Under the Tide: One Hit Wonders – New Radicals/Gregg Alexander
November 3, 2014
Courtesy of TSOAM.
Groups with one hit wonders are a puzzle. They arrive in the music scene with a chart hit, fade into obscurity, and leave you wondering, where the heck did they disappear to? Have they become irrelevant, or are they just not making music anymore?
Whenever the radio comes on with such “passe” songs, conversation will start. You will experience a sudden flood of emotions, feel the surge of warmth in your heart when such songs bring back good memories, associated with heydays of high school or glorious times.
“You Get What You Give” was one such seminal track for me. I remember scrambling through many record stores trying to get the one and only album released by the New Radicals, or the group that was named and fronted by Gregg Alexander. Making the VH1 list of “100 Greatest Songs of the 90s” and having one of U2’s members feeling “jealous” over it just adds to the underrated factor of this work of music.
Alexander wasn’t shy about letting his feelings known about corporations and how the music industry was heading in the wrong direction. As he opined about lyrics in his hit song (Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson/Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson/You’re All Fakes), “to notice that everybody focused on the so-called “celebrity-bashing” lyric instead of this lyric that was talking about the powers-that-be that are holding everybody down, that was something that I was kind of disillusioned by.”
It was this disillusionment and also the fatigue of performing which led Alexander to disband the group. Alexander’s songwriting oozes creativity (And I’m crying like a church on Monday/Praying for these feelings to go away/So do me a favor baby/Put down your new God/And love me like Sunday again), and his art of bringing references into songs seamlessly (Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart/Who holds the stars up in the sky) is art in music itself. Which is why I felt, it was a pity for the group to have disbanded, ironically, as a result of Alexander’s perceived excessive celebritization by the media.
While construed as a one-hit wonder, it would have been interesting to see how the group and their other songs would have fared if they had continued making music.
It was music to my ears when I discovered Alexander re-emerged to write the song “Lost Stars” for the movie Begin Again, with vocals by Adam Levine. While I surely won’t get the chance to ever see Alexander perform on stage again, having his humble and honest songwriting influence in the music industry again is a breath of fresh air.
