33rd song: You Get What You Give

You Get What You Give - The New Radicals

So I'm starting again with this format, after a brief intermission, and my first target is this song which was briefly considered for my 'Guilty Pleasures' compilation, but I don't really think I've ever felt that guilty for loving this.

I mean, Joni Mitchell loves it. She said it rose "from the swamp of McMusic like a flower of hope". It was in Pitchfork's Top 100 songs of the 90s. It's not uncool. And it's awesome, of coursome.

But The New Radicals is a funny little tale. Basically a one-hit wonder, but it didn't necessarily have to be. The band was, to all intents and purposes, a man called Gregg Alexander, who'd released a couple of unsuccessful solo albums previously.

I remember reading an interview with him at the release of 'You Get What You Give' and he seemed a right-on fellow, full of righteous leftist fury at capitalism, commercialism, his peers and his paymasters. He was going to shake the fucking world up with power-pop! Bosh! And 'You Get What You Give' itself picked up some attention for the section where he berated Beck and Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson for being fakes. He's setting himself high on a pedestal here, I thought.

Then he was on Top of the Pops, and it was the most desultory, weak, performance you can imagine, which was very disappointing, and the album 'Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too' flopped somewhat (it actually sold a million copies, so not actually a massive flop).

I bought it - it's actually pretty good, full of extremely wordy, angry oomphy songs with big choruses, kind of exactly what he promised. I haven't listened to it all for several years, but just thinking about it I can recall all the tunes really well, which is a good sign. Maybe nothing else quite as great as 'You Get What You Give' but a few not far behind. The next single was due to be 'Someday We'll Know', a nice little powerballad which definitely could have had a bit of success with a following wind.

But by the time it came out, The New Radicals were already on the way out. He simply said he couldn't be arsed, he hated the whole business, this was not the life he wanted. Fair enough, kind of principled, I thought.

But then, not long after, Gregg Alexander's name started cropping up again in slightly less hip circles - he'd become a writer for hire, and did pretty damn well at it too. 'Life is a Rollercoaster', 'Lovin Each Day' by Ronan Keating amongst others of his, 'Murder on the Dancefloor' by Sophie Ellis Bextor, 'Inner Smile' by Texas, 'Game of Love' by Santana. Once you know they're all by him, you can hear his sound in all of them. I mean, fair enough, but it's hardly the revolution is it? Is it fair to say a cop-out? [It's a good example of how precise our taste is - I'm sure i'd have liked two or three of those songs if they'd been on the New Radicals album, but in the mouths of Keating (is what he does singing) or Charlene Spiteri (who is a good singer but i always found (probably unfairly) annoying, like she was born to be interviewed by Chris Evans or appear on Jools Holland's Hootenanny) I had no time for the songs.]

But I suppose, if your gift is writing punchy pop songs, whatever your political feelings, once you realise you're not going to change the world and you don't have the charisma and ego to be a rock star, it's a perfectly reasonable course to take to step into the background and make the most of what you've got. Gosh, I said some fairly caustic anti-establishment things when I was younger and had big ideas about what one should and shouldnt do, and I've ended up basically providing corporate entertainment to bankers and lawyers, so I'm no one to talk.

So basically, The New Radicals (a pretty terrible name) are known for just this one song, even though the man behind it had an awful lot more good tunes in him.

But it really is a great song, which stands outside genre and taste. As with, say, Going Underground, its lyrical anti-establishment message isn't rocket science but neither is it clunky or misplaced, it's a warm-hearted graceful song which makes people feel better about themselves, and as for the coda where he rants about bankers and health insurance before calling out the likes of Marilyn Manson, it may be a bit daft, but it sounds pretty good [he claims he put it in as an experiment to see if people would pick up on the juvenile insults or the anti-establishment political bit].

It's a song which ticks the right boxes, pushes the righ buttons, and warms the right cockles on a snowy January day, so it's perfect for today. Go on, give it a listen.