Barenaked Ladies

So the Barenaked Ladies have been fairly pivotal in my life for nearly a decade now. Flashback: it’s the spring of 1999. I’m in eighth grade. I’m significantly shorter, lighter, and more of a social cripple. I’m part of the graduating class of that year, deeply horrified at the prospect of moving on to high school (the absolute peak of the adolescent storm, you see) and I get smacked with a yearbook info sheet to fill out. The usual questions are there: best experience (the part of the school day where I get to leave and not come back for about sixteen hours), what I’ll miss most (probably the cheap pizza every other Wednesday), my hobbies (uh…), and, of course, favorite song/band/artist/random noise/whatever.

Being a lad of a mere thirteen years of age, intensely sheltered and not terribly savvy at anything, I decided on just putting down the name of the song I had last heard on the radio when my mom was frantically driving me to school that morning. Before the sheet is handed in, the guy sitting next to me asks to take a look at what I wrote. As he was reading it, he made no facial expression whatsoever until he came across something that clearly disgusted him. “The Barenaked Ladies?!” he said, a sincere bit of shock evident in his voice (we were all too young for irony). “They blow.”

Yes, the Barenaked Ladies are pretty lame. The chit-chat on Talk to the Hand is pretty much proof of this. Between songs they deride (in decidedly not witty fashion) a front row concert-goer that was using a cell phone during a performance of one of their non-hit album tracks, make terribly unfunny jokes (a pornographic DVD, eh? Yuk yuk) and refer to themselves as “BNL” (an abbreviation/acronym that always made me cringe, even as a wee eighth grader who didn’t know exactly who John Lennon was). Of course, their songs are all over mainstream radio, adult alternative mainstream radio, mind you. What is less hip than that? They’re making some old, unhip, soulless record company execs a lot of money! (So did the Strokes though, so oh well.) Not to mention the phrase Talk to the Hand is pretty worn out and dry and unfunny and annoying and so 1998.

Damn it all, though, the Barenaked Ladies are endearing. Of all the post-grunge outfits to reach prominence in the late ’90s (though the band technically broke through in 1992 with their largely unsung classic, Gordon), the Barenaked Ladies stuck out with their irrelevant, laugh-it-all-off perspective. While Third Eye Blind, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Matchbox Twenty told their heartbreak stories with utter seriousness and teary-eyed conviction (really helping to lay the groundwork for the modern emo movement just as much as any underground band has), “One Week” was a song where the guy couldn’t even concentrate on his estranged girlfriend, preferring to instead ruminate on Chinese chickens, Aquaman, and samurai movies. Why? Because that girl was coming back to him eventually, no big deal. Contrast this with Stephen Jenkins continually wondering how it’s gonna be, Rob Thomas wanting to push you around (emotionally, that is), and Johnny Rzeznik writing mainly about not wanting the world to see him, teen pregnancy, and heroin addiction, and you’ll see why the Barenaked Ladies’ stance of “we’re just a bunch of goofy jerks!” always managed to set a different kind of mood whenever one of their songs was played on the radio for the tenth time that day.

Talk to the Hand sees “One Week” as the first song played, as if just to get it out of the way right out the gate (if the band themselves isn’t sick of it by now, given that they’ve had to play the song every show for nearly ten years, then my hat is off to them) and the rest of the show mixes older songs (“The Old Apartment,” “Be My Yoko Ono,” “Pinch Me,” “Brian Wilson”) with newer material (“Bank Job,” “Sound of Your Voice”), the set list predictably leaning a bit more towards the older stuff. The good news is that the new songs sit beside their older brothers and sisters pretty comfortably. The bad news is that Talk to the Hand, on the whole, feels a bit inessential. They’ve already had a live album (Rock Spectacle, quite the favorite among the hardcore fans), they’ve already had a greatest hits record, and to be honest, there’s probably better shows they could’ve released than this. Not that Talk to the Hand is a bad performance, mind you, but rather it feels more like a par performance, as if this is how about how good you can expect the band to be should you ever go see them. I’m sure the hardcore fans have bootlegs that they cling to tighter than this.

Forgive this completely ignorant statement, but I smell the phrase “contractual requirement”. Again, I’m speaking completely out of ignorance and nothing else.

The DVD itself is preferably to the CD for several reasons. It’s very well shot, it has decent extras, and you get to see the band’s onstage shenanigans (which, honestly, endears me more to them than the washed-up comic routines). If anything though, Talk to the Hand, lame title and all, is a fine reminder of what an impressive body of work the Steven Page/Ed Robertson song-writing team have created over the years. They didn’t play “Shoebox of Lies”, but no one’s perfect.

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