Cracker

Cracker is as good an example of a one-hit-wonder as i can think of. All anybody vaguely remembers is the lead off single from their second album. I urge you to not be some junkie cosmonaut, and check out their humble alt-country rock self-titled debut. 

The world needs a new folk singer/Frank Sinatra like he needs a hole in his head. Then La Bamba, but as a sarcastic "happy birthday to me." 

The concept is pretty fantastic. This is Cracker brand sardines and fried eggs, a product of the U.S.A., packed for Virgin Records America, Inc., in Beverly Hills. Yes, the Richard Branson label, but like his franchise period, not the full UMG sellout. You can compare them to Gin Blossoms because it's 1992, and this is what everybody else's answer to Geffen's Nevermind was going to be in 4 years. 

Nirvana, Guns 'n Roses, Metallica were 1991, "alternative rock" was what was going to be the next big thing. Cracker was right there, but they didn’t quite connect because they're too good. Yes, it's "alternative," but it's not "leave me the fuck alone" alternative, it's "yeah, sorry, we're actually a professional caliber touring country-rock band." You can absolutely compare them to Gin Blossoms, and make the argument that Cracker's sarcasm is actually funnier.

Gin Blossoms couldn't sing "can I take my gun up to heaven?" implying it's his girlfriend, and have it make any sense. Cracker has a Dead Hot Workshop vibe, and caliber, they're the real deal Holyfield, but Richmond Virginia was not a scene like Seattle or Tempe or Athens. Richmond might as well be Nashville, honestly. Cracker, in my opinion, had the problem of being a completely ready-to-wear mainstream darling in a world that intentionally flipped the the bird and turned the channel on principle rather than taste. 

If you kinda liked Fuel, or Matchbox 20, or felt like Candlebox had too much hair metal herarage, Cracker was what they were obscuring. To be fair, you can't sing "don't fuck me up with peace and love" on any radio station. 

And then there's Dr. Bernice, which ends the album with a seemingly anti-trans conundrum. You can completely forget how 90s sarcasm works, but i'm here to remind you of the mess you leave when you run away without really examining it. 

Dr. Bernice is very suspiciously a man masquerading as a lady doctor. Not a drag queen, not a legitimate trans woman, not even a transvestite, a hairy-knuckled dude pretending to be an authority figure specifically to trick you. And so, metaphorically speaking, if you're riding in the front seat of Dr. Bernice's car, then you are in on it, a siren luring me to the scene of my own violent, watery, sexually confused shipwreck. 

The whole album is about the package, as advertising, misleading you. It's about being desperate to not have your illusions shattered, and going to great lengths to stay safe, sheltered, ignorant, asleep. 

You can't sonically compare them to Cake, but intellectually the two are very similar. It's a theatrical irony, inverted upon the listener. It's a wink and a nudge that says "you can't seriously think this way and hope to emerge unscathed." 

Hold on, need to look up something....

Yeah, The Sixth Sense and The Matrix both came out in 1999.  The '00s were supposed to be our decade of cultural overhaul, but they were quickly subsumed into the culture of "disrupting the industry" by being the industry wearing unconvincing drag to discredit drag itself. Counterculture being culture, the irony was recast as the irony of irony. I liked The Blair Witch Project, but i can accept it as the irony of irony it really was. Gorillaz, of course, had the bead on it a year earlier, but I don't need to like Damon Albarn to appreciate his perspective. 

My point is, like 1989-2002 is a mine field you kind of had to experience to understand, because intentionally phrasing things the wrong way was the actual point. Like, i honestly don't know how Fred Durst hasn't ever had that moment of clarity parking lot fight with Wes Borland. So many people thought Tim Armstrong was applaudably overcoming mental retardation, Kurt Cobain literally martyred himself to prove the point that society would blame Courtney Love like they had Yoko Ono. 

To all the journalists out there in the ether, you're writing about GenX like we lived 97 years ago. We're right here, we're 45 to 60 years old in the throes of a midlife crisis we created for ourselves because we couldn't afford our parents' brand of midlife crisis, and we're watching you do exactly what we tried to explain you would do, in every direction. A million dollars is worth about 20 dollars, always has been, probably always will be. 

Solving the riddle is worth less than charging an entry fee to solve the riddle, and we're tired of explaining that you still have to pay to solve the riddle whether you want to or not, because owning the publishing rights to the riddle is the actual riddle. 

You don't sell out to make money, you sell out to bankrupt the buyer, then capitalize on the rebound. Unfortunately, corporate America has always played by those rules, so no matter what you do, you won't actually succeed unless you make your success more lucrative for someone else. 

Ride with me in my rusty 4th hand Pinto, it'll make more sense in a bit. Cash is the absolute worst thing you can own, because you lose all if it when somebody hits you over the head with a Maglight. Doesn't matter if you find a way to get it all back after the doctor staples your head shut, you gotta go get your head stapled shut.

So no, Musk and Gates and Murdoch and Buffet and Bezos and Huang and the Waltons don't have billions of dollars. More cash than you, but nowhere near enough to bankrupt their empires on a bad roulette spin or getting mugged. Cash is merely what they use to pay you, the maid, the babysitter; what they actually own are things they know someone will buy in the future. It doesn't matter what the thing is actually worth, it only matters that you have enough of it to sell to pay for the thing you have to pay for. Or, they just take out a loan and pay it back from the interest they earn on everything else. They aren't wealthy because they make money, they're wealthy because they don't use their own money to pay for anything. 

What does any of this have to do with Cracker? Irony, I thought I explained that already. The wealthy are poor, the poor are wealthy, each thinks the other has control of the actual wealth, neither cooperates to turn the canoe rightside up, so we all drown because we're too macho to wear those ridiculously unfashionable life jackets.

It's an album that screams "i may be and idiot, but i'm smarter than you," and half of us tragically don't get the joke. Ironic, considering we all have to live with the consequences.