Alright, fine.
Let's get weird with it, shall we? Let's get a little oddball. After yesterday's halfhearted impugning of Metallic despite my love of some of their singles, let's take a look at a band that completely lost their minds. An equally distant band who never the less had a single I still love that people don't really know about today. Although I suppose if one were to look deeper into the mythology of their careers it could be inferred that they never had proper minds to begin with. I'm speaking (with some trepidation) about the Butthole Surfers and their biggest mainstream success, 'Pepper'.
The Butthole Surfers are a band with a hell of a reputation. They are quite simply infamous for...being themselves. Established back in the early 80s, the band would make a horrifying yet captivating spectacle out of their stage shows. Outrageous outfits and bizarre costumes. Rampant and encouraged drug use. Nudity. Open flames. Prat falls and fake blood to accentuate them. Then there are the rumors about sex on stage which have yet to be confirmed. In the midst of all this the band was making avant-garde noise rock, punk rock and just straight up, weird, jammy stuff. Front man Gibby Hanes got to the point where he had a massive rack for noise effects which had little rhyme or reason, he just liked to switch things up for the sake of weird. I learned all of this after the fact, of course, but I did love their most mainstream release.
In 1996, some fifteen+ years after they got their start, the band released their album Electriclarryland. A single released from the album, 'Pepper', became a bit of a runaway hit with the alternative crowd at the time. This was of the era where Beck was still more of the 'Loser' sound than the 'Lost Cause' sound he later embraced. The music world, especially MTV, was much less nuanced and outrageous. A single like this stood out for its weird sound, the spoken/rapped sections in the verses. The plodding beat and the backwards vocal snippets. We were easily shocked, my friends. Something as pedestrian as 'Pepper' stood out as bizarre in a sea of Bush and Joan Osborn. Hey, I was young and sheltered, okay?
The song is a fantastic example of alternative music in the mid 90s. It's that mid-tempo shuffle, no bass to speak of but a simple drum loop and some fuzzy guitars. It's really a great song made of a handful of parts. Gibby intones about a list of odd characters who all die in bizarre ways. The chorus is awesomely poppy, just a single chord with Gibby singing "I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. I can smell you on my lips and smell you in my clothes. Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies. You never know just how you look through other people's eyes." Other than a small guitar solo and the backwards vocal piece, that's the entire song. That's it. It's incredibly simple, another example of how producers and execs are screwing up by packing in sounds and cluttering songs with blips and bloops. This is catchy simply because it's so simple and stupid.
The Butthole Surfers are still technically around and, I would wager, just as insane. This song, as great as it is, is the rare commercial bright spot in their canon. If you love this, you probably won't like anything else they do. Still, I love it for its absurdity and du jour elements. It's a great 90s alternative track you owe it to yourself to dig up.
Let's get weird with it, shall we? Let's get a little oddball. After yesterday's halfhearted impugning of Metallic despite my love of some of their singles, let's take a look at a band that completely lost their minds. An equally distant band who never the less had a single I still love that people don't really know about today. Although I suppose if one were to look deeper into the mythology of their careers it could be inferred that they never had proper minds to begin with. I'm speaking (with some trepidation) about the Butthole Surfers and their biggest mainstream success, 'Pepper'.
