I like “Teenage Dirtbag.” I adore it as a tune, and I like that it is had a bizarre, lengthy, and delicate arc as a beloved tune by different folks, too. (My band has been identified to cowl it ourselves, and it all the time will get the group going.)
I additionally love the lengthy and engaging story behind the tune. And I like the obsessively private relationship that Wheatus’s singer/songwriter Brendan B. Brown has with the tune. He appears to don’t have any compunctions about being thought of a one-hit marvel (with a tune that truly wasn’t even a success within the US). He is blissful and proud that folks adore it, and has obsessively recreated it time and time — initially to translate into different languages, but in addition to achieve management of the grasp tapes.
In any case these re-recordings, I suppose it was solely inevitable that he would rewrite the whole tune as a Christmas tune as properly. You possibly can hear above, or at Spotify, and many others.
‘Cos I am only a Christmas dirtbag, child
Yeah I am only a Christmas dirtbag, child
Santa forgot all about me, child
Tonight, ooh
My solely actual criticism has extra to do with the unique tune. Performers and DJs alike usually play or sing the primary line of the second verse (“Her boyfriend’s a dick”) after which awkwardly censor the subsequent (“He brings a gun to high school”). I actually perceive American sensitivities round gun violence, and notably college shootings. However (1) the boyfriend bringing a gun to high school is clearly demonstrative of him being a dick, so there is not any glorification right here; and (2), the tune was truly impressed partly by a real-life homicide that occurred in Brown’s hometown when he was a child (of which the dickish boyfriend is unsurprisingly not the perpetrator). This new Christmas model of the tune, nonetheless, rightly sidesteps each of those points with a line about Brown’s real-life kids truly getting the presents they need for Christmas:
Yeah, Liz acquired a doll
The one she was asking for
And Pete acquired all of it
A baseball bat and a ball
So I am each irritated at that public response to that stanza, and in addition, completely endeared by Brown reclaiming it and spinning it round into one thing genuinely candy and healthful.
That, and I simply want I might go see AC/DC at CBGB’s with Santa on Christmas, too.
