Review Summary: What are we missing, exactly?
The Long Island Sound: A Reflection on Suburban New York’s Musical History – Part 6
The year was 2000. The emo scene of Long Island that we all know and love today was still in its gestation period, as Jesse Lacey had just recently formed Brand New following his drama-filled departure from Taking Back Sunday and Adam Lazzara was a just 19-year old college kid living in North Carolina. The hip-hop of Public Enemy and Mobb Deep and the progressive rock stylings of Dream Theater and Joe Satriani made it big prior to the turn of the century, but who would rise up to represent the island during the new millennium? Well, as fate would have it, a group of four boys from Northport known as Wheatus would soon make it big.
Now, Northport isn’t the largest or most well known community; it’s just a small town on the north shore of western Suffolk County with a population just over 7,000. But for a brief moment, Wheatus joined the ranks of Edie Falco and Jack Kerouac as celebrities from Northport with their breakthrough hit, “Teenage Dirtbag”. Although it propelled them to stardom, the main problem with having your debut single be a song as goofy and high on the novelty factor as “Teenage Dirtbag” was that it pretty much cemented their future as nothing more than a one-hit wonder. Sure, it’s an alright song, but vocalist Brendan B. Brown’s whiny vocals coupled with the elementary lyrics about high school romance (including now outdated references to Keds and IROC) and its overall goofy nature pretty much doomed them in terms of future success. Quirky, gimmicky acts like Wheatus normally don’t get a second chance, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when the followup failed to reach “Teenage Dirtbag”’s level of success.
The rest of the album is much like its biggest hit, to a sense.
Wheatus is silly and immature and geeky to an extent. What made “Teenage Dirtbag” work was a sense of charm under the layers of goofiness, and it’s the lack thereof that ultimately sinks the album. Tracks like “Hump’em n’ Dump’em” or “Punk Ass Bitch” (if you couldn’t already tell from the titles) showcase absolutely cringeworthy lyrics without anything redeemable about them. Lines such as “She looks like she finished here fat / she then turned around and ate my kitty cat” or “you're full of baloney, that you're a stupid shit-ass, a meathead, guido, pass gas” are filled to the brim with immaturity and idiocy, and some of the instrumentation is also grating, whether it’s the overreliance on cowbell during “Sunshine” or the overly breezy “Truffles” (and who thought it was a good idea for Brown to rap on “Wannabe Gangstar”?)
It’s not all bad though; “Leroy” is a pretty good rocker with some nice guitar parts and one of the best choruses on the album, and their rendition of Erasure’s 80s dance classic “A Little Respect” manages to stay pretty faithful to the original. Yet out of all the bands whose fifteen minutes of fame lasted only fifteen minutes, Wheatus definitely were not the most robbed. Listen to “Teenage Dirtbag” every once in a while for nostalgia or just for fun, spin “Leroy” if you’re a bit bored and maybe even add “A Little Respect” to your playlist of cover songs. That’s just about it, though, as the amount of mediocrity greatly outweighs the good. Fifteen years later, we still don’t give a damn about these guys, and there’s a reason why.
Part VII: This is the story of a girl…
