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Ben Folds Five Say Whatever: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/18/11 9:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

There were a lot of aspects of the Ben Folds Five that made them seem like little more than a series of gimmicks. First there was the name, which was ironic because the group was only a trio. Then there was the fact that they completely jettisoned guitars from their lineup, preferring instead to center their songs around frontman Folds' incredible piano playing. Folds also wrote a lot of jokes into his songs and was sometimes self-consciously goofy (one of the key tracks from their breakout album was called "Song For the Dumped," which contained the chorus "Give me my money back, you b----/ And don't forget my black T-shirt"). But Folds was capable of delivering both pathos and beauty, and he executed that best when Ben Folds Five released their second album Whatever and Ever Amen on this day in 1997.

Formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Ben Folds Five released their self-titled debut in 1995 and scored a minor indie hit with the song "Underground" (which, in a twist, poked fun at the college rock scene). That album contained a number of great moments (including the bouncy "Philosophy" and the heartbreaking "Alice Childress"), but those moments really blossomed on Whatever and Ever Amen. Folds tapped into deep wells of pathos, channeling rage ("One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces"), sadness ("Selfless, Cold and Composed") and unrestrained jubilation ("Kate") through the keys of his piano for a mix that yielded a handful of radio hits.

Folds also revealed himself to be an exquisite storyteller, and the narrative songs on Whatever and Ever Amen — including "Steven's Last Night in Town" and the massive cross-genre hit "Brick," whose heavy rotation video is below — are some of the strongest in Folds' ever-deepening catalog.


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And Now Some Thoughts About Crash Test Dummies: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/16/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

Do you remember the first song that you really, truly cared about? The one that got you invested in pop music in the first place? It's almost always something embarrassing, mostly because little kids have questionable taste in music. When I was first discovering the world of pop in the late '80s and early '90s, I brushed up against plenty of songs that made me feel something I couldn't quite understand or that just sounded especially good coming out of the terrible speakers in my parents' Mercury Sable. There was a short-lived obsession with Genesis (I was briefly suckered in by "I Can't Dance"), followed by my first indulgence with hip-hop (Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)" was in heavy rotation for a few weeks there). And while the obsession with grunge came a little bit later, the song that ushered me into the world of alternative music was Crash Test Dummies' "MMM MMM MMM MMM."

Crash Test Dummies hailed from the exotic world of Winnipeg, Canada, and there was something about their fussy-but-friendly arrangements and smart-alecky lyrics that appealed to the 11-year-old version of myself. Like most people, I was first drawn in by frontman Brad Roberts' impossible voice, a stately baritone that lent the group a sense of gravitas and was able to shift from sexy to funny to sad in an instant. I had copied "MMM MMM MMM MMM" off the radio onto a cassette, and it got a lot of play in the car even though it was a radio hit and could be heard every four minutes or so. (For the record, that tape — swiped from a handful of nightly countdowns on the local pop radio station — also had Beck's "Loser," Ace of Base's "The Sign" and Green Day's "Longview.")

Though "MMM MMM MMM MMM" is regularly regarded as one of the worst singles of all time (and I can clearly see why), I still feel the strange pull of nostalgia any time I run across it. I still can't tell why I loved it so much (I can still karaoke most of it and the rest of God Shuffled His Feet from memory today), but it remains a cornerstone of my musical development. By the fall of '94 I was busy deciphering the hidden meanings in Nirvana's In Utero and diving deep into the finer moments of the Pixies, the Replacements, R.E.M. and the Ramones, but none of that could have been possible without "MMM MMM MMM MMM." Have fun trying to get it out of your head for the next two weeks.


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Daft Punk Become Human: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/15/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

The legacy of Daft Punk, perhaps the greatest dance music act of the 21st century, is loaded down with irony. The two Frenchmen who make up Daft Punk — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — have spent the last 15 years or so crafting some of the world's biggest dance floor anthems, and they have done it in relative self-imposed obscurity. Their public appearances (including concerts) are conducted under the cover of helmets or masks, they rarely grant interviews and they don't even work that often. In trying to stay anonymous, Daft Punk have become exceptionally famous for not wanted to be recognized, and because of the scarcity of their work, each of their new releases is greeted with twitchy enthusiasm. Such was the case on this day in 2005, when Daft Punk dropped their third album Human After All.

After the full-bodied sound of their previous album (2001's Discovery), Daft Punk decided to make Human After All a more "minimalist" release. The entire thing was constructed in only two weeks and the basic tracks were crafted using a pair of guitars and a drum machine. While there are plenty of post-production bells and whistles, the tracks on Human After All do sound raw and immediate — a perfect backdrop to flailing at a club.

None of the songs on Human After All became as big as previous hits "One More Time" or "Harder Better Faster Stronger," but "Robot Rock" is a worthy entry into the Daft Punk catalog and is a good jump start to the day.


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Pantera Forge Some Steel: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/14/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

It is truly a shame that the first thing most casual music fans remember about Pantera is that their guitarist was murdered on stage in one of the most tragic events in rock history. While Dimebag Darrell's passing was indeed shocking and tragic, he should really be remembered for his revolutionary approach to guitar playing, which brought together the brutality of metal with the thump of Southern rock for a swampy, punishing brew that was as thrilling as it was loud. Dimebag's skills were never on display better than on Pantera's final studio album Reinventing the Steel, which was released on this day in 2000.

Four years had elapsed between Pantera's previous album (1996's The Great Southern Trendkill), a scattered collection of tracks that, while heavy, did not capitalize on the success of 1994's Far Beyond Driven (which is one of the hardest, loudest albums to ever top the Billboard album chart). The rift between singer Phil Anselmo and the rest of the band continued to grow in the years between The Great Southern Trendkill and Reinventing the Steel, beginning with Anselmo's trouble with heroin (he was hospitalized for an overdose in 1996). Though the band continued to tour and kept scoring Grammy nominations, Anselmo continued to drift away from Pantera in favor of side projects (like the black metal supergroup Eibon).

The band was clearly on its last legs, but they managed to pull together one last time for Reinventing the Steel, which featured some of Dimebag's most savage riffs and Anselmo's most guttural growling. The single "Revolution Is My Name" was a minor hit and one of the band's lasting anthems.


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Collective Soul Experience A Breakdown: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/11/11 9:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

Back in 1993, a band from Georgia named after a concept invented by Ayn Rand scored a surprise local hit when an Atlanta radio station began repeatedly blasting a song called "Shine." The success of that song lead to a record deal for Collective Soul, who released their debut album Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid the following year. In one fell swoop, Collective Soul established themselves as major players on the alternative rock scene, and on this day in 1997 they continued their streak of success when they released their third album Disciplined Breakdown.

The creation of Disciplined Breakdown should have been something of a victory lap for the band, who had scored their greatest success with 1995's self-titled album (which contained the huge hits "December," "Gel" and "The World I Know"), but the album was created under quite a bit of duress. The band had split with their management and were going through a protracted legal battle when the time came for Disciplined Breakdown to be recorded. Since so much of the band's money was tied up with litigation, the sessions for the album were pretty spare, and the whole of Disciplined Breakdown was recorded in a cabin in the woods without any studio flair.

Of course, the results are some of Collective Soul's most raw and interesting tunes, as they were mostly written on the fly and express a real sense of tension without sacrificing the group's knack for beauty and melody. "Precious Declaration," the album's first single, captures those elements brilliantly, as it manages to deliver both a buzzsaw guitar attack and the lovely respite in the bridge.


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'Buffy' Slays The Television Landscape: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/10/11 9:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

It's odd to think about now, but back in 1997, there really weren't that many vampires around. Sure, Dracula was always a character who slipped in and out of the public consciousness, but in general, pop culture was relatively bloodsucker-free. Also missing in the early part of '97? Quality teen shows, which were not a focus of any of the networks at the time. But a new network called the WB had appeared in the TV universe and would remedy both the dearth of vampires and teen shows on this day in 1997, as it marked the world premiere of the first episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Created by Joss Whedon and based on the characters he first created for a film that was a minor cult hit in 1992, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" told the story of Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), the titular "chosen one" whose job it was to eradicate the world of vampires, demons and other various forces of darkness. In the pilot, she finds herself on her first day of school after having just moved to the fictional Sunnydale, California, a suburban town that happens to be built on top of a Hellmouth (a sort of beacon for darkness). She soon meets up with her "Watcher" (librarian Rupert Giles, played by Anthony Stewart Head) as well as her sidekicks Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon). (Later, that group would expand to include a number of other characters, including Buffy love interest, the vampire-with-a-soul Angel, played by David Boreanaz).

It was a brilliant premise, as Buffy not only had to fight against undead evil (in the first season, she spent most of the episodes battling an ancient vampire known as the Master) but also the pressures of being a high school teen (school work, dating, friendship, thinking about the future). The show expanded greatly over the course of seven seasons and was never a major ratings hit, but it developed a deeply passionate following and helped solidify the WB as the go-to place for teen shows ("Dawson's Creek," "Felicity" and "Charmed" all followed closely behind).

The cast of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" have gone on to mixed careers (Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green are probably the show's biggest success stories), but Gellar is still the face of the show. She used that face in a number of other places over the course of her career, including in Stone Temple Pilots' video for "Sour Girl," from their 1999 album No. 4.


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Radiohead Contract The Bends: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/9/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

The sophomore jinx is deadly for any rock band looking to grab some longevity. No matter how much buzz a group has surrounding its debut, the second album is still a treacherous road to cross. On this day in 1995, a band started out on that road after scoring a breakout hit single from their otherwise underwhelming debut album. They began a brief tour to promote their second album, which would initially land with a thud but eventually attracted critical acclaim. That band was Radiohead, and that album was The Bends.

When Radiohead's "Creep" first ascended to radio-dominating status in the fall of 1992, most people simply looked at the group as a more English version of the grunge that had already been flooding the airwaves for a year. Full of crunchy riffs and anthemic self-loathing, "Creep" was a pretty good pop song but didn't even vaguely hint at the sort of band Radiohead would eventually become. Pablo Honey, the album that housed "Creep," was otherwise unremarkable (though it has become more interesting when viewed through the prism of the rest of the band's recorded output) and it didn't help Radiohead that Stone Temple Pilots also had a song called "Creep" on their debut.

But The Bends is a whole different animal entirely. The album was produced by John Leckie but engineered by Nigel Godrich, who would go on to be the group's guiding voice in the studio. Though not quite as innovative and daring as OK Computer or Kid A, Radiohead's second album retains the band's knack for constructing big-hooked anthems while pushing the sound gently into the electronic atmosphere. Many of the band's overriding themes — isolation, panic, fear of technology — started to take root on The Bends, and you can hear the group becoming restless with the confines of rock structure (which they would eventually shed entirely, for better or for worse).

The Bends was a slow-burning album, picking up attention through a number of different avenues. The 1995 hit film "Clueless" featured the album's first single "Fake Plastic Trees," the band went on a huge shed tour opening for Alanis Morissette (who was the top commodity in radio rock at the time) and the video for "Just" got quite a bit of play on MTV (mostly because it was so mysterious).


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Gang Starr Go Hard: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/8/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

Why don't more rappers draft one producer to take care of the beats for an entire album? Some of the greatest hip-hop albums in the history of the genre sound that way because they have such a cohesive sound, with themes that can be revisited and sonic markers that can work with the lyrics, not just next to them. Think about the greatness of Run-DMC (whose Jam Master Jay handled all the beats), Public Enemy (with the Bomb Squad matching Chuck D's aggression note-for-note) or the insular worlds created by the early work of the Neptunes (like Clipse's Lord Willin') or Timbaland (like Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's debut Supa Dupa Fly). For the best proof that it's a system that works, look no further than legendary tag team Gang Starr, whose critically-acclaimed smash album Hard to Earn was released on this day in 1994.

Gang Starr consisted of rapper Guru and producer DJ Premier. The premise was simple: Premier crafted the beats (cobbled together from soul samples and his deft scratching) and Guru provided vivid, literate lyrics delivered with a deadpan flow. They were never hit makers, but every album in their catalog is considered something of a modern classic.

And they never sounded right apart, either. Though Premier lent out his production services to dozens of other rappers (he produced everybody from Snoop Dogg to Alicia Keys to Christina Aguilera), nobody ever seemed to wrap around the tracks the way Guru did. And Guru experimented with various versions of his Jazzmatazz series, but he never sounded as sharp as he did next to Premier. They were a formidable duo who casually tossed off jaw-dropping tracks like "Mass Appeal" (Hard to Earn's centerpiece track) like it was easy.


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Stanley Kubrick Dies Before His Time: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/7/11 9:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

The summer of 1999 was fascinating for the film world. Obviously, the cineplexes were clogged with high-profile blockbusters like "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace," "The Mummy" and "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," but there was also a ton of discussion about a visually stunning, narratively complicated final opus starring the world's biggest celebrity couple and envisioned by one of the greatest directors in the history of film. "Eyes Wide Shut" was a cultural phenomenon, driven by the fact that director Stanley Kubrick had died on this day in 1999 at the age of 70.

Kubrick had been working on "Eyes Wide Shut" for years, and like many of the projects he had worked on in the past, it was surrounded by an air of secrecy and misinformation. Nobody really knew the plot, though they did know it starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (who were married at the time) and involved an awful lot of sex ("Eyes Wide Shut" was initially slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating, and the final cut — which Kubrick supposedly submitted just before he passed away — featured a number of digital obfuscations of more graphic sequences). The challenging film (which clocked in at a very summer-unfriendly running time of nearly three hours) ended up bringing in nearly $22 million in its opening weekend and easily taking the number one slot on the box office chart (besting fellow opening films "Lake Placid," "Muppets From Space" and "The Blair Witch Project" (the latter became a big hit later).

When Kubrick passed away on this day in 1999, he left behind a total of 13 films, each one a game-changer for one reason or another. "2001: A Space Odyssey" redefined how filmmakers approached science fiction, "Full Metal Jacket" turned the war film on its ear, "A Clockwork Orange" took a hard look at violence in cinema and "Barry Lyndon" used costumes and candlelight to capture 19th century England in perhaps the most accurate way ever. "The Shining" not only made its mark as one of the greatest psychological horror films ever made (and revolutionized the use of Steadicam), but it also provided pop culture fodder that has been referenced over and over again — including in a classic episode of "The Simpsons" and in 30 Seconds to Mars' awesome video for "The Kill."


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Evanescence Fall Into Place: Wake-Up Video

Posted 3/4/11 8:30 am EST by in Wake-Up Video

In the early part of the 21st century, the rock scene was dominated by a new era of indie rock, one that had rebelled against the nü-metal of the turn of the century and developed a whole new aesthetic that covered both the sonic and visual worlds. Bands like the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were doing new things with rock constructions that were simultaneously looking forward and looking back. It was a thrilling time to be a rock fan. But in 2003, the band that made the biggest impact had nothing to do with that trend. Evanescence seemingly came from nowhere, released their debut album Fallen on this day in 2003 and proceeded to lay waste to most of the rock universe for the rest of the year.

Co-founded by charismatic singer Amy Lee and guitarist Ben Moody in Little Rock, Arkansas, Evanescence went from a summer camp project to a successful local band almost overnight. The group recorded a pair of EPs, which lead to a deal with Wind-Up Records (the label that brought Creed into the world) and the recording and release of Fallen.

Full of loud guitars and goth leanings, Fallen brings together the jagged thump of nü-metal and Lee's dark, haunting voice, a lovely instrument that at its best recalled Tori Amos or Sinead O'Connor. The first single "Bring Me to Life" picked up traction because of its attachment to the movie "Daredevil" (it was featured in the film's trailer) and kick-started a massive year that saw Fallen sell seven million copies in the United States, score another big single ("My Immortal") and take home two Grammy Awards (Best New Artist and Best Hard Rock Performance for "Bring Me to Life"). Evanescence have gone through a tumultuous swing since the success of Fallen (Lee is the only original member of the band left, and they haven't released any new music since 2006's The Open Door), but for a little while there, they were on top of the world.


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