YouTube Depression Theatre: Hot Tips for the Boys
On "mainstream obscure" and teen boys singing '90s Tears for Fears.
Like many millennials, I occasionally have a tendency to let bad emotions get the better of me, and I often numb the anxiety the best way I know how: distracting myself on the Internet. Over the last few decades I've cultivated a bank of videos that often get me out of a spiral; they're inspiring, humorous or just plain interesting. I'm going to share them with you under the heading I call "YouTube Depression Theatre," and you can put them on if you ever need to feel something.
With Everything That's Going On Right Now, I found myself galvanized by Molly Mary O'Brien, writing on her terrific site I Enjoy Music an "anti-slop manifesto" that drew visceral parallels to my own adolescence of growing up in the George W. Bush years and how the artistic coping strategies of that period might apply to this also quite bad epoch in human history:
So this is my commitment, my modern manifesto: to stop being willing to accept slop, to look for alternatives to slop, and to seek out community in places outside of the usual Slop Zones. That's what I did the last time I felt so awful about the state of the world, and it changed my whole life. I plan on going to shows, buying music and merch, encouraging music conversation in places outside the Meta/Twitter vortex, writing about artists making good alternative and independent music (especially artists whose existences are threatened by the current administration), and celebrating how music is social and interactive ("Music makes the people come together" - Madonna) because connecting to each other is ultimately how we're gonna get through all this shit.
I have felt the same way too, lately, but of course, my manifestations of these interests have always existed in a liminal space I call "mainstream obscure": stuff that was, at one point in the past, released within the confines of the major label system and often cultishly devoted in various spaces; art and artists who were fleetingly, almost improbably popular in a way that doesn't always resonate in modern times; or the comparative chaff (i.e.: non-hit singles) from the wheat of pop glory. Acts (particularly British ones) like Squeeze, Joe Jackson, Prefab Sprout and a host of other quirked-up white boys are among those who fit the personal bill here. It's my Started from the Bottom ethos writ large!
Squeeze's "Tempted" may be the patron saint of "mainstream obscure," a song that many know now but completely missed the Top 40 in both the U.S. or the U.K. charts. This may have something to do with half the main vocals being taken by keyboardist Paul Carrack, who had no other lead vocals on a Squeeze song in this period. (Squeeze's biggest chart hit in America is 1987's tongue-twisted "Hourglass," which I linked above and would be surprised if you recognized.
One such favorite act is Tears for Fears, best known for the evolutionary dark-wave synth-pop of their early years to the expanding, electronic-assisted modern rock of chart-toppers like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "Shout." (There's also their last gasp of mainstream popularity, the tortured thinking man's prog-soul of 1989's The Seeds of Love, which I unsurprisingly love more than most.) Like so many pop bands of the MTV generation, most people couldn't tell you what they did once Nirvana went mainstream; I, of course, am not "most people."
The '90s were not an easy time for Tears for Fears. Co-founding member/bassist/"Rule the World" singer Curt Smith got way sick of his partner Roland Orzabal's theatrical musical hoodoo and split for a forgotten solo career; Orzabal carried on the TFF mantle himself for two albums, 1993's Elemental and 1995's Raoul and The Kings of Spain, then cut a deeply forgotten solo album in the wake of 9/11. Orzabal and Smith got back together some time after that, and thanks to a combination of steady touring in amphitheatres and arenas, some really solid additions to their larger body of work (2022's The Tipping Point rules) and the canny management skills of Full Stop Management, headed by Eagles manager Irving Azoff and his son Jeffrey, they've had a pretty good second act.
The ending of "Break It Down Again" contains a mystery that took me more than a decade to solve: that militaristic chant you hear before Orzabal's last variations on the chorus is from one of a multi-volume set of sound effects records curated by Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman (specifically, "Manual of Arms," from the seventh volume); the effect is also heard on two extremely different songs: R.E.M.'s "Orange Crush" and Kanye West's "Jesus Walks."
Even so, that early TFF solo period is one I've had a hard time pushing from the center of my "mainstream obscure" universe for quite some time, thanks in part to Elemental's lead single "Break It Down Again." With grunge and its repercussions on alternative rock in full effect, Orzabal and new creative partner Alan Griffiths seemed less interested widening the band's focus from The Seeds of Love, instead making a record that sounds, at best, what a '90s version of their U.S. breakthrough Songs from the Big Chair might resemble. "Break It Down Again," which eked out a No. 25 position on the Billboard Hot 100 (and only five spots higher in their native England), blended brash synth patches with modest guitar chords and a theatrical, multi-part melody tied to lyrics about knocking things down to raise them back up. I really dig it, and it's still the only song from the just-Orzabal period that TFF still play in concert.
But this being me, and this being YouTube Depression Theatre, if I'm going to pull up "Break It Down Again" on video, it's going to be one of the most bizarre ways to experience it: sung on a latter-day episode of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, by then known as MMC. That's right: the updated version of the '50s children's program that introduced a cadre of young performers, including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell. This version is sung by original cast member Josh Ackerman, Tony Lucca (a runner-up on the second season of the deathless singing competition The Voice), and JC Chasez, who'd join his co-star Timberlake as the co-lead singers of late '90s and early '00s pop juggernaut *NSYNC.
My wife often tells the story of seeing a newly post-*NSYNC Chasez concert with a friend and liking only one song that she would later come to realize was "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince and The Revolution.
Hearing this trio (backed by a cadre of the girls in the cast as deeply average backup singer/dancers) interpret the pop psychology of Roland Orzabal as smooth, conflict-free teen idols is about as funny as it gets. Lucca, somewhere in the uncertain throes of puberty, gets to open the song, compensating for Orzabal's near-operatic transitions to Brit-twang head voice by briefly channeling Louis Armstrong's scatty patter. Chasez sets phasers to "smolder" as he runs his diction together for the ladies. Ackerman sings the bridge's deeply ironic lyric about "play[ing] to the crowd with your big hit sound" as literally as possible, bouncing an invisible basketball to the meter.
It's all frankly incredible: imagine a baseball slugger confidently point to the furthest stands and hammer the ball deep into foul territory with a smirk that suggests it's really fair. This is, assumedly, what some Eisner-appointed underling thought the youth market—or, at least, a certain subset of shut-ins with pay-cable access—desperately needed. (There's no shortage of wild MMC clips like this: check out a top-hatted Chasez leading a trio of drably-dressed teens walking around a literal train while covering Soul Asylum's downer ballad "Runaway Train.") Perhaps, ultimately, that insane exec or showrunner wasn't making this kind of television for today's kids, but tomorrow's: weirdoes like me who take to these bits of youthful ephemera like flies to honey and pass on the savings to you, the curious reader. I'll break it down again and again, no top hat necessary.