‘Walkie Talkie Man’: the most annoying one-hit wonder ever made
For a moment in 2004, TV surfing across the music channels toward indie‘s coveted MTV2 station was fraught with an abrupt bludgeon from one of the 2000s, and popular music in general’s, most gratingly obnoxious one-hit wonders.
What’s the opposite of slap, the expression beloved by Gen Z kids to describe something good, great, or excellent? Why, shmack of course. The title of New Zealand pop-punk rap gaggle Steriogram’s debut album, Shmack!, was led by UK Singles top 20 abomination ‘Walkie Talkie Man’, a jerky irritance of chittering bass, limp guitar attack, and an atrociously nasal rap swagger which triggers a dispirited rage before the first verse is over.
Legend has it that ‘Walkie Talkie Man’ referred to a club security guard who would chase the band out of the venue for reasons one can suspect were entirely valid. In fact, one listen to Schmack!‘s toothless cartoon punk evokes a scenario of Los Angeles’ Henson Recording Studios doorman bursting through the studio room à la Jack Torrance, driven to madness by frontman Tyson Kennedy’s Jibba Jabber inanity.
‘Walkie Talkie Man’ exists in a moment where rock was in a crisis. Nu-metal had brought metal to its nadir and spawned metalcore and high-school pop-punk saturation, and indie’s initial promise had dumped its landfill identikit Topman factory onto the charts that wouldn’t die a death for a good few years. While good taste was in a moment of insecurity, Steriogram swooped in the mid-2000s blind spot, where so long as you had a guitar and spiked-up hair, you’d be played on Kerrang!, or at least P-Rock.
Snotty rap can work. It’s a mystery as to what makes early Beastie Boys so infectiously brilliant in a similarly cartoon delivery, but the flair and the inventive lyrical joviality New York’s hip hop legends wield effortlessly exist in a remote universe far removed from anything on Schmack!. An unfair comparison, perhaps, but rolling the sleeves and zenning out to endure ‘Walkie Talkie Man’ does prompt an examination of what Kennedy’s doing that irks to the degree it does.
It’s agony. Kennedy’s hi-speed muppet rap is the secret ingrediant to ‘Walkie Talkie Man’s unique awfulness. What would be just about a forgettable hack of 2000s corporate kids rock, Kennedy’s animated flow scrapes like a cheesegrater to the brain, aggressively pushing their sole hit to a depth of strangulated shopping mall-studded belt rebellion.
Steriogram enjoyed the last laugh, though. Managing to recruit music video auteur Michel Gondry for the promo, ‘Walkie Talkie Man’s undeniable fun video, involving Kennedy being unspooled like a stuffed toy in a woolly world, helped prepare their single to global chart heights and enjoy nominations for four Video Music Awards and even a 2005 Grammy Award for ‘Best Short Form Music Video’.
You either have a nostalgic affection for mid-2000s pop-punk, or it sends a shiver down your spine. Whichever camp you’re standing in, it’s without argument that Steriogram’s ‘Walkie Talkie Man’ acts as a time capsule for that era, and if you don’t think it’s one of the most annoying one-hit wonders of all time, you’re wrong.
