Which One Were You?

As I mentioned earlier in the week in my post about trying to find a song worthy of being added to my musical library, there were an awful lot of one-hit-wonder bands in the mid-90s. And in listening to their songs again I'm not totally convinced they weren't actually made up of the same group of people, with a few minor adjustments thrown in. I mean, the bands certainly looked the same. They were comprised of 4 or 5 skinny white guys who were alright musicians, but you could tell it was more about their look than their sound. I don't know if they cared about appearances before signing their record contracts, but once they were property of the record companies they were sent to some ad agency who dressed them in dark clothes, took glamour shots of them looking wistfully into an empty field so that the lead singer would appear deep and then wrote press releases about the newest 'grunge' band on the label, even though none of these bands were very grunge. This was done much in the way musical acts like Sum 41 were allegedly punk bands, just cleaned up and 'safe' for mainstream consumption, which by definition made them not punk bands.

So during that time we had a steady stream of bands that were essentially indistinguishable from one another with names like Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, Diswalla, The Verve, The Verve Pipe (see, even their names were similar) and Vertical Horizon. Each had a hit or two, released a video with a convoluted plot and the lead singer got to take Jennifer Love Hewitt to an awards show. But the bands all sounded so much alike that if you had put all the songs together you could have easily convinced people they were all from one group and it would have made for a hell of an album. Because of how similar they were no one group was able to distinguish itself from the herd, so they all faded away quickly. As it stands now you probably don't remember which band sang which song. Anyway, all this time spent on iTunes wandering down memory lane made me fondly remember my first college radio show, when I was convinced this music was going to stand the test of time. I distinctly remember playing this song several times, though until I looked it up on Youtube I could not remember the band's name. Typical.