“You Get What You Give” by New Radicals, Monday, September 11, 2023
Years ago, I was singing karaoke and my friend started giggling. I was singing “Lost Stars” by Adam Levine and the line “Yesterday I saw a lion kiss a deer” got this friend rolling on the dirty 노래방 floor. Admittedly, it’s a funny line for a pop song. And besides colorful Taylor Swift revenge lyrics, pop music has been mostly scrubbed of quirkiness by the late ‘10s. Back in the ‘90s and even into the ‘00s, the pop charts were littered with head-scratching lines. However, that eye-rolling line in Begin Again wasn’t written by Levine or co-star Keira Knightly. That line came from the lead singer of a one-hit wonder in the ‘90s, Gregg Alexander or New Radicals.
FOUR A.M., WE RAN A MIRACLE MILE. New Radicals broke up the year after releasing their debut record, Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too. The album contained two singles, “You Get What You Give” and “Someday We’ll Know.” Musically, the two hits sound like typical ‘90s pop rock. Listeners can mistake the band for The Verve or even R.E.M. The non-hit tracks on the record feel less refined and may be better identifiers of the band. However, it’s probably the lyrics of the band that stick out in ‘90s nostalgia. To get a hit, Gregg Alexander wrote about pressing issues of the late ‘90s in “You Get What You Give,” including cloning, population growth, Y2K, consumerism and wealth disparity; and celebrity gossip. The result is one of the least coherent songs of the ‘90s. He mentions many issues without ever developing the thought as a theme in the song. Then almost at the end of the meandering 5-minute track, Alexander adds a bridge name-dropping some of the biggest musicians of the late '90s--Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love, and Marylin Manson.
FAKE COMPUTER CRASHES DINING. Gregg Alexander claimed that he wrote the name-dropping bridge of “You Get What You Give” to test whether the media would look at the societal issues mentioned in the song or focus on interpreting why the celebrities were mentioned in the song. Even though the speaker of “You Get What You Give” calls the celebrities listed as “fake” and that he will “kick [their] ass[es] in,” Alexander claimed to have no personal issue with the celebrities. Alexander even apologized to Beck. Marylin Manson, however, threatened to “kick [Alexander’s] skull in” if he ever met him. He was upset not that “he said he’d kick my ass. I just don’t want to be used in the same sentence as Courtney Love.” The celebrity chatter in the song may have made the song number 1 in Canada and a top 40 hit in America. The band’s follow-up single, “Someday We’ll Know,” was also played on the radio. The quirky lyrics of that song certainly bring back to mind the “Lion kiss[ing] a deer” of Alexander’s later career. But those Begin Again lyrical elements are certainly present in today’s song.
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