New Radicals

Many people will miss his message, drawn instead to the groove, the humorous way he has with words, or with the case of the hit single, “You Get What You Give,” to the name-dropping, butt-kicking outro: “Fashion mag shoots/With the aid of 8 Dust Brothers/Beck [and] Hanson/Courtney Love/Marilyn Manson/You’re all fakes/Run to your mansions/Come around/We’ll kick your ass in.”

“Whenever people ask me about that, the thing I try and impress upon them with that outro part of the song is that the more relevant part of the lyric is: ‘Health insurance rip-off lying/FDA big bankers buying/ Fake computer crashes dining/Cloning while they’re multiplying,'” explained Alexander in Toronto the day after New Radicals’ triumphant promotional show at the city’s Lee’s Palace. The band launches a North American tour in New Orleans February 14th opening for Lenny Kravitz.

“Quite frankly, all the people that I’ve met ask me about that lyric, and the media always ask me about the Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love and Beck-Hanson thing, which was a little bit of a test for me to see if it was the media or the people who care about the bullshit. That was the motivation behind that lyric.”

There’s a greater message to the song and the album as a whole, a message that sums up the reason Alexander agreed (yes, agreed) to get back in the corporate world of rock ‘n’ roll in the first place. You see, he’d already gone through the whole major label thing once (make that twice) before, with highly unsatisfying results.

In 1989, at the impressionable age of 17, Alexander was signed as a solo artist by Jimmy Iovine to A&M. He released one album, a R&B/soul thing whose title, Save Me From Myself, got changed at the 11th hour to Midnight Rain “because the cover was me standing on a bridge with a broken mirror on my wrist and it was before the suicide chic thing,” Alexander laughed. The album came and went as quickly as a free fall off that bridge.

Three years later, Alexander got another deal, this time with Epic, and re-released that first record as well as a follow up, Intoxifornication, which also died a quick death during the height of grunge. “There was no way in hell that what I was doing was going to get through to people,” Alexander said. “In my gut, I absolutely knew it.”

But he didn’t let the disappointment become dream-destroying. He did recoil but enjoyed the freedom of writing out of personal necessity, not contractual obligation. ” I was traveling Europe on a bare budget by train, sleeping on couches. I had my guitar and was writing songs and busking, going out clubbing and doing a decent amount of chemicals,” recalled Alexander.

“I’m always recording songs — on 4-track, 8-track, whatever — and had a body of work, a lot of the material on this record. On some level, I had resigned myself to retiring to an island in Spain somewhere, with no money, getting a job peeling bananas, and write music and write books and travel around on bicycles and scooters and live the adventure of what, maybe, we’re all meant to be doing in these last days.”

In the middle of this bohemian (apocalyptic) thinking, he had no idea the “lifeforce” his songs had taken on, which he discovered when old friends and acquaintances heard his music. “People are really cynical in the music business but there was this unbelievable human reaction to the songs and everything started steam rolling again,” Alexander said.

“I started getting a second wind in terms of thinking I could use rock ‘n’ roll for a purpose other than self-aggrandizement or celebrity or all that kind of bullshit,” he explained of why he opted to sign yet a third recording contract, this time (by Michael Rosenblatt) to MCA.

“That’s what had made me retreat from following through what I wanted to do and being as aggressive as I was at 17. I started to see what the rock ‘n’ roll dream was about and it was not what it had been idealized as. It was really about corporate bottom line and quarterly reports and all that kind of shit and I didn’t want anything to do with that.

“Once I made a decision to use the machinery for my own opportunity to talk about those ideas — ‘maybe you’ve been brainwashed too,’ talking about where society’s at — and once I thought I could make a statement about where society is at the end of the millennium, then I started becoming a bit more motivated about putting my songs out there.”