What derailed the New Radicals’ career?
Every band should have a say in what their legacy is going to be. The last thing that anyone wants to do is be typecast into one specific sound, and even if they are completely happy where they are, it’s no fun being asked to play the same song over and over again if they weren’t that thrilled with it in the first place. But in the case of New Radicals, Gregg Alexander knew that hanging things up was more about being realistic than having to worry about being a relic of the 1990s alternative scene.
If you look at Alexander’s career before he donned the bucket hat, no one would have expected him to be one of the biggest names in alternative rock. He had been writing music before Nirvana had even broken, and looking at some of the material from his salad days, it was clear that the post-ironic version of a sleazy rock star that he was trying to be was never going to work.
Once he started to make music with Danielle Brisebois, there was a lot more that he had to offer that fit pretty well with the slacker generation. It was definitely more in line with pop, but when Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too came out, it felt like Generation X had their own AM-radio masterpiece. Everyone remembers tunes like ‘You Get What You Give’, but even tracks like ‘Like A Church on Monday’ and ‘Someday We’ll Know’ should be considered classics from that time.
But when someone has as big a smash hit as ‘You Get What You Give’, it was all going to be downhill, and Alexander saw the writing on the wall before he even hit the big time, saying, “I accomplished most of my goals with this record… over the last several months, I’d lost interest in fronting a ‘one hit wonder’, to the point that I was wearing a hat while performing so that people wouldn’t see my lack of enthusiasm.”
It’s not like he was subtle about the hat stunt, either. Everyone might have been able to recognise the band as ‘the one with the guy in the bucket hat’, but given how much he shied away from the spotlight, it was like he was encouraging everyone to ignore them after things started rolling. But just because someone doesn’t take fame seriously doesn’t mean they don’t take their craft seriously.
Alexander always knew that his greatest strength was his songwriting. ‘You Get What You Give’ has a countless number of hooks throughout its runtime, and even ‘Someday We’ll Know’ was getting enough attention to be covered by Hall & Oates, so Alexander figured that his next life was going to be writing for other artists.
Not all of the songs he wrote were as ambitious as maybe ‘I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away the Ending’, but his track record for great tunes has been incredibly solid. Whether it’s working for pop bands like Hanson or turning in classics like ‘The Game of Love’ with Santana and Michelle Branch, Alexander is far more interesting as a songwriter now than he was back in the day, usually throwing in different jazzy chords that catch the audience’s ear a lot easier than the typical pop song chords.
Did we deserve more New Radicals music? Absolutely. But you have to respect when an artist sees their strengths and runs with them. It’s a little disheartening knowing that there are probably countless songs that the musician never got to write with his old band, but it’s a fair trade knowing that he would eventually write something as powerful as ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ with Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
