Listen To 'Teenage Dirtbag' With Me: Ruston Kelly On The Loser Anthem
A sensitive college dramedy in the age of the teen sex romp, Amy Heckerling's Loser hit theaters in July 2000 with a thud. It failed to earn back its $20 million budget, and by the time stars Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari reunited in American Pie 2 a year later it was as good as forgotten. The film's legacy might have ended there if not for one thing: Tucked into its run-of-the-mill alternarock soundtrack was a song by an unknown New York band, whose self-titled debut wouldn't even be out for another month. The track didn't sound like anything on the radio — rather, it sounded like everything on the radio.
For the first few bars of "Teenage Dirtbag," it's not clear what you're hearing is of any kin to rock music, as what sounds a busted cassette deck competes with what sounds like an MPC stuck in a washing machine. When a guitar finally arrives, it shuffles in smelling like hemp oil, treading an acoustic groove closer to Ani DiFranco or Dave Matthews than the missile attacks being conjured that year by Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit. The percussion is lite hip-hop pastiche, its DJ scratches and ghost notes rendered swagger-free by the tonnng of an overcranked snare. And later, when that coffee-shop guitar finally tastes the might of an overdrive pedal, the result is basically a hair ballad but for the skronky stoner riffs between each line. None of this should work, but somehow the collision of sounds from across the FM dial finds a strange equilibrium, and you might even be bobbing your head by the time the vocals enter and confuse things all over again.
In interviews, Wheatus singer and songwriter Brendan B. Brown of his adolescence in Northport, N.Y., where a much-publicized in 1984 had made it extra-hard to be a metalhead loner. "I found that it'd compress the time that you're actually having the s*** kicked out of you if you antagonized them by donning a girl voice." It's a choice that suits the song's dramatic narrative, one you'll recognize if you've seen a single movie about high school. The narrator is head over heels for his classmate Noelle, a stunner in Keds who (we're told) deserves better than her meathead boyfriend. Alas, as an unpopular nerd well outside the in-crowd, our hero pines away in secret until one night changes everything. It sounds so simple, and yet in execution every moment is specific, weird, and memorable. Brown sets the story in a kind of cracked teen poetry, which takes as a given that "Man, I feel like mold" is a normal way to say you're sad. There are zoo-crew sound effects in the vein of early Eminem, a brass chime cued to the line "She rings my bell." And there is the over-the-top fantasy of the climax, where Brown switches into character as Noelle, surprising the hero with a pair of Iron Maiden tickets and confessing, "I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby, like you."
