys with their shirts off? What if the record-buying public thought the Fairbrasses were gay? No one would buy the record because then they would be gay! The record company had to figure out how to keep people from panicking. Their simple solution was to surround the two shaved-head body-building guys with women photographers dressed in bikinis (just like real photographers), because everyone knows that authentic male homosexuals would never appear in a video with women in bikinis. This is a bedrock principle of Western democracy.

While this logic may appear faulty, or even Republican, it obviously worked, because this thing sold like crazy. And while I can do without the video (the choreography is so inept, it’s adorable) (almost), I can’t do without this song. “I’m Too Sexy” is danceable, fun, too simple to forget, and there’s even a brief guitar homage to Jimi Hendrix just past the 1-minute mark. (Either it’s a homage or they couldn’t think up something on their own.)

“I’m Too Sexy” is a coed favorite at any dance, unlike ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” or Bananarama’s “Venus,” both of which have been coopted by women, or Men Without Ideas’ “Safety Dance,” which speaks only to nerds. “I’m too sexy for [fill in the blank]” is a useful catchphrase, particularly at the office. The readers of Rolling Stone voted “I’m Too Sexy” onto the list of the 10 Worst Songs of the ’90s (it finished 9th); this just adds to the song’s luster.

In the U.S. we think of Right Said Fred as a one-hit wonder. I was surprised to learn that they’d had other hits in their native England and on the Continent. It’s unfair to judge an artist in any discipline on one work – except in pop, where your judgment is most often right. Thanks to the miracle of downloadable music, I listened to all of Up, RSF’s debut album. “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” has a good title, but I have shirts that are sexier. I’m too sexy for the rest of these tracks, and I’ve already said so in My Little Turn on the Catwalk: The Journal of Right Said Fred Studies.

I don’t care what gender the Fairbrass brothers want to mate with. Thank you for writing that song before Tower pulled all of its singles. Whatever you boys are doing today, I’m confident that you’re still too sexy, whether you’re in Milan, New York, or Japan.

Random ’90s Pick of the Day: Foo Fighters, Foo Fighters (1995)
Dave Grohl was Nirvana’s drummer. Not only is he a great drummer, he also wrote all the songs and played all the instruments on the Foo Fighters’ debut. The Foo Fighters make big arena rock and don’t take themselves too seriously.

Random ’90s Pan of the Day: Foo Fighters, Foo Fighters (1995)
Sounds like all the other arena rock of the ’90s.

Tomorrow on ’90s Week: What I know about women won’t even fill a blog post!

To infinity and beyond: ’90s Week starts tomorrow

Posted: June 18, 2012 in music, Record reviews
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All right ramblers, let’s get ramblin’. I thought ’70s Week and ’80s Week went pretty well, so it’s time to dive into ’90s Week. Yes, the 1990s, when my house was worth a billion dollars and I grew obscenely rich at my dot-com. I don’t even own that house anymore and the only traces of the dot-com are the baseball caps we made with our logo on them, one of which I gave to Accused of Lurking, who is still walking around underneath it in Seattle.

Many scientists have concluded that the ’70s gave us the worst music of all time. This is because the ’70s gave us the worst music of all time. It’s hard to beat “Muskrat Love” or “You’re Having My Baby,” but the ’90s tried: “Achy Breaky Heart,” the “Macarena,” “Ice Ice Baby,” “Barbie Girl,” “My Heart Will Go On,” “I Will Always Love You,” and forced participation in the “Electric Slide” at corporate team-building retreats. This was a very complicated decade. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.

Random ’90s Pick of the Day
Various artists, For the Masses (1998)
This Depeche Mode tribute CD taught me how good Depeche Mode’s songs were if you could just get somebody else to play them. The highlights come from Failure (“Enjoy the Silence,” an ironic choice for a moody but extremely noisy band) and Rammstein (who pump some Armageddon-level hysteria into “Stripped”).

Random ’90s Pan of the Day
Britney Spears, …Baby One More Time (1999)
I’m convinced that this broad is responsible for two horrors of the new century, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry. I’m also pretty sure that Justin Bieber and Katy Perry are the same person.

Punchline from a ’90s radio commercial at Christmastime
[Harp music, animals, muted violins.] “Angels. Animals. The baby in the manger…[shredding guitar and devil voice]…and MEGADETH!”

First rule of ’90s Week: There are no rules in ’90s Week. See you tomorrow.

Roll over, Kurt Cobain

Posted: November 28, 2010 in music, Record reviews
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Grunge Lite
Sara DeBell
1993
I was living in Seattle when our fair city unleashed a pair of unstoppable cultural forces: coffee and grunge. Everyone knows what coffee is: overpriced. What is grunge?

Figure 1. Let’s go grunge-spotting!
Here are some general characteristics to help you seek and spot grunge anywhere in the world:

  • Men who can’t sing.
  • Big fuzzy guitars – a moderately pleasing sound that conveniently camouflages a lack of technical skill.
  • Overflowing testosterone. Particularly ironic in that the best album from the grunge era is easily Hole’s Live Through This. Only Courtney Love’s husband came close when his band released Nevermind.
  • Bad male fashion – plaid shirts worn unbuttoned or tied at the waist, or two nondescript shirts worn one on top of the other. A man at my gym left one of his nondescript shirts on a hook in the locker room for two months before he realized it was his shirt and not an irregular pattern on the wall.

Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam played Matt Dillon’s band, Citizen Dick, in the movie Singles (1992). This movie might not have been the high point for grunge, but it was certainly the high point for Pearl Jam.

Targets don’t get much fatter than this
Sara DeBell’s Grunge Lite, which appeared while grunge was still happening, was billed as a “whole buttload of easy-listening favorites,” recorded entirely in her dining room. She took 11 grunge masterworks and muzaked them, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow,” Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick,” and Soundgarden’s “Hunger Strike.” (DeBell was particularly taken, or appalled, by Soundgarden, who appear three times in her carnival of carnage.) I only wish she had taken down my faves, Screaming Trees (“Nearly Lost You”). They could’ve used the publicity.

Grunge had it coming, but this is the kind of album you’ll play only when your house is full of people and they are full of your beer. Sure, the muzak versions of  these songs are clever…if you like muzak. Few people will be able to sit through the entire thing without losing intestinal containment. OK, I’ve done it. In the mid-’90s, though, when I played DeBell’s version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at parties at our house, everyone over 40 would gather adoringly around the stereo. I probably couldn’t get that reaction today, now that the real “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a standard in the Classic Rock repertoire and everyone I know is at least 100.

After releasing Grunge Lite, DeBell became the copy editor at The Stranger, one of Seattle’s weekly alternative papers. At that time I was finishing my sojourn as the copy editor at Seattle Weekly. If this was her idea of how to gain respectability, I could’ve told her it wasn’t going to work.

I don’t know where Sara DeBell is today, musically, but the one time I spoke with her, in 1996, she was really into The Everly Brothers!

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