20141208_194936Ok, so where were we? Joan Jett was still hot and we were working our way through a mix CD that I made when I was 17. Obviously if you haven’t read last week’s article where I detail the first 11 tracks of this mix, you should go do that. Before we get started, I thought it might be cool to paint a more vivid picture of the world in Spring of 2001.  Perhaps clues into what sort of mindset I was in when making this mix (events from History Orb.com):

  • Jan 4th – Rapper Vanilla Ice spends night in jail after allegedly ripping out some of his wife’s hair during a row
  • Jan 8th – 28th American Music Award: Faith Hill & Kid Rock win
  • Jan 9th – Apple announced iTunes at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for organizing and playing digital music and videos. Now widely used by Windows and Mac users.
  • Jan 15th – Wikipedia, a free Wiki content encyclopedia, goes online.
  • Feb 21st – 43rd Grammy Awards: Beautiful Day, Shelby Lynne wins
  • Feb 28th – 15th Soul Train Music Awards: The Isley Brothers, Destiny’s Child & Jay-Z win
  • Mar 24th – 21st Golden Raspberry Awards: Battlefield Earth wins
  • Apr 1st – Same-sex marriage becomes legal in the Netherlands – first country in the world.

That would bring us up to around the time I made this mix. What a world! Now,  Joan Jett had just led us off with some classic early punk rock, it was time for me to put my punk rock cred on display (only to completely destroy it by the end of the album).

Track 12: “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” – Dead Kennedys

This is probably one of the major high points of the album, I cannot possibly feel bad for putting on a DK track. “You ain’t hardcore cos you spike your hair, When a jock still lives inside your head.” I feel like I was somehow trying to make a statement with this track, since I am pretty sure that “Police Truck” was (and is) my favorite Kennedys track. I guess I was trying to compensate for The Offspring and Limp Bizkit. Here’s a weird story related to the Dead Kennedys: I was riding shotgun with my brother as he drove his cool Mazda Protege through the town of Saint Sauveur (a ski town North of Montreal). We were probably blasting some very bad dance music (my brother loved bad dance music, so this could have literally been C+C Music Factory or 2Unlimited coming out of the speakers). Some kid, who I had deemed a poseur, was standing at the corner wearing a DK shirt. I rolled down the window and shouted “You don’t listen to Dead Kennedys, you queer!”. I don’t know why I would have added a homophobic slur at the end of that, but I knew I was doing it for effect. Something along the lines of that if he did listen to Dead Kennedys the slur would make him angry? I was a confused kid guys. Anyways, enjoy the song.

Track 13: “Staring at the Sun” – The Offspring

Ah, the third and final Offspring song that found it’s way onto this mix. I know what you’re thinking. This is a track off Americana, this isn’t even “good” Offspring. Or at least, certainly not nostalgic Offspring. There’s a bit of a story here too. Being a giant geek I was also a very big fan of the Final Fantasy games. Someone made a tribute video using some of the remastered cinematics from Final Fantasy 4 up to the cinematics in the teaser for Final Fantasy 8 set to this song.  I remember when the video came out it got me super psyched for FF8. Now, this was a few years later and I already knew that FF8 was pretty bad, one of the worst really, but I had watched that video a dozen times when it came out. This was back when if you wanted to watch a video you pretty much had to download it. Song remains special to me. Here is that video. I remember my good friend Mat (who was a much bigger Offspring fan than I was) flipping out pretty hard about this video.

Track 14: “Have a Cigar” – Pink Floyd

My friend Marc recorded “The Wall” from TV one night in high school back when TV stations would just play uninterrupted movies over night. I went over to his place and watched it. It was not only a great film but also was the first time I remember thinking “hey, classic rock does not suck.” My dad was much more of a Beach Boys kind of guy, if he had exposed me to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin at a younger age I might have made this discovery before age 15. Enter the world of downloading and I began to discover even more of it. To this day, “Have a Cigar” from The Wall is one of my favorite classic rock songs of all time.  Yeah boy.

Track 15: “Shoots and Ladders (Industrial Remix)” – Korn and Chemical Brothers

Just in case I had tricked you into thinking that I had a semblance of taste in 2001 this track shows up to remind you that no, I did not. First of all, this is not actually remixed by the Chemical Brothers, apparently it’s by the Dust Brothers. I can understand the confusion (the Chemicals debut album was called Exit Planet Dust which I feel messed us all up for a really long time that they were in fact two groups). I never really “got” Korn. They were about fucked up childhood and being angry, right? I remember not getting it but sort of convincing myself that this was how I was supposed to feel as a teenager. This song is really bad guys.

Track 16: “The Grunge Song” – Radio Free Vestibule

A lot of Canadians (and Montrealers especially) will know Radio Free Vestibule or just “The Vestibules” as they’re now known. I remember hearing some of their sketches on what was probably CBC Radio (or maybe their original McGill Radio stuff) at some point in high school. When the internet happened I started tracking down a bunch of their sketches for my own enjoyment forever. This shit still cracks me up. It felt Canadian and local enough that you felt sort of like you were in on a special joke. I remember especially my brother’s friends knowing a bunch of their sketches by heart. Reciting them and cracking up was a good time.

Track 17: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” – Various Artists

Yes, I know that various artists have covered this song LimeWire, but what artist did this rendition? Oh, you don’t want to tell me? Fine. I’ll look it up. I surprised myself when I found out that I had put the original Charlie Daniels version. I think this may be because I owned a copy of “Videoplasty”  by Primus so I felt like I needed a different version. Good on me for going with original. This song is badass. Always made me think that I could probably make a deal with the Devil and beat him at Powerstone.

Track 18: “Daria Movie Theme”

I think I’ve talked about my high school affinity for the Daria cartoon back on a 9ES. It was one of those shows that I still enjoy. Most of my friends and I enjoyed Daria as a show about “our people”. Our people being the misfit high school kids who thought they were cooler than everybody but were all just pretty much geeks and weirdos. I think at the time we thought we had better taste in music than the rest of our school but this mix is proving that’s not true. Anyhow,  this is the theme from “Is It Fall Yet?” which was the first full length made-for-TV Daria movie. This was still pretty current since it had came out the previous summer of 2000. That’s right everyone, Daria was still on TV when this mix was made. I feel like I’d be remiss for not mentioning that the band that performed this (and the original theme) was “Splendora.”

Track 19: “Going Out of My Head” – Fatboy Slim

Ok, I lied. This song was my actual jam. Also, this one actually ages pretty well. It’s very cheesy and pretty dated, but I would still get pretty excited if this song popped up in a Seth Rogen movie for some reason. The video features an awesome magical party boombox that I’m pretty sure I wanted to own and amazing b-boy dancers.  That’s basically all you need to know about the song.

Track 20: “Growing Pains Theme” – B.J. Thomas and Dusty Springfield

This song is actually called “As Long As We Got Each Other” and it was the theme song to Grown Pains and what the fuck was wrong with me? Was I trying to troll myself? I don’t even ever remember a time where I was a fan of the show. I was 9 years old when it went off the air (although I surely watched it in syndication after school). The song is pure 80s garbage fluff. I mean, I guess this was one of the early examples where I really enjoyed something terrible in an ironic way but seriously, this is fucking awful. Listen for yourself.

Track 21: “Lawrence Olivier for Diet Coke” – Radio Free Vestibule

Do you know what I think happened? I might be putting a revisionist spin on the thought process of my 17 year old self but I’ve got a theory. I think that “Going Out of My Head” was probably where I expected to end the mix. However, even blank CDs cost money and there were still usable minutes left to fill. So I just grabbed any old mp3 from my collection and threw it on there. That would explain why I included a sketch that contains no music using dialogue from Lawrence Olivier’s many films and interviews to sell me Diet Coke. It might also explain why I had the Growing Pains theme song. It might also explain the catastrophe of the last two songs. Or maybe I was just a complete idiot. This sketch is pretty funny though.

Track 22: “Break Stuff” – Limp Bizkit

If this song wasn’t on here I could pretend that I just liked their angry cover of “Faith” and we’d be done with it. But no, this song betrays an actual enjoyment for Limp Bizkit. I don’t even know what to say to defend myself here. I used to really think that the lyric “I pack a chainsaw” was legitimately bad ass. Like, who would fuck with a guy that kept a chainsaw on his person? That guy was a bad ass. That guy just needed something to break. How about your fucking face? Now of course I know that’s a stupid lyric in a stupid song. At the time I probably jumped around like an idiot trying not to actually break anything in my room listening to this awful song. The video featured the likes of Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre, Eminem, Pauly Shore and a weirdly high number of children given the song’s content. I wish this was the low point of the mix. I wish I could just say “Yeah, and then there was a Limp Bizkit song, teenage Keith be whack.” No, I saved the best/worst for last.

Track 23: “Three Small Words” – Josie and The Pussycats

Ok. Ok. Ok. Fuck. Alright, so this movie had just came out. Rachel Leigh Cook was definitely cute. She said she was a “punk rock prom queen” and who was I to argue? This movie was in a hype frenzy and the song was also all over the radio and I feel like a girl that I was into at the time really liked it. Oh, who am I kidding? I loved this song. The movie actually wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been and I remember seeing it a little while ago and thinking it held up pretty good considering the source material and time it came out. The video sealed the deal for me. These girls were basically the physical embodiment of what I thought was hot at 17. What does Rachel Leigh Cook look like now?

She's no Joan Jett but still, looking pretty great all the same.

She’s no Joan Jett but still, looking pretty great all the same.

So that’s that. I don’t know if I’ll do this again. It was pretty painful. Tune in next week for something else.

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek