PicoBlog

It was easy to be a cynic in the 90s. There was something in the air: the President was caught in a stupid lie, the X-Files was on TV, and alternative rock took a world-weary, almost jaded turn. Indeed, as older bands like REM, Jane’s Addiction, and Depeche Mode became the mainstream, major labels started looking for the next big thing. Artists like Beck and Marilyn Manson were snapped up and pushed into heavy rotation, while smaller labels like SST, Factory Records, and IRS faded away. 

Meanwhile, Gregg Alexander was biding his time.

Alexander was a guy from Michigan who moved to LA to pursue a music career. He certainly looked the part: floppy bucket hat, faded t-shirt, track jacket zipped all the way up. Alexander was proficient on a handful of instruments and had been kicking around the alt-rock scene for over a decade. He released a couple of records as a solo act, but hadn’t managed to crack through. “Who signs these losers?” asked Allmusic’s WIlliam Ruhlmann in his review of Alexander’s second LP Intoxifornication.  

In 1997, Alexander and Danielle Brisebois formed The New Radicals together. He brought his chops as a musician and writer, while Brisebois - a former child actress who’d been on All in the Family - played keyboard and percussion, and wrote songs with Alexander. The rest of the band existed as a sort of collective: nobody was there permanently, but a lot of people left their fingerprints behind. They were snapped up by MCA Records, who released their first LP Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too a year later. 

While Brisebois and Alexander shared writing credits on “Someday We’ll Know,” almost all of the record was written solely by Alexander. The record is flush with 70s influences, big pop hooks and overdriven guitars. It starts with “Mother We Just Can’t Get Enough,” which mixes a jangling guitar riff, a liberal serving of percussion, and splashes of piano together, building up to a chorus that explodes with Alexander shouting at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile, “I Hope I DIdn’t Just Give Away the Ending” is a mid-tempo song, driven by piano and drums, but layered with instruments and vocals; it’s as lush a pop song as anything that came out that year.

But the album’s big hit and lasting contribution was “You Get What You Give,” the second track on the album and its lead single. It’s also the only other song Alexander shares a writing credit with: he wrote it with Rick Nowels, a professional songwriter who’d worked with everyone from Stevie Nicks to Celine Dion. It opens with a slight guitar pattern and a simple drum riff; after a few bars, Alexander counts the band in and kicks in with a yell. Soon the whole band’s in flight: guitars fly in out of nowhere, a piano starts pounding away, a bass pushes the music ahead.

The track’s all but laced with honey: it’s sticky, it’s sweet, one wants to bite into it right away. The vocals are double-tracked on the chorus and the way it builds up makes it perfect to sing along to. The video’s no slouch either, with people running wild through a mall. It’s a bright and sunny song: Alexander sings about how you have the music in you, that we’re all going to pull through.

The song’s message is one of optimism and hope, decidedly uncool ideas in the late 1990s. This is around the same time as Matthew Good Band’s song “Everything Is Automatic'' and its wry, cynical look at society: “Do you miss your TV / Do you miss yourself.” And Alanis Morissette dryly thanking terror and frailty. And here’s a song that’s telling you not to be cynical, not to get stressed. It’s all going to work out in the end.

Indeed, as the song winds down, Alexander takes aim at what’s dragging us down: “Health insurance, rip-off flying / FDA, big bankers buying.” But it’s the potshots at music industry phonies, as Alexander calls them, that drew attention: He calls out Beck, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. In a 1998 MTV interview with Kurt Loder, Manson threatened to crack open Alexander’s skull; Love’s answer has gone unrecorded. 

“You Only Get What You Give” was a smash hit. It went to number one here in Canada and was all over the radio and airwaves in late 1998; it did pretty well State-side too, hitting the top 40. But the New Radicals didn’t survive the song’s success, breaking up shortly after the album’s release. Alexander found it easier to work as a producer and professional songwriter, sometimes in tandem with Nowels. In 2003, the duo scored a massive hit with “The Game of Love,” a Santana track featuring Michelle Branch. More recently, Alexander and Brisebois’s song “Lost Stars” was nominated for an Academy Award.

But the real legacy of “You Only Get What You Give” came in 2021, over two decades after the band broke up, when Alexander and Brisebois (plus a bunch of session musicians) performed the song at Joe Biden’s inauguration. The song was a favourite of Biden’s son Beau and was recited at his funeral; it was a natural fit for the event, which went for a spirit of optimism after four years of dysfunction and anger.  

And really, what more could you ask for from a pop single?

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