Remember that song where the guy says “I wanna be welcomed, not just tolerated”?
No?
It would be nice to live in a pure meritocracy, where simply having the best ideas or the best songs or popular support would instantly elevate you to notoriety. But more often than not, the most powerful institutions – in music, in pop culture, in life overall – are packed to the hilt with the establishment – reputed and highly regarded figures that are resistant as all hell to change.
The establishment catches a terrible rap from most people who want to get Rebel Hipster Cred Points, but look- they’re established for a reason. Today’s establishment was yesterday’s anti-establishment, and it’s important not to blow yourself over in adulation of every lameass trend that enjoys a few minutes of the overheat.
But how sweet it is, those rare occurrences where somebody comes from out of absolutely nowhere to the biggest stages without shaking the right hands, kissing the right babies, or needing anybody’s damn permission for it. Sometimes it’s more annoying than epic – sometimes we never hear from them again. But party-crashers of the world, we salute you:
10. Soy Bomb
Man, I swear to jeebus I didn’t plan for Bob Dylan’s old ass to show up in so much of this website, but call it synchronicity, because here he is again. It’s the 1998 Grammy Awards, and Bob Dylan is riding high. Album of the year! Most celebrated voice of a generation! All that stuff old people like to say to avoid recognizing new people!
And then this motherfucker shows up like a 2 pound hooligan at a football game. Dylan looks around with the WTF face as if the dude is gonna tackle him (you know, like they do in real football), but when nothing violent breaks out, the old pro decides he’s just going to roll with it. What I still don’t understand is why the director didn’t just get a really tight close up of Dylan until security got to him. I mean, I’m sure they put plenty of effort into making sure the floors were polished and the background performers looked clean, and I’m sure that plenty of effort went into putting that camera at juuuust the right angle to look all poigiant, but the small matter of a half naked man with fucking SOY BOMB written on his chest just might be reason enough to forgo all that artsy BS for a few seconds.
On a side-note, you wanna talk about nervousness? You wanna talk about stage fright? I don’t think being a scheduled performer for a big event like the Grammy’s has anything on deciding to rush the stage, bottling it up, not telling anybody but yourself. You don’t know how people will respond to “avant-garde performance art” of that magnitude. You can be a cute footnote or the most hated man in America. Not to mention, there can be physical consequences to stepping out of line like that, as this next guy can tell you.
9. Muntazer al-Zaidi
(aka, the guy who threw a shoe at Bush.)
You may say, hey, this doesn’t really count as crashing. al-Zaidi was invited to cover the event as a journalist. And I would tell you that he sure as hell wasn’t invited to hit Dubya with some size ten Iraqi Filas, that’s for damn sure. As a symbol, it was pointed – President Bush was on his way out and trying to shore up his reputation as an uncompromising stalwart of liberty, and even though cracking people upside the head with footwear is Absolutely Not OK, it was a real example of Iraqi frustration colliding with American spin.
And you may say, this isn’t even related to music! And I would say, look, there’s music in the video I put up! See!
8. Chumbawumba
I mean, I’m not taking anything away from pot smoking liberals who curse a lot, but there aren’t that many actual anarchists in music today. And those dudes are hardcore about their shit, which a quick runthrough of their website will tell you. While The Machine will chew your ass up and co-opt you regardless of political ideology (see Against The Machine, Rage) it’s hilarious that such a serious minded group who title their first record Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records as a jab at Live Aid twenty or so years ago would get most of their fame (and residuals) from a piece of glorified jock rock that gets played in the background at stadiums.
Ain’t life a bitch?
The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.
Huh.
7. Kanye West At Every Awards Show Ever
I was split on whether or not to include this dude at all. One of the things that makes party crashing fun and worth talking about is that the crasher is an underdog, stealing the spotlight from the big boys. Nobody expects it, and sometimes it’s over as soon as it starts. With Kanye, you’ve got somebody who is as in as you can be in mainstream American music, but is seriously pissed off that he’s not getting enough accolades from old people who don’t listen to him anyway.
It’s basically the exact opposite of every cool musician who has ever lived. I’ve stuck up for him sometimes in the past, but this thing where he acts like a whiny ass titty baby every time he doesn’t win Rap/Sung Collaboration or whatever is just out of fucking line. Maybe somebody should sit him down and explain that winning a Grammy does not magically make your CD the best of the year in the real world, because even though it’s entirely possible that Allison Krauss is the greatest female recording artist of all time and 99% of the free world is missing out on her brilliance, you’ve still got a giant pile of money to cry into at night.
But then again, maybe nobody should tell him anything, because his blowups seem to get more hilarious each and every year – and that’s what brought me on board for putting him on the list.
6. All Those Fucking “The” Bands.
Do you remember the story If You Give A Mouse A Cookie? You give the mouse a cookie, he’ll ask for a glass of milk, and then a straw, and then a napkin to wipe his face with, and before you know it, radioactive zombie rats are raping your little sister while Courtney Love cheers them on. So even though The White Stripes, The Hives, The Strokes, The Vines and The Interpol (that’s their name, right?) could easily be thought of as radioactive rats vigorously humping the carcass of the modern musical landscape, Fred Fucking Durst is the useless ass sugar cookie that started all these problems in the first place.
2000-2001 was an extra depressing time to be a music fan, with Limp Bizkit and Korn and a million ripoffs of Limp Bizkit and Korn moaning about girls that dumped them, so the retro stylings of The The’s (say that three times fast) were a welcome breath of fresh air on the radio. Commercially, it turned out to be mostly a creation of the press, and all the hype that these guys got on TV and music magazines didn’t amount to a bunch of record sales. But this was post-Napster, and record sales were beginning to skid across the board…
5. Wu-Tang is for the chillen’s!
Yeah, it’s another Grammy moment, which might be because the Grammy Awards are the most visible symbol of the music industry establishment, and might be because they always seem to allot time to applaud old guys who kicked the bucket last year, but they never let Ol’ Dirty Bastard storm the stage and rave about his threads every time Puffy gets an award. They should definitely fix that next year.
This was in 1998, and if I remember, the Fugees were giving out an award for best pop song or something like that. ODB stormed the stage, did his thing, and some 5′1 dory ass security guard tried to sweat him on the way out, and by the way… for real? He’s not Clean Cut, Polite, And Socially Acceptable Young Man, jackass, get out of the way. It’s a good thing ODB was in a mellow mood, because that could have gotten much, much worse.
Now, for those of you who don’t know the intricacies of the urban universe, and you’re wondering why Kanye is a Whiny Ass Titty Baby and ODB isn’t… well, on one side of the fence we have rappers that rap, and on the other side of the fence we have rappers that do R&B. That’s the guy in the silvery pants that dances with Mase. When the R&B guys get into the rap territory, the bets are off.
4. Oh, and a corollary:
3. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody
Are you serious? If somebody told you that a rock opera / ballad / rock song about…. whatever the hell that song is about, that lasted about six minutes and featured one of the goofiest falsettos ever would even get on the radio, let alone be a hit song, I probably would have laughed at you.
But there it is. It’s kind of like going around the world – sometimes a song or movie or book or whatever can go so far into left field that it comes storming across in the other direction. It’s also hard to deny that the song is as catchy as hell…
2. Danger Mouse’s Entire Career
He reminds me of Sugar Ray in a weird, weird way – he’s had this ridiculous stream of one hit wonders, except his have been in the realm of being culturally visible instead of just writing a catchy song. He bounces from oddity to oddity, and they all seem to catch fire from nowhere.
Remix a Jay-Z album with Beatles beats, then do a psychedelic R&B album or two with Cee-Lo, then work with Damon Albarn’s nutty side project? Sure, why not, I’m fuckin’ Danger Mouse, and while I’m at it, I’ll hook up with a mask wearing comic nerd and make rap CD’s for a late night stoner cartoon block!
There’s no logical reason anything he does works, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious public demand for any of his weird ass ideas, but everytime he seems to fill just enough of a niche to get people talking.
1. The Macarena
No, seriously. Los del Rio are basically a couple of hillbillies from Spain who slave away in obscurity for decades with no real hope of ever “making it big”. And after doing it for the love of the game for a big chunk of their lives, they just barely scrape up enough money to do a lounge tour of South America. They improvise a catchy couplet, decide to write a song, and then take over the fucking world. I don’t know of a song before or since that’s been #1 on the charts for an entire year.
And maybe the Macarena is a teeny bit annoying to some people, but I’m not begruding those old dudes a lick of the success they’ve got, or the royalties they’re still getting – in an environment where all of the rules were stacked against them, they got together an insanely catchy battering ram and knocked the gates down. They didn’t just crash the party, for 52 sweet weeks, they were the party! And if we all work together, they can be back in the limelight again!
Let’s GO!
…
Not a single one of you are actually dancing right now, are you? I see how it is. I guess I’ll have to bring the Macarena back all by myself.
You bastards.