A similar rift had happened with Dookie in the mid-90s, but Quarashi didn’t have the DGC/Geffen media machine conspiring to turn them into one of the biggest bands in the world like they had with Green Day. A new generation of jaded critics generally disliked Jinx, so the tastemakers either overlooked it or avoided it, and the part-time Juggalos who did buy it got bored with it and unceremoniously recycled it.

Hauksson’s poetic “I’m here to fuckin’ stay like the warts on yo’ dick!”) were marginally excusable by the built-in ESL charm of the European band trying to succeed in this reactionary US market.Īs one would expect, the group fell into the grates between a rapidly dividing post-modern culture. Some of their least excusable lyrics (e.g. They did get gradually more aesthetically foreign-seeming with each viewing, though. Their name was actually an Arabic word (meaning “supernatural”), so that didn’t give them away either. Quarashi pinched the iconography and (coincidentally more than intentionally) of rap-metal and nu-metal from their breeding grounds (if not the sound, so much), so when the “Stick ‘em Up” video first hit MTV, their nationality wasn’t overt. By this point, most of those copies of Three Dollar Bill, Y’alls had been sold or traded in for copies of Bleed American, yet suddenly, we received the white-boy pump-up anthem of all goddamn time from a rap group from goddamn ICELAND. We had been forced to sit through almost five years of marginally talented white boys with power-chords, stolen DJs, and increasingly slick production. Bush and the “Morning in America” –on-acid atmosphere that he ushered in, nobody could have anticipated Quarashi. So, given the murky residue of good-ol-boy Nu-Metal that pervaded across the installation of “good-ol-boy” President George W. The most harmful element was this sudden wave of isolationism that accompanied the arrival of year 2000 of the top 100 videos that MTV counted down at the end of the year, exactly one single came from a European artist. Ricky Martin, Shakira, and even the late Maori guy who sang “How Bizarre”) that seemed harmless at first, but when rap-metal conquered the airwaves with its predominantly white, energy-drink guzzling contingent as the millennium approached, switching the radio on was enough to make one get excited about the Y2K apocalypse. A talented base of international stars firmly crossed over (e.g. I’m sure this resonated with either anyone who was dumb enough to believe it or lucky enough to capitalize on it. I remember watching Britney Spears talk about what a wonderful time it was for pop music, given the tremendous diversity of artists who charted at least one-hit-wonders. The strangest thing about the popular culture that manifested itself in the late 1990s was the democratic veil. But rewind your pop-culture clock about 15 years to a time when the post-Telecom Act foot-bound mainstream media wielded a juggernaut power over the music we heard, the videos that MTV broadcast, and the exact products we bought in bulk (no matter how many of those eventually landed in dumpsters and on Goodwill shelves). I say “arguably” because I believe to this day that anyone between 20 and 40 who claims they never liked a single neutron of ska-punk, rap-metal, or the “swing-revival” is not only essentialist but also a fucking liar.

For reasons not too difficult to figure out but complicated to explain (and even more difficult to defend), the recent turn of the century courted a handful of strange strains of arguably regrettable popular music. Music has no bad genres, only bad progenitors. This is a story about how a language barrier cleanly burned the “guilty” off a guilty pleasure.

Quarashi stick em up lyrics