Back by popular demand folks!
Sorry for the hiatus but I just wanted to make sure you were all paying attention.
So on to more important things …lets discuss the Gin Blossoms.
Just hear me out here.
The Gin Blossoms came out at a great time in music history, and that’s because at that time , people still listened to the radio for music and Best Buy just started selling CD’s for like, 8 bucks cheaper than Sam Goody.
Now I’m not going to kid myself or anybody else out there and claim that the early 90’s were the golden age of radio. Fuck, that’s the farthest thing from the truth. At that time the station that was playing the Gin Blossoms was going to follow it up with 1 of the following songs: Creep by Radiohead, Loser by Beck, That Crash Test Dummies song that was sometimes called the Campbell Soup Song, or Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows.
Now I’m not saying that is wasn’t a great age because of the quality of the music but because those 5 songs were the only fucking songs they played! And since CD’s were so much cheaper at Best Buy we took a gamble on blowing the only money we had on an entire album from which we had only heard one song.
Lets loop back to the Gin Blossoms shall we?
Why am I devoting my comeback blog entry to the Gin Blossoms? I’ll tell you why:
1.)Because one of my favorite stories to tell is how the Gin Blossoms played a sports bar in my hometown like 10 years ago and skipped out on their tab at the Outback Steakhouse before their gig (my friend’s sister was their server, so it’s true.) and
2.) because Hey Jealousy is one of the best songs of all time.
I have multiple friends that agree with me on this (well maybe I’m the only one that puts it above anything Mozart ever did but they agree it’s good) While it’s no Love Song (see my previous post on Tesla’s masterpiece), it’s pretty fucking good. And it’s not good because of its artistic merit. And it’s not good because it’s a technical piece of music or because it broke down barriers. It’s not even that it’s good in its simplicity.It’s a good song today for the same reason it was a good song then.
Any one of us could have written that fucking song.
Seriously, if I was able to actually write music, the first thing I’d write would probably sound something like that song! Hey Jealousy is a song we can all relate to! I mean seriously, that whole song plays out like a conversation I had every weekend of my teens (and maybe into my 20th year before I could get into bars.)
One of my friends: What are we going to do tonight?
Me: We could drive around this town. Let the cops chase us around.
Okay, so the conversation wasn’t exactly like that but it wasn’t too fucking far from it.
And the line “If you don’t expect too much from me you might not be let down”? Jesus Christ! That’s like the slacker mantra! Which is what we all were!
I hate to break it to you folks but if you graduated from high school between 1993 and 1998, this is the anthem of our generation. We’d probably all like to think it was something cooler like a Pavement song, or hell, we’d probably even settle for Beck. But no, it was the Gin Blossoms Hey Jealousy.
Think I’m wrong? Listen to it again. Think about riding around with your friends or by yourself right before summer break, smoking cigs, listening to the radio, and trying to figure out what to do that night.
It’s okay; at least it wasn’t that song “Detachable Penis”
