Spacehog: A Rock Hogyssey

First I want to say that I did not make up the word "Hogyssey" as a joke.  This band actually released an album called The Hogyssey in 2001, five years after their one radio hit.  I kind of wonder if they had given up on writing serious music and turned to self-parody.  Watch how David Letterman grits his teeth when saying the words "Hogyssey" and "Spacehog" and see how just much respect this band commanded by the end of their career.

It wasn't always this way for Spacehog.  "In The Meantime," their hit in 1996, was one of the few good songs I remembered from this time period.  It was nothing special, just solid power pop with a neat bass line and not-excessively-stupid lyrics.  A hidden gem.

Well, this is what I thought until I revisited the song on youtube and found this live performance where the lead singer completely douches everything up.  First he moves like he's being electrocuted, which only David Byrne and Thomas Dolby can pull off without looking stupid.  Then, once he opens his mouth, he sings with the most obnoxious wannabe Eddie Vedder voice I've ever heard.  It's a reminder of how awful it was putting up with that style of singing for ten years.  

Despite their ridiculousness, doucheyness, and general lack of talent, the band garnered a surprising amount of fame and credibility during their short career.  This really new "website" on the "internet" called "pitchfork" gave their first album a very respectable 7.6/10 and even predicted it would be reissued one day "in a green-tinted jewel case." (?!?)  Royston Langdon (the lead singer) even met Liv Tyler at some point, as evidenced by this photograph:

That must have been nice for him, right?  I'm sure he was a big fan of her work.  She was the bomb as Arwen in Lord of the Rings.  It must have been nice, too, when they GOT FUCKING MARRIED IN 2003.

There's the well-known cliche that girls like pissing of their dads.  So if you're a girl and your dad doesn't like, say, Chinese people, you're totally bringing home a Chinese guy.  This is the only way I can rationalize Liv Tyler marrying the dude from Spacehog.  Her dad is one of the most famous rock stars in the world, and how better to piss him off than by marrying a lame guy from a really lame band?  

Spacehog broke up in 2002 after The Hogyssey flopped.  However, they played two reunion shows in 2008 and now there's talk of a full reunion tour and album.  Very interestingly, Royston Langdon's marriage to Liv Tyer lasted until 2008, overlapping exactly with Spacehog's hiatus.  I see three possible scenarios:

1. Being married to one of the hottest women in the wold distracted Langdon from his shitty music.
   
2. Tyler dumped Langdon, and he turned to his "art" to cope.
   
3. Langdon dumped Tyler because she was getting in the way of his rock star lifestyle.  This would have been a terrible decision on Langdon's part, but this is also a guy who released an album called The Hogyssey.

Bush (or Bush X for Canadians)

Look at these guys.  There's Gavin Rossdale embodying mid-1990s grunge zeitgeist, with his long hair, t-shirt and brooding attitude.  Then there's Nigel Pulsford, a bald man with a goatee and boa who looks about sixty years old.  Apparently Bush had other members, but I'm too lazy to look them up on Wikipedia.  No Matter.  The point is, it's pretty obvious which of these guys was destined to marry Gwen Stefani.  Those two are actually still together despite all expectations, implying they enjoy each other's presence on some non-superficial level and have actual conversations about stuff.  This is good for Gavin, because there's no way "being in Bush" is still attractive.

This wasn't the case in 1994, when Bush exploded into our hearts and onto our t-shirts (I owned a Bush t-shirt) with their first single, "Everything Zen."  Back then we all got our rocks off with loud/soft dynamics, like in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," where the first four bars were all soft and the next four were CRAZY DISTORTED!  Everything Zen totally owned this dynamic.  The verses were really quiet, with nothing but drums and bass and Gavin's singing, and then the chorus elevated us to grunge heaven.  There were also those great pump-up parts where Gavin would repeat some mantra over and over, like "there's no sex in your violence," and then blast into the chorus with even more fury.  

It was pretty exciting being twelve years old and hearing someone sing about sex.  But even crazier was that part in the first verse where Gavin sang about finding his "asshole brother."  Asshole!?  You totally couldn't say that on the air, or (as the case was) in front of my mom.  Take note of their ingenious way of getting around the "asshole" problem on Letterman:

It never really occurred to me that song lyrics were intended to convey actual meaning until I was a little older.  I just thought lyrics were there to sound cool over the music.  I didn't know what "zen" meant at the time, but the chorus (Everything zen/everything zen/I don't think so)  still conveyed to me that everything was not, in fact, zen.  This seemed really important.  Because "everything" means the whole world, and singing about the whole world is pretty deep.  

But way, way deeper was their biggest hit, Glycerine.  Do you know what this song was about?  It was about heroin. Absorb that for a few minutes.

Maybe once you've finished  absorbing, you can figure out how this song actually relates to heroin use, because I have no fucking clue.  The first lyric sounds a little heroin-y (Must be your skin that I'm skin' in/must be for real 'cuz now I can feel), but it could just as easily be about sex or a mosquito bite.  

Bush rounded out their radio blitz with two more hit singles, "Come Down" and "Machinehead," which combined with the others to create exceedingly high expectations for their followup album.  Luckily they impressed us all with Razorblade Suitcase in 1996.  This one only produced one single, but what a song it was: "Swallowed." I mean, fucking Swallowed"!  It was so rough, yet so pretty.  

I remember hearing an interview with Gavin where he said the lyrics were about feeling totally overwhelmed and losing your sense of self. That's exactly how I felt when I went through important life changes, like moving from seventh grade to eighth grade.

Bush's last gasp came in the form of a song they contributed to the film, An American Werewolf in Paris, entitled "Mouth."  Like how a werewolf has a mouth and goes around biting people with it.

Wait, did I say last gasp?  Because they actually released two more albums that no one in the world knows about.  There was The Science of Things in 1999 (things?!  deep!) and Golden State in 2001.  

Despite breaking up in 2002, Bush remain shockingly active to this day.  As previously mentioned, Gavin is still married to Gwen, and made this deeply bizarre surprise appearance at one of her concerts.  The song they sang was "The Sweetest Thing" by U2, essentially creating pornography for those who wish to relive the 90s.

Gavin also started a band called Institute and released a solo album.  Unfortunately, both of them sound exactly like Bush.  There's also talk of a Bush reunion tour.

It's actually a bit inspiring how Gavin Rossdale just continues through life with the firm belief that people still enjoy hearing Bush.  Kind of like it's okay seeing a mental patient who really believes he's Napoleon III, just as long as he's happy.  In the case of Gavin and the rest of Bush, however, it doesn't even matter what they do anymore because they're all bloody rich.