Musical Embarrasment For October 2004: Busted – What I Go To School For [InterStitial #3] (JMcQ)

England has always been classified as a musical Mecca, from the earliest days of The Beatles, The Kinks to a more current set of bands including Coldplay and Radiohead. However, their brand of antiseptic pop music has always been miles beyond what we in the United States could defecate out. While we in American can still lay claim to the worst track that has ever been released in Detroit Grand Pubah’s “Sandwiches”, England has yearly produced pop drek that goes miles beyond what we have here. Where we have the preteen gymnastic wunderkinds of Jump 5, England had given S Club 7 a television show and carte blanche since 1999. Predating Kelly Clarkson by six or so months, Pop Star’s runner-up Gareth Gates seemingly can’t do anything but stutter through a litany of already-trashy tracks ("Mack the Knife” and " Unchained Melody").

The United States and England have been fighting for over a decade to determine who was leading in the production and packaging of their boy bands. The United States had Menudo (Puerto Rico is practically “the 51st state) in the late seventies and eighties and the New Kids On The Block in the late eighties and early nineties. England fires back with Take That in 1990, and Backstreet Boys take back the title for the United States in 1992. While each of the acts are founded during these years, it takes them a few years to actually become a force in music, with Take That’s first chart victory in 1992 (Promises) and Backstreet Boys in 1995 (We’ve Got It Going On in Europe) and 1997 (Quit Playing Games in the ‘States). Salvos are fired for the next few years: United States’ heavy machinery comes in *N’Sync and O-Town, where the U.K. comes out with Boyzone and 5ive.

Pop-punk flitters all throughout this last period of music, flirting with success more often in the United States than the U.K. Good Charlotte, Alien Ant Farm, and A New Found Glory hit it big in the early oughts, with the U.K. staying pretty silent on that front. 2002 rolls around and Busted is rolled off the mass-production line, their Ken bodies swaddled in punk gear steeped in tradition (Sid Vicious necklaces and all). Having the audacity to say that “Pink is working with Rancid on her new album. It's ridiculous. She's about as punk as my little finger.", Busted knows not the heights of their douchery. It’s totally the pot calling the kettle black.

Anyways, “What I Go To School For” is a two-year old track, coming off of Busted’s first album of the same name. Universal released a self-titled compilation of Busted’s music, simply carrying the band’s name on October 12th for the United States market. Luckily, even with Universal’s push, the album seems to faring poorly – on Amazon, it ranks #43,571 (in music), and it is one of about 50 videos to choose from on the TRL online request page (it has not hit the top ten, and chances are that it wont, going up against Ashlee Simpson, Usher, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Eminem).

But why exactly is this track so gash? Even taking into account the age of the track, the stale guitars and boy-band stylings are still wildly out of class, seeming more proper in 1996 than 2002 (or 2004). During the track, the drums are so perfectly arranged that they honestly sound as if a drum machine (or Cakewalk) instead from any of these boy-toys. With solos that sound as arbitrary as those found in “My Heart Will Go On”, the track is as hollow as any of those created by the Matrix, Busted’s (and Avril, Liz Phair, and Lillix’s) production team. The track shows a band that has no desire to experiment, and gets lost amongst a mass of songs that are equally inoffensive and uninteresting. Still, as Logan from Marietta’s Mental Pain (http://www.geocities.com/mentalpainpunx/) points out, “they’re cheesy in the fact that it (their music) is so overproduced, but the English-based crowd they are going for, 14 year old girls, don’t care.”

Finally, the video (and this is how I was first introduced to Busted) for “What I Go To School For” finally shows the band as the hacks they truly are. Matt, Busted’s bassist, started a precursory band whose repertoire was just Green Day songs, and the video begins with eir aping the mannerisms of Billie Joe Armstrong (of course, channeled through a Benji from Good Charlotte). This look-alike nature of Busted is not just though Matt, but also comes through heavily in James, who flawlessly mixes the emaciated frame of Sid Vicious with the rat-likeness of Pierre from Simple Plan. Each member has enough pins on their jacket to rival Rik (from The Young Ones), and seems about as dedicated to the ideals of revolution in punk as ey was. This is not the tear-shit-up spirit of the Sex Pistols (even though Universal is leading Busted around just like Malcolm McLaren did with the ‘Pistols) nor is it the bored ennui of the Ramones; it is the system invalidating and watering down a movement to the point of impotence. Don’t support bands like Busted and McFly (thanks again, Logan), and pick up something by Against Me!, Strike Anywhere, Defiance Ohio, or just one of the bands from your local area.