2003 Week
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week concludes with a look at a turning point in country music, where two smash hits daydreaming about getting away from it all helped make the beach as essential a Nashville vista as the dusty plain or the open road.
On August 25, 2012, Kenny Chesney officially declared the sovereignty of No Shoes Nation during a show at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. A banner was eventually hung among those honoring all the Patriots’ titles to commemorate Chesney’s initial acknowledgement, though the actual origins of his fanbase’s name are shrouded in mystery (it was mentioned explicitly at least as early as a June 2012 Billboard feature on the singer).
“No Shoes Nation is more than a state of mind,” Chesney explained in the press release for his 2017 album, Live in No Shoes Nation. “It’s the place we all come together for the music, the fun and each other.”
Whether or not you accept the legal autonomy of his shoeless (or more often, flip-flopped) fans, the decades Chesney has spent entwining country music and a specific type of geographically hazy beach vacation have fundamentally changed the genre. The tipping point came just under 20 years ago, on August 16, 2003: the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart was Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett‘s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” and the No. 2 song on the chart was Kenny Chesney’s “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems.” Two weeks earlier, Uncle Kracker’s breezy cover of “Drift Away” (whose chorus is often misheard as “give me the Beach Boys“) reached No. 9 on the Hot 100.
America, or at least its country radio-listening contingent, needed a break — and it hasn’t put down its margaritas (or put on its shoes) since Chesney and Jackson spent one sweaty, sunburned summer compelling country listeners to trade back roads for sand bars. Etching a new country radio formula in stone and inspiring hundreds of imitators, they also ensured some of their songs’ questionable, touristic language and imagery stayed in the genre’s canon.
Before No Shoes Nation established its borders, of course, there was the little hamlet of Margaritaville. The early-’00s beach country renaissance arrived about a quarter-century after Buffett — having flopped pretty hard trying to ride the coattails of the Texas outlaws into Nashville — carved out what would become a billion-dollar niche romanticizing the then-untamed Key West waterfront. Buffett, having grown up on the less-scenic Gulf shores of Mobile, Alabama, had some claim to the island-time lifestyle that he would brand so effectively.
His conversion experience, though, came courtesy of singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, who Buffett had met while trying to make it in Nashville. Walker, who lived in Miami at the time, led a down-on-his-luck Buffett around south Florida in typical vagabond fashion. Buffett fell in love with Key West, and told Walker to leave him there when he headed back to Miami. “I’d been a teenager on Bourbon Street in college, I knew New Orleans from childhood, and Key West just had that magic,” Buffett later told Texas Monthly.
After “Margaritaville” hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 — marking the singer-songwriter’s first, and still biggest, solo hit — Buffett was more than content to lean all the way into the light subversion of his beach-bum persona. With it, he was able to top the Adult Contemporary Airplay chart and reach No. 13 on Hot Country Songs, expanding his audience outside of Nashville by translating hippie nonchalance into a mode that even good hard-working folks could understand: a beach vacation.
There is an actual self-deprecating critique buried in “Margaritaville”: Buffett describes it as “wasting away,” after all, and a “lost” third verse observes tourists who “dream about weight loss” and “wish they could be their own boss” (tourists who sound a lot like most people listening to “Margaritaville”). But any reflection on what it might mean to actually escape the drudgery that makes frozen beverages so symbolic and seductive was clearly eclipsed by the fun of singing about margaritas.
Having forged a new sunny, breezy bridge between country music and pop — one that would eventually be coined “gulf and western” — Jimmy Buffett more or less played for the Parrotheads and explored different Margaritaville-themed ventures for the next 20 years. He never came close to the pop ubiquity he found with “Margaritaville” — until 2003, that is, when his unlikely compatriot Alan Jackson wondered, “What would Jimmy Buffett do?”
Jackson, who made his name through the ’90s as the most agreeable kind of neo-traditional country singer-songwriter, isn’t the kind of artist one would typically associate with “beach country” — even post-“Somewhere.” But the Georgia native claimed Buffett as an influence prior to their most familiar collaboration — his 1992 signature song “Chattahoochee” is about frolicking around a body of water, after all. “I’ve always been a big Jimmy Buffett fan,” Jackson wrote in the liner notes for his 1999 album Under The Influence, which included his first collaboration with Buffett on a cover of “Margaritaville.” “I like his music and the fact that he does what he wants to do.” (Billboard called the cover “a bit jarring.”)
In spite of the surprise that greeted his “Margaritaville” cover, Jackson went looking for another good duet option for him and Buffett — and came up with the most successful single of his career with “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.” “When I got the song it sounded like Buffett, so I called him up and asked him if he’d do it with me,” Jackson told the AP in 2003. “We cut the track in Nashville, then I flew to Key West and did the vocals [at Buffett’s Shrimp Boat Studio].” Buffett was not enormously invested in the song: he didn’t go to the video shoot (hence the live interlude), nor did he talk to the press at all about it as it skyrocketed up the charts — and it made no difference whatsoever. The song became not just one of the biggest of the year, spending eight weeks atop the country charts, but of the decade, a timeless drinking anthem that’s more about imagining a carefree beach vacation than actually getting to go on one.
Chesney first publicly embraced Buffett a little earlier than Jackson, with the late 1998 release of his breakthrough hit “How Forever Feels.” The singer-songwriter, raised in a small town near Knoxville, had as solid of country music bona fides as anyone in Nashville. But they hadn’t helped him break away from the pack of nearly indistinguishable mid-’90s cowboy-hatted young men attempting to replicate Garth Brooks’ success. “How Forever Feels,” which spent six weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart, was the reason people started to learn his name.
The song, which was written by Wendell Mobley and Tony Mullins, has a decidedly country aesthetic — fiddle, pedal steel and all — and is about a decidedly country topic (marriage). But it opens with a little tribute to Buffett: “Big orange ball, sinkin’ in the water/ Toes in the sand, couldn’t get much hotter…Now I know how Jimmy Buffett feels.” That, along with a video shot on a picturesque St. Thomas beach in which Chesney alternates between his Brooksian black cowboy hat and a backwards baseball hat and sunglasses, was enough to cement his brand as “beach guy.” As “Forever” climbed the Billboard charts, Chesney added a cover of “Margaritaville” to his own set, and started tossing beach balls into the crowd when he played his single. (Earlier in 1998, Garth himself also scored a Buffett-influenced hit of his own, with the land-weary “Two Pina Coladas.”)
It didn’t really matter that “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” and any number of other non-explicitly “beach” songs became hits for Chesney soon after — his fate was cast with his first mention of “oil tannin’ señoritas.” “Before I was just in a big bowl of guys,” Chesney told the AP in 2004. “You’ve got to find your avenue, your way to separate yourself. I think for the first time in my career I was able to pull myself out of that ditch and be known as more than just a country hat act who was singing the same old songs everybody else was singing.”
Seemingly disinterested in messing with success, Chesney and his team put out a greatest hits compilation in 2000 that featured the first of several iconic country-beach-kitsch album covers. Chesney, fully clothed in a black cowboy hat and white button-down shirt, is pictured emerging from the ocean — despite the fact that only one of the included songs even mentioned the beach (on the back, he was similarly submerged while wearing overalls). The album became his first to top the Country Albums chart, and has since gone platinum five times over.
Releasing No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems in 2002, then, was almost like playing with house money for the Chesney camp. The album followed a now-familiar formula: a couple overtly beachy tunes, combined with a slew of more familiar country radio sounds (and a Bruce Springsteen cover, lest anyone question his range, or right to integrate rock elements into his performances at bigger and bigger venues). The cover featured Chesney in a black tank top and seemingly impractical cowboy hat on the sand, so that you knew his latitude and attitude before even listening to the album.
Surprisingly, the title track — Chesney’s most overtly island-themed tune to date (note the ukulele) — was No Problems‘ final single. “The islands,” Chesney intones during the video’s opening monologue. “They’re the one place where you can truly be as you are — where it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or how you make your life, you’re just there, with the sun, the sand, the sea, and the locals.” In place of Buffett’s hazy pairing of self-indulgence and deprecation, Chesney offers a manifesto. (Chesney had actually passed “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which was originally offered to him by writers Don Rollins and Jim “Moose” Brown before Jackson snapped it up.)
Together, “Somewhere” and “No Problems” distill how Chesney and Jackson helped retool Buffett’s beachy bohemia into a core element of contemporary country music — how they translated its hippie dropout energy into something that fit easily within the world of Nashville’s moralized conservatism.
“Beach bum” is not a lifestyle for either, but an escape from the unpleasant but necessary rigors of doing one’s job: “I’m gettin’ paid by the hour and older by the minute, my boss just pushed me over the limit,” Jackson sings, “I’d like to call him something; I think I’ll just call it a day.” In place of Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” we get an anthem for taking this job and swallowing it…in the form of a tasty frozen beverage. Chesney has been “working six days a week,” while Jackson hasn’t “had a day off now in over a year” — they’ve earned this indulgence, which could hardly be deemed anything close to “wastin’ away.”
The darker side of all three artists’ take on coastal escapes comes with a relentlessly casual attitude towards “locals,” as Chesney calls them in the aforementioned monologue, treating them like an unchanging, natural, impersonal force – akin to the sun, the sand and the sea. Most often, the beachy escapes imagined in “Somewhere,” “No Problems” and the dozens of copycats since are uninhabited except for sexy nameless “senoritas;” they have no issue, then, with somewhat hackneyed countrified takes on reggae and calypso.
In these songs, there is a clear sense that the intended audience is people who view Mexico or Jamaica as a place to vacation, not as their home — and those listeners seem to feel entitled to those beaches and margaritas, regardless of the potential consequences of their perpetual visits for their inhabitants. Margaritaville resorts stretch throughout the Caribbean and Central America and press uncomfortably up against the residents of those actual countries where people live all year long.
Chesney released “When The Sun Goes Down,” a beachy duet with Uncle Kracker, in 2004 — the first of many attempts to follow up “No Problems.” Buffett would lean into his way-belated Nashville success the following year with an album of country collaborations called License to Chill, often quipping about getting his first country No. 1 and his first award (the CMA for Vocal Event of the Year) long after becoming a household name. “I was thinking of doing a record like this for a long time,” Buffett told the Boston Globe at the time. “It certainly has not gone unnoticed by me that I was either getting mentioned as an influence or was included in song lyrics by a lot of country singers.”
“I think everybody’s a Jimmy Buffett wannabe,” Chesney said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2005. “Deep down, Jimmy was always a country artist. His songs had a country soul to them.”
Now, it’s the rare country album that doesn’t have some sort of vacation-themed song or allusion to mix up the drinking tunes, whether it’s Dierks Bentley’s “Somewhere on a Beach,” Morgan Wallen’s “Sand In My Boots,” or Luke Combs going “deep sea señorita fishing down in Panama.” The Buffett aesthetic and ethos was, via Chesney and Jackson, turned into yet another familiar Music Row formula; a theme that allows for No Shoes Nation to treat a concert like a more affordable version of the kinds of vacations they’re singing along to songs about from the Sandbar (what Chesney tours call the pit).
“You can call him a Kmart Buffett all you want, but give Chesney credit,” as Sean Daly put it in the St. Petersburg Times. “He’s coupled boat-drink dreams with blue-collar reality, a simple formula with staggering 21st century pull.”
While Jackson, ever a traditionalist, hasn’t done much with his beachy cred, Chesney has maintained all along that his ever-growing vacation anthem oeuvre is about more than just him keeping a good thing going.
“The people who believe this is all an invention of clever marketing have missed the point,” he told Billboard in 2007. “Not that there hasn’t been some great marketing, but … we don’t put a check out there I can’t cash. When people talk about the tropical lifestyle, the beach, summer, friends, we absolutely put that out there…But we didn’t just pull it out of the air. That’s my life and how I live.” If the country charts of the past two decades are any indication, more and more country fans wish they could live that way too.
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here as we catch up with some old hitmaker friends we might not have heard from in a little bit — Lumidee, The Ataris, Eamon and Electric Six — to reminisce about old times, and see what they’ve been up to since we last spoke.
If the clap-clap-clap-clap beat of Nicki Minaj’s latest single “Red Ruby da Sleeze” gives you straight-up 2003 vibes, there’s good reason: the song leans heavily on a sampled hook and riddim from Lumidee’s breakout hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh).” No one was more surprised by the request from the Queen of Barbie Tingz than Lumidee herself.
“It was random! It was an email I got. They need a rushed approval,” the Harlem native explains. “I do get these emails a lot through my administrator. But I’m reading and I’m like, ‘Oh wait – Nicki Minaj?’ Obviously I’m excited! Like, who’s not a Nicki Minaj fan?”
She adds, “I got even more excited because I have a 14-year-old daughter and she’s a Barb! She goes to war for Nicki Minaj. So I’m like, if this happens, you know all the cool points I’m gonna get?”
The solid-gold staying power of “Never Leave You” can be chalked up to the combined appeal of the then-18-year-old Lumidee’s sincere pledge of devotion in the lyrics, the song’s hypnotic “Uh-ohhh! Uh-ohhhh!” refrain and the early-2000s popularity of the Diwali Riddim employed on the track. It was one of three songs to utilize the very same dancehall beat and hit the Hot 100’s top 20 between the spring and summer of 2003.
Here, Lumidee explains the humble origins of her evergreen smash that first dominated the airwaves two decades ago.
Who she is: Lumidee Cedeño, who was raised in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood and dreamed of being a performer from an early age.
“I always was inspired by people like Mary J. Blige and Missy Elliott growing up,” the singer, who is of Puerto Rican descent, explains. “And Missy with her wordplay, the words were so simple and relatable, but then fun.”
“Never Leave You” sprung out of an entirely different track altogether: “I was a year into recording music with this DJ [Tedsmooth] from my neighborhood who worked a lot of clubs,” Lumidee recalls. “We had a record already called ‘Honestly’ and it was a little more slow-paced. It’s also on Almost Famous, my first album [which would be released later that year]. It got some club reaction, but it’s not a club kind of record. So in my mind I’m like, ‘Let’s do a remix’.”
Enter the Diwali Riddim: Jamaican dancehall producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden crafted the beat heard on “Never Leave You,” the above-mentioned “Get Busy” by Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go,” a No. 11 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. All three were released in 2003.
“I didn’t really like the beat they built around [‘Honestly’] at first,” Lumidee explains. “So one day I’m in the studio and this Diwali riddim is hot at the moment. So the guy I’m signed to is like, ‘We gotta jump on this.’ [I was] having problems in my relationship. I wasn’t in the mood to write, but I was like, ‘Never Leave You’ would go to this [beat] on the remix. My producer places it on there and it’s a little bit off. He tweaks the beat a little bit and it kind of just sat in there. We both were like, ‘I think it works!’ That’s literally how it happened.”
The relationship that inspired the lyrics: “It was a guy I met in my neighborhood, just walking by. We had some friends in common. We hung out a few times, but he kind of just disappeared. I didn’t have an ego, but I had pride and I wasn’t going to call him if he wasn’t going to call me. We ran into each other again and we were together [from there]. So ‘Never Leave You’ was pretty much about the back-and-forth between us. It really was a genuine love song.”
She continues, “I wanna say my whole first album and the second album were based on this guy. I have two kids from this guy! It’s weird what time will do. Now it’s 20 years later and the relationship is over, but it’s not sad. When things end it feels weird, but it’s always a new chapter. Every lesson comes with a little bit of pain, a little bit of struggle.”
The first time she heard “Never Leave You” on the radio: “I was in a car with [DJ Tedsmooth],” she recalls. “I had a couple of records that they would play on mix shows. I had a few moments like that. But this one was different because the first time it played, it was like, “OK. Cool. Then it played again and the reaction from the DJs was like, ‘If you don’t have this song in your back pocket right now, you’re crazy!’ It was in clubs and then people started calling the radio and requesting it.”
Her big break: With “Never Leave You” growing organically out of club and radio play, major labels came knocking. Lumidee eventually signed with Universal Records. Being a teenager at the time, however, she admits that she was green as far as how the business side of the industry worked. And when it came down to it, she only had two weeks to cobble together her first LP, Almost Famous.
“Pretty much, the album was just the first songs I’d ever written and recorded. We really didn’t do anything new for it,” she explains. “At this time, ‘Never Leave You’ is already blowing up everywhere. I’m doing two or three shows every weekend and things are taking off. All these record labels are calling, and I’m just going wherever they lead me, because I had no clue how the record business worked. I was signed to this DJ [Tedsmooth] and I was just being guided. I went wherever he took me and that’s what it was.
“People are like, ‘Why would you do that?’” she continues. “They don’t have a clue unless they’re in it. And you’re so excited as an artist, and it’s that thing of — you don’t wanna lose this as an opportunity. It’s now or never. So you wind up signing things maybe you should read over. But I have to say, even with all of that, it still has been such a tremendous blessing. I haven’t had to do anything but music since. Even with the not-so-great deal, I still got mine in there and it’s great.”
What happened next: Free from her deal with Universal Records after Almost Famous, Lumidee found herself in high demand outside of the States as a featured vocalist.
“The best thing that happened for me after [my first album] was going overseas, doing these shows and working with other artists,” she says. “I just kept getting a lot of bookings. I signed with a German label the second time around. We did this record, ‘Sientelo’. It was a reggaetón track with Sir Speedy and it was a No. 1 record in France. It was actually with another Puerto Rican artist, but it was a No. 1 record in France. The randomness of it all! Then we did the FIFA World Cup song [“Dance!” with Fatman Scoop] in 2006.”
Lumidee put out her second LP Unexpected in 2007 and followed it up over the next few years with mixtape releases.
Her recent output: Lumidee stayed productive during the pandemic and dropped her third album, 1013, in 2021. It’s a melodic set, lush with smooth, synth-heavy cuts that find the 38-year-old singer exploring musical territory outside of the R&B genre, thanks to a new collaborator.
“I got with this producer [Ibra-Heem] and was just using him as an engineer. I didn’t realize he was a good producer until one day he [said], ‘Let me play you something’,” Lumidee recalls. “So the first record we did was a Christmas record called ‘Slay Ride’. I’d had the song written, but nobody could get the beat right. So I did it with him and he just locked right in with it. We just kept working. We called [the album] 1013 because we were both born on October 13th. We’re both Libras.”
The singer makes sure to point out that she’s exactly where she wants to be, creatively. “This is the type of music, to be honest, that I listen to; that I vibe to on my own. Even though it’s still very much me, Lumidee, it’s a little more grown and a little more evolved.”
Enter Nicki Minaj: After receiving the request to sample “Never Leave You” from Minaj’s camp, Lumidee wasn’t sure when “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” would actually arrive.
“Obviously it has to go through a lot of different approvals, and I’m waiting to hear back,” she says. “Then I got a random call at 3:00 in the morning from a friend of mine, and he’s like, “Listen, b–ch — you need to go online right now! Nicki Minaj just posted this!” It was a visual of her doing the record. I was like, “Oh, shit! This is really happening.” I definitely woke up my daughter at three in the morning like, look at this! She’s like, ‘Oh my god — this is so good for me! I mean, it’s good for you. But it’s also good for me!’”
On her 20-year journey since “Never Leave You”: “I gotta say, I feel lucky. I feel blessed. But I’ve definitely been through some s–t,” Lumidee laughs. “And no one has made it easy for me in this business. But I’ve noticed that if you stick to your guns and you keep going, you start seeing the blessings. I went through a lot of shit with this record, you know, and a lot of beatdowns. But at the same time, people loved it and I feel like the people that loved it — they’re still out here. It’s still surviving through them.”
Up next: Lumidee is scheduled to perform in Las Vegas on May 6 during Usher’s Lovers & Music festival.
The pandemic not only sidelined punk rockers the Ataris from performing for a long stretch; frontman Kristopher Roe found himself hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.
““I got it in March 2020 for five weeks and then I got it again in July 2020 for five weeks, just by being in the same room as my now-ex-wife for 15 minutes,” Roe notes as he discusses his band’s 2003 major label breakthrough album, So Long, Astoria. ”She works as a doctor, and it was just one of those things where she was around sick people a lot.”
A few days later, however, Roe is happily on the phone describing “a warm-up show” he and the current lineup of The Ataris performed near Eureka, Oregon in early March. It was his first time on stage in nearly a half-decade. “Overall, for not having played together in the same room since 2019 and just jumping right on stage, it was really good,” he says.
A few weeks later, the 2003 lineup of The Ataris reunited to commemorate the two decades that have now passed since So Long, Astoria with live performances of the full album at Los Angeles’ Wiltern theater (on April 7) and House of Blues in Anaheim, California (April 8). Ahead of those, Roe discusses the Gold-certified LP and unexpected success of the band’s cover of “The Boys Of Summer” 20 years ago.
Who they are: The Ataris, a band formed in Anderson, Indiana by Kristopher Roe during his teenage years in the mid-1990s. “I would record all my own music in my bedroom in the small town of Anderson, Indiana, where I grew up,” the singer and guitarist recalls. “We’re talking about from age 13 to about age 17 or 18.”
How they first got signed: “I would go to shows around the midwest, but specifically at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, Ohio,” Roe explains. “I remember it was Friday the 13th of September in 1996. I went to a show with my friend. It was The Queers, The Vandals, the The. Mr. T Experience — old Lookout Records bands.”
Roe’s friend chatted up a roadie that evening who informed them that Joe Escalante and Warren Fitzgerald, of California punk outfit The Vandals, were forming their own label called Kung Fu Records. “I always had my demo tape with me and I would give it to bands that I would see,” Roe says. Some time later, he received a letter from Kung Fu, who subsequently flew the young musician to California.
After the release of debut Ataris album Anywhere but Here in 1997, Roe added band members Marco Peña on guitar, Mike Davenport on bass and Chris Knapp on drums. John Collura eventually replaced Peña, and that lineup would six years later record So Long, Astoria. “We just went out and toured. You know, we got in the van and did it like the bands that we loved, DIY-style. We would just do the weekend thing and play every place we could.”
From an indie to a major: Sensing that The Vandals and Kung Fu had “kind of given up” on his band, Roe convinced the label to let The Ataris record an EP to be released by Fat Wreck Chords. The song “San Dimas” was included on a free mail-order compilation by the rival indie label. “That was the first gateway to The Ataris for most people,” Roe points out.
He adds, “We had a three-record contract with Kung Fu and we were still kind of hampered by the fact that the label always suffered good distribution. We would be on tour and people would be like, ‘Man, we can’t find your records’. So people would mail-order them.”
After cultivating notable buzz from years of touring, other labels, including Columbia Records, began to talk to wine and dine Roe.
“I asked my friend Glen Phillips, who was in the band Toad the Wet Sprocket, what his experience was like on Columbia,” Roe recalls. “He was like, ‘Dude, I gotta tell you, for a label that just took what we did and nurtured it and let us do our thing, they were great’. There were definitely labels that were throwing bigger money around, but I really wanted to just go to a label that would let us continue to do what we did and let me have full creative control to do my thing.”
Covering “The Boys Of Summer”: Though first So Long, Astoria single “In This Diary” brought the band alt-rock radio success, it would be The Ataris’ cover of Don Henley classic “The Boys Of Summer” that launched them into the mainstream.
“I recorded that song because it was a tribute to my grandmother. I would go down to Florida to visit my dad’s mom and dad when my parents got divorced. So my mom saw me to the gate and put me on a plane, and then my grandmother met me at the other side. It was really rainy, so I couldn’t get out and do the things you do as a kid. I was stuck inside my grandparents’ little trailer park home in Largo, Florida. My grandmother, being the great woman she was, said, ‘Let me take you out to the local department store. You can pick out one record and listen to it while you’re here’.”
Roe’s album of choice that day was Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast. He recalls, “I’d always tape songs off the radio with my little jambox and I loved the melancholy of [“The Boys Of Summer”]. When my grandmother passed away in 2001 I just thought, ‘Man, I really wanna cover that song as a tribute to her’.”
The single that almost was: “My Reply” was originally intended to be the second single released off So Long, Astoria.
“It was a real personal song about a girl who had written us a letter and had been in and out of the hospital,” Roe explains. “We had this treatment written for the video and everything, and one of the heads of radio at Columbia had gotten wind of some shake-ups starting to happen at the label. He thought, well, [‘The Boys Of Summer’] is already gonna be a hit, because it was a hit before. So he thought he took that song to radio behind our back. We were like, ‘Can they do that?’ We were green to that. Of course they can!”
How he views “The Boys Of Summer” now: “It’s a great song. The rest is history, and I’m honored that people related to it and liked our version of it. [Los Angeles station] KROQ still plays it to this day. It’s surreal. I think it was the only thing in my career I had no say in, but I’ve learned to embrace it. You can’t fuck with the writing team of Don Henley and Mike Campbell.”
What happened next: Roe and his bandmates pushed to evolve their sound for their 2007 follow-up, Welcome the Night. “We just wanted to continue doing what we felt was our next organic step,” he says. “There were a lot more effects pedals. We were incorporating a lot more of those big, atmospheric echo-y kind of breakdowns in the instrumental parts of the songs. Jawbreaker always did that in their songs.”
Unfortunately, the band’s creative process collided with Columbia, and every other record label fighting an uphill battle against illegal downloading at the time. “We were recording Welcome the Night, and we started to see more and more of our crew at Sony being let go or going to other jobs,” Roe says. “That was the time where they were trying to figure out new ways to get people to continue to buy CDs. But we had this really amazing thing happen where we talked to the head of Sony and they ended up letting us go.”
The Ataris moved over to U.K. label Sanctuary for the release of Welcome the Night, but the band experienced déjà vu. “The same thing happened to them about six months after the album was out,” Roe explains. “We toured, but the album never really got a chance. Sanctuary folded and decided they were only going to do back catalogs because putting out new records wasn’t lucrative for them anymore.”
The Ataris now: For the next 10 years, Roe steadily remained on the road with a newer lineup of The Ataris.
“Pre-pandemic, I would go out for two or three months at a time,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to balance that out. The good news is I’ve always maintained friendships with everyone, and that’s why we were able to come back around for the 20th anniversary of So Long, Astoria. I feel like that album was really the first time I was able to be aware of what my strong points were as a songwriter. I feel like I was able to really dig a lot deeper and write these descriptive stories. I’m proud that I was able to make this time capsule of this period of my life.”
When Eamon’s expletive-riddled debut single “F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)” dropped on the masses like one giant F bomb in late 2003, one thing was apparent: You did not want to be the one to do the 20-year-old Staten Islander dirty in a relationship. In just under four minutes, smooth crooner drops the king of all four-letter words no less than 21 times during the crass breakup ballad.
“The label had me go with the angle that I was heartbroken. But the truth is, I was a smart-ass kid who was always into shock value for entertainment purposes,” Eamon, now 39, admits. “And also, I was a dirty dog as a kid with the girls. I was always on the other side of heartbreak — the kind of guy that I pray the Lord keeps far away from my daughters! Anyway, I flipped the script and wrote it from the heartbroken perspective. So technically it’s not a true story.”
Finding a direct avenue to distribute his music wasn’t an easy road for Eamon in 2003. He recalls, “As far as labels, every single one — and we went to tons of them — told us the same thing: ‘We love the songs, but this music has no shot at radio. It’s impossible’.”
In the end, all it took to turn the tide was for one influential New York DJ to give the song a spin on air.
Who he is: Eamon Doyle, purveyor of tunes in the genre of Ho-wop — aka “doo-wop, ‘60s and ‘70s soul and hip hop.”
His early influences: “Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers were by far my biggest inspiration,” he says. “I can go on and on about various ’50’s doo-wop acts and ’60s soul acts that influenced me so much. Especially since I was just coming out of singing lead with my father’s doo-wop group [The Elations] and performing alongside many of the legendary ’50s and ’60s groups. I recorded much of my first album when I was 16 and 17. My first single was written and recorded when I was 16, but didn’t get my record deal until I was 19. The oldies and hip hop heavily shaped me as an artist in my teen years.”
But doo-wop wasn’t the only genre that caught the singer’s ear while growing up. “Being a proud Staten Islander, I was heavily influenced by Wu-Tang,” Eamon notes.
On the use of explicit language in lyrics to his early songs: “As an Italian-Irish teenager in Staten Island, I was just writing how we communicated,” says Eamon. “I will say, though, I was telling my producer Milk [Dee] at the time that it was crazy he had so much faith in [‘F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)’]. I believed it wouldn’t hit like he thought it would because of the language. I didn’t have the vision that him and Mark [Passey, who co-wrote the song] had.”
His big break: While Eamon was between the ages of 16 and 19, his team trotted the singer’s music out to dozens of labels, including Jive Records, who he eventually signed with. But Jive wasn’t ready to bite at first.
“Their reaction was, ‘The music is great, but we can’t see the vision of how this is gonna work’,” Eamon explains. “So, the CEO of the production company I was signed to, Nat Robinson of First Priority Music, had a relationship that went back a long time with Troi Torain, also known as Star from The Star & Buckwild Morning Show on [New York City station] Hot 97 at the time.”
Initially, Robinson played Torain the clean version of Eamon’s song — “for radio purposes” — but got a pass.
“But before Nat left the meeting, Star looked at the CD demo and asked, ‘What’s the dirty version sound like?’” says Eamon. “He proceeded to play it in the meeting and flipped out. He went and did his own edit, which consisted of loud beeps over the expletives, and told Nat he’d break it the next morning. The next day rolled around and the request line was so out of control that he played it eight times. Almost every label that turned us down called us and wanted to talk about a deal. The rest is history.”
Eamon’s grandmother was beside him when he first heard the song on the radio: “My parents were at work, so I was downstairs with my grandmother in her apartment – which is so sentimental because I just lost her a couple days ago,” the singer reminisces. “[She was] my second mom. Star introduces the record with an incredible introduction, as only Star could do – and the chills, the goosebumps and of course the hollering was heard through the whole block. Like I said, he played it seven more times in a four-hour radio program! So it was a feeling of ecstasy because I knew we had something special on our hands.”
“F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)” was so special, in fact, that it hit No. 1 in over a dozen countries, including the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. Stateside, the song peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and helped propel Gold-certified parent album I Don’t Want You Back to No. 7 on the Billboard 200.
He got an “F.U.R.B.” response: On the heels of the global success of “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)”, fellow Staten Island singer Nicole Francine Aiello, aka Frankee, claimed to be the cheating ex-girlfriend Eamon lyrically admonished on his hit song. In 2004, she released sound-alike answer single “F.U.R.B. (F U Right Back)”, which proved to be just as packed with colorful language. It played out like a poetic pop soap opera. However, Eamon insists he had no idea who Frankee was.
“I’ve never even met the girl,” the singer says. “It’s funny, because I thought the song was really amusing when I first heard it. But then the whole ordeal got really annoying … So many interviews had the question, ‘What is it like to have your ex make a rebuttal song?’ That was frustrating, because I wanted to talk about music instead of a lie that had no foundation in truth whatsoever. It is what it is, though. I made money off of it, because it’s no different than Weird Al re-doing a song.”
Frankee started a trend: “There were rebuttals from all around the world,” Eamon recalls. “So many different countries had girls putting out rebuttal songs saying that they were my ex. The best by far though was a girl from Philly. I got to speak to her once and she was good people. I wish I could find the song, because it was the best rebuttal out of all of them.”
What happened next: Eamon found that his sophomore LP, Love & Pain, didn’t receive the same push as its predecessor. “At the time, I was extremely disappointed,” he explains, adding that it “kind of sucked that they put ‘F–k It’ as a bonus song on the CD release, when that was just extremely successful only 18 months ago. They never even released the album in America. There’s so many layers to what happened there, though.”
Eamon also found himself in an extremely dark space in his personal life. “At that point I was self-destructing because I was so empty,” he says. “I believe the Lord let me destroy myself with isolation and addiction for that period of my life and the next four years that followed. It truly brought me to my knees four years later. I just [barely] got by handling success as a 19 year old. I don’t know what would’ve happened if it happened again a couple years later for the Love & Pain album. I might not be here today.”
He turned his life and his music around: After locking himself in a hotel for a year to “cut off the world,” Eamon was at peace with a decision to quit music in 2011. Then he was offered a deal with an independent label. It proved to be another setback “because of [a contractual situation].”.
“It didn’t end well, because of situations I won’t get into. It kept me stagnant for a few more years,” says Eamon. “Finally in 2017, I dug back into that time in that hotel room and a multitude of other experiences, and released my first album in 10 years, Golden Rail Motel.”
That LP, as well as its 2022 follow-up, No Matter The Season, saw Eamon return to the doo-wop music that inspired him at a young age. “These albums are my proudest work, my best work by far in my opinion and the happiest I’ve ever been with making music,” he says. “It’s truly me. If something were to happen to me, heaven forbid, I would want people to be able to go back to [No Matter The Season] and experience what my soul was screaming out. My goal in the new chapter of my career is, every time I record something, I impact you in ways you didn’t think was possible.”
What’s next: Eamon has recorded a Christmas album that he says will see a release in the fourth quarter of this year. “It’s an incredibly special record that my late grandmother had been pushing me to do for years. It hurts that she won’t see it come out, but I’m grateful I got to play it for her and she heard what she inspired me to do. Other than that, I’m always recording. I’m putting together songs little by little in hopes to make the greatest album that I’ll ever make in my career. The genesis of it is off to an amazing start.”
Detroit rockers Electric Six shook the disco’s rafters with their debut single “Danger! High Voltage” and, in the process, landed at the lofty heights of No. 2 in the U.K. Blocking them from crowning the chart in early January 2003: Girls Aloud, the wildly successful ‘00s pop act who were enjoying the tail-end of a four-week reign with their own first outing, “The Sound of the Underground.”
“I know it wasn’t close. I think they had like triple the sales,” Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine recalls. “But to debut at No. 2 like that, I’ll take it.”
To be fair, Girls Aloud had the strength of a full season’s exposure on U.K. TV series Popstars: The Rivals behind them. But Valentine and his bandmates had their own secret weapon in tow on their first major release: uncredited vocals by fellow Michigan native Jack White, who often rubbed elbows with the members of Electric Six in their respective late-1990s salad days in Detroit’s now defunct Gold Dollar Bar.
“Our guitar player had the idea to call in Jack to do a call and response kind of thing. It was before [the White Stripes] had blown up,” Valentine laughs. “I really, really doubt, had they already gotten big, he would have done it.”
Following “Danger! High Voltage,” Electric Six’s comedic punk romp “Gay Bar” became yet another top five smash in the U.K. and further fueled the band’s cult following in the U.S., though the band never found major chart success in their home country. Below, Valentine looks back on the year that put his band on the global map.
Who they are: Dick Valentine (real name: Tyler Spencer) initially formed Electric Six with gents from his former high school, including Cory Martin (drums), Anthony Selph (lead guitar), Joe Frezza (rhythm guitar) and Steve Nawara (bass). Since 2003, the band has undergone several lineup changes, with Valentine remaining the sole constant member.
“The band started when I was 24 in 1996,” he explains. “I graduated from the University of Michigan and moved back to Detroit, kind of aimless. I had a copywriter job at an ad agency. Doing the band was more of an escape for me. I didn’t realize at the time that I lived in a city with such a vibrant rock scene.”
The band’s original name: The Wildbunch. Alas, a collective of British DJs had staked their claim on the name by the time Valentine and his bandmates signed a deal with indie label XL Recordings.
“We were forced to huddle and come up with a new name pretty quickly,” says Valentine. “We had like two months to get it done and we were bickering back and forth. Electric Six — somebody said it. Nobody knew what it meant, but nobody threatened to quit. It was so neutral and so harmless. And it doesn’t mean anything. It didn’t offend anybody and that’s why we kept it.”
Their big break: “It was really easy for us to get gigs around [Detroit] and it took off pretty quickly, locally. That said, we kind of struggled to get out of Detroit,” notes Valentine. “We never really toured – we didn’t really have the money or the means or anybody putting our stuff out to make that happen. Then five or six years later, the White Stripes happened and we were totally in the right place at the right time. And not just us; pretty much every other band in Detroit got looked at or got signed.”
The initial spark of “Danger! High Voltage”: Despite their local success and the cadre of promising songs in their set like “Gay Bar,” Valentine briefly split from his bandmates. He explains, “I took a job out in Los Angeles for about a year. We took a hiatus. I came back around Y2K and we wrote ‘High Voltage’. We had a riff that had been lying around and I just put the words to it.”
Along comes Jack White: “Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell!” thunders Dick Valentine in the opening lyrics of “Danger! High Voltage.” The next three minutes of the dance-rock jam wind up being a musical duologue between the Electric Six frontman and one “John S. O’Leary,” aka Jack White.
“He came in and had a good time doing it,” Valentine says. “He didn’t wanna sing anything about Taco Bell at the time. He didn’t want to be affiliated with anything corporate. But he came in and did the song and that was that. I don’t know if it was the fact that he was on it or if it was that it had that sound that everyone was looking for, but it obviously became the lead single.”
Devo helped the band whip together another hit…sort of: For follow-up single “Gay Bar,” the innuendo-crammed video saw Valentine playing a multitude of writhing Abraham Lincolns in various states of undress. And the lyrics, by his own account, were a breeze to write.
“The repetitive guitar riff, I’d had for a while. We were at our local bar one night and the song ‘Girl U Want’ by Devo came on the jukebox. I’m drunk and it’s loud and people are talking. I couldn’t really hear the lyrics that well. I thought [Devo singer Mark] Mothersbaugh was saying ‘It’s just a girl, just a girl in a gay bar!’ But it’s actually ‘girl you want’. I misheard the lyric, so I was like, I’ll write a song about a girl at a gay bar. It’s not a very complicated piece of songwriting. It wrote itself in about a minute.”
What happened next: Electric Six moved from indie label XL to Warner Bros. for their 2005 sophomore LP Señor Smoke. Valentine recalls, “That was a situation where the guy who signed us left the company shortly after. We got left in limbo. There was a lot of, ‘We want another ‘Gay Bar’.’ And there wasn’t another ‘Gay Bar’ on that record. We had songs like ‘Jimmy Carter’, and they’d be like, ‘No, no, no — you can’t be a serious band. You have to be a funny band’.”
Eventually the band found a home on another indie, Metropolis Records, where they remain signed to this day.”We’ve put out like 14 records [with Metropolis] and it’s just been a lot easier to turn in whatever record we want and go out on tour, sell them at the merch table and be more of a touring band.”
Twenty years later, Valentine and the current lineup of Electric Six have steadily remained on the road. “Other than Covid, the only time I had a sizable break was between Fire and Señor Smoke,” says Valentine. “It was different then because the thought was like, ‘You’re gonna write more hits. You’re gonna go in and you’re gonna duplicate what you just did’. Then that didn’t work out on the second album. We became much more of a DIY band, just home-recording, and that’s really worked for us. We’ve kind of built up a cult following that way. That was a weird time because it was the last time there was pressure to write a hit — which we’ve never had since then. And it feels great.”
Coming up: Electric Six will tour in Canada and the UK in June and July. “Then I don’t think we go out in the States again until like September or October,” Valentine says. “And our new record Turquoise comes out on Metropolis in September.”
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here as we check in with a number of the grown-up kids from that year’s hit film comedy School of Rock — to find out what they’re up to now, and hear about what they take away from their experiences with the film and its deeper-than-rock history lessons two decades later.
Brian Falduto was 10 years old when he was cast in a movie about rock and roll starring Jack Black. He was slated to play Billy, a preppy student who eventually becomes the designer for a band of preteens led by Black’s burnout rocker Dewey Finn. Like his co stars, Falduto left school for two months to work on School of Rock.
It was like being teleported to another world. Like other kids his age, back at home, Falduto did his best to blend in. But on set, he and his fellow school-aged actors were seen and celebrated regardless of who they were or what they did. The things that made them “different” or “weird” at school were the things that got them into the film. Falduto’s Billy, nicknamed Fancy Pants, was sassy, snappy, and unforgettable. “On set, people were like, ‘Just be yourself, we just want more of you,’” he recalls.
Then filming ended, and Falduto returned to school and the real world, where difference wasn’t celebrated – it was punished. “It was this weird mixed messaging that I got,” he says. “[After filming], we went back to school where people are mean – and if you stand out, you get picked on. It was a really confusing thing to navigate.”
It’s been nearly 20 years since the alternate universe of Richard Linklater’s School of Rock delivered its earnest message of high-wattage self-empowerment through rock music, and stage-dove into North American pop culture. It didn’t take long for the film to become a pop culture phenomenon: School Of Rock’s worldwide gross nearly quadrupled its $35 million budget, and eventually spawned both a 2015 Broadway show and a television series, which debuted in 2016. At the time of its release, Roger Ebert wrote in his review that the film proved that “you can make a family film that’s alive and well-acted and smart and perceptive and funny — and that rocks.” Fondness for the movie persists; in early April of this year, Black even teased a reunion and potential sequel.
In 2003, it made perfect sense to use rock and roll to tell a story about breaking out of society’s tightly-policed boundaries. Buoyed by emo, nu-metal, pop-punk, and the early days of the ‘00s indie-rock boom, alongside recent entries from legacy acts like Tom Petty and Johnny Cash, guitar music was still widely appreciated and sought-after, even as pop and hip-hop overtook it in overall popularity. School of Rock’s ancestral family tree of rock, depicted in a scene where Finn has covered a chalkboard with the genre’s lineage and subgenre offshoots, became a learning tool for kids getting into classic rock—both inside and outside of the movie.
Two decades later, guitar music and rock and roll are still omnipresent, shapeshifting into new, subversive forms that can make Finn’s idolatry feel distant and dusty. Artists as wide-ranging as Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Yachty, and Turnstile are updating the curriculum. In the cultural and political upheaval of 2023, School of Rock and its guitar-god worship might seem dated. But as the former students of Horace Green share, Black and his band of classroom misfits still have a lot to teach us.
*****
“It’s The Sound of Music with no Nazis.”
That’s how Rivkah Reyes, who played student and bassist Katie in the film, describes School of Rock nowadays. The comparison is apt. Both movies find a wayward adult (by civil society’s standards, anyhow) taking charge of a crew of buttoned-up, well-disciplined children, who eventually learn to color outside the lines and live freer, more confident lives. Besides the Nazis, the other key difference is that School of Rock gets a lot louder, and the Von Trapp kids never tell their father that he’s “the man.”
In Sound of Music, Julie Andrews’ Maria uses singing to break the children out of their cages, but Jack Black’s disheveled Dewey Finn employs the sounds and culture of rock and roll to teach the uptight kids at Horace Green Preparatory School to be themselves, and to love themselves. The kids get a crash course in classic rock history: Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. AC/DC. Motorhead. Anyone who has seen the movie likely can’t read those names without blurting out Black’s iconic cry of despair: “What do they teach in this place?!”
The learning in Finn’s classroom felt authentic because for most of the young actors in School of Rock, it was. Z Infante, who played the lighting designer Gordon, says that between takes, Black would point to band names on the aforementioned family tree and ask who knew them. “The rock education was very in the moment,” says Infante.
Infante, now 30, grew up listening to ‘90s freestyle, dance music, and Sade – but when he got cast in the film, his family started listening to classic rock, and Infante fell in love with punk and alt-rock. Maryam Hassan, who played Tomika, says the same thing happened in her home. She was raised on R&B and soul, the former of which was a precursor to rock and roll, so leaning into rock music wasn’t a big leap. “You listen to blues music, and you hear that funk, that guitar,” says Hassan, 30. “That’s the foundation of rock music.”
Hassan grew into a punk rock fan, taking to bands like Paramore when she was younger. That adrenaline-inducing thrash of guitars, bass, drums, and vocals can take anyone “from zero to 100,” she says. “There’s no better way to break someone [out of their shell] who’s insecure or unsure of themselves.”
Others had been steeped in rock since they were young. Joey Gaydos Jr., who portrayed soft-spoken guitarist Zack Mooneyham, came up surrounded by the originators of Michigan’s early 1970s proto-punk scene. Long before he was born, his father played guitar in Detroit rock bands and gigged with Brownsville Station’s Michael “Cub” Coda and MC5’s Rob Tyner. Seeing photos of his dad with the rockers filled him with reverence and awe. “I’ve always been so into the hero, the Link Wray,” he says of the influential early rock guitarist. In the film, Mooneyham’s father disapproves of his son’s interest in rock music. Gaydos Jr.’s reality was the opposite. “Of course the bond of father and son will have its idiosyncrasies, but [fighting over] playing rock guitar? Hell no,” he grins.
For some of the cast, rock’s disaffected nerve was more appealing than AC/DC riffs or “Smoke on the Water.” Falduto says even after the film, he wasn’t “bit by the rock bug,” but he connected with the genre’s encouragement of letting loose and throwing caution to the wind. It was the perfect vehicle for telling kids to plow through the boundaries of normativity. “It had to be the school of rock,” he says. “What was it going to be? The school of classical music?”
*****
Classic rock’s contemporary cultural position as primarily the domain of heterosexual white men (increasingly cranky and conservative, a trend demonstrated by Van Morrison and Eric Clapton) is reflective of the genre’s canon, and School of Rock’s syllabus didn’t necessarily unseat that notion. But the film succeeded in spotlighting the essence of rock and roll, a genre pioneered by queer Black women, beyond its aesthetics: it celebrated the act of rebelling against the tyranny of normativity. It didn’t just normalize difference – it threw out the idea of “normal” in the first place.
“It’s that whole line, ‘stick it to the man,’” says Infante. “Rock has always been a place of rebellion, particularly thinking about the roots of rock music being in blues and the protests that exist in that music, the acknowledgment of their reality. Rock music expanded upon that. School of Rock was able to be rebellious and teach people about rebellion.”
For Hassan’s Tomika, that meant demonstrating that all bodies are beautiful in the scene when Black pulls her aside to discuss her insecurities about her weight. Hassan was a confident kid, so she didn’t share Tomika’s misgivings, but when the scene goes viral on Twitter every few years and she revisits it, it feels like a pivotal moment. “That was pretty monumental, to have a young Black girl in that scene,” she says. “I’m happy we can celebrate that, and kids can feel seen.”
Maryam Hassan
Ashley Johnson
Falduto recalls that when his character approaches Finn in the classroom to ask to be reassigned as band stylist, his teacher doesn’t bat an eyelash; he just approves the request. “It’s not remarkable that Billy likes to be effeminate and dress things up,” says Falduto. In the years since, Billy has been labeled a gay character, but Falduto said the script never referenced his sexuality, and it never came up on set.
“It didn’t need to be labeled as something, because you don’t need to be gay or a certain gender in order to like fashion or to be effeminate or to be sassy,” says Falduto. “It was a testament to what our society was like at the time that everyone saw that kid and was like, ‘gay.’ When people don’t understand something, they want to understand it, so they put a label on it because things that we don’t understand scare us. It’s a way of normalizing yourself to put a label on something else. It’s still happening to this day.”
Growing up in Chicago, Reyes was bullied for being “the weird girl with the classical guitar” and Filipino lunches at school. But School of Rock turned that weirdness into a weapon. “We all had similar stuff, being bullied at school,” says Reyes. “But whatever our cool unique thing was, was the reason why we ended up in School of Rock. It was really empowering. To its core, it’s a movie about radical self-acceptance.”
For Reyes, two scenes in particular evince the film’s anti-establishment heart. The first is when Finn asks the students what rock and roll is about. Scoring chicks and getting loaded? No. Sticking it to the man? Yes. Later, when the snotty, punk drummer Freddie – played by Kevin Clark and affectionately nicknamed Spazzy McGee – is found hanging with a crew of grizzled rockers smoking and playing cards, Black gives him an earful. The purpose of the scene isn’t necessarily to communicate that partying is bad. It’s that Freddie made a commitment to his friends, and it needed to be honored.
In May 2021, Clark was biking in his native Chicago when he was struck and killed by a driver. He was 32. Reyes and Gaydos stayed close friends with Clark until his death, and the loss still lingers with them. The two make music together, and when the snare begins to rattle in the corner, they know it’s Clark piping up with a drum idea. “He’s still very much with us,” says Reyes. “He’s a very loud, very friendly ghost.”
“That loss is devastating all the time,” says Gaydos. He adds with a gentle smile, “We keep rocking for him. What else can you do?”
Gaydos’ simple affirmation gets at something deeper, something that cuts to the bone of the film and its romantic vision of rock music. “This is the truth: rock and roll is just about connection with your bandmates,” says Reyes. “The real essence of it is sticking it to the man, then connecting with your people and creating something together.”
Reyes has spent years developing a keen sense for whether fellow creatives are in it for the right reasons. They’re protective of their musicianship and bass playing after being pigeonholed as “the bass girl from School of Rock.” They eventually had to leave one musical project when another member kept making references to the film and using their presence for clout. Reyes credits the sensitivity to School Of Rock.
“I live in L.A., where everybody is kind of in it for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of it all,” they say. “I can sense it right away. Those people don’t stick around in my life very long.”
Reyes has been sober for five years now. After years in acting, comedy, and music surrounded by drugs and alcohol, they were nervous that eliminating substances might have a negative impact on their artistry. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna be a bad rock star if I don’t do coke before the show,’ or ‘I’m not gonna write good comedy if I’m not a little stoned,’” they say. “At the end of the day, my authenticity comes out through my desire to stay away from the stuff that society told us was the cool thing to do if you wanted to be a rock star.”
Part of School Of Rock’s enduring appeal is its encouragement of deviation from the norm, but the real world—even as it enjoyed and celebrated the film—has never been quite as welcoming to change. For a long time, Falduto resented the long shadow of his role for years, lost between experience of on-set acceptance and the reality of a society that punished uniqueness. “It was a hard thing to carry while I was confused about how I was,” he says. In middle and high school, classmates knew him as “the gay kid from School of Rock.”
Now he works as a life coach for queer youth, and records and releases country music—a love he picked up while working at a country radio station after college. “For a really long time it was really hard to be the gay kid from School of Rock,” he says, “but it’s come full circle. Now I’m soaking in the beauty of the process.”
Brian Falduto
Ashley Johnson
*****
This year’s milestone marks a span of time that’s flung the actors from their desks into the grown-up shoes of the film’s adults, like Finn, Mike White’s Ned Schneebly, or Joan Cusack’s Principal Mullins. Finn’s struggles to pay his rent hit closer to home these days. “What adult can’t relate to that?” says Reyes. “There’s always that thing at the end of the month like, ‘oh shit, is the legend of the rent way past due? Are we about to have to commit fraud to pay our rent?’”
One of the film’s central subtexts is the struggle for liberation in a world that demands submission – via bills, social pressure, or, for Cusack’s Mullins, parental overwatch. School of Rock gave its cast some tips on how to do that. Jordan-Claire Smith, who played Michelle, one of the band’s groupies – a rare poorly aged misstep for the film, the cast acknowledges – entered the film as a child actor, and stayed in the industry until she was 18. But the joy of acting was disappearing. “I was having so much anxiety around auditioning and representation,” says Smith. She decided to take a break.
Smith went to college, and discovered a new passion: nursing. She works as a nurse now in California, and produces and acts in short films with friends and her husband. Her work now doesn’t involve cranked guitar amps and dimly lit venues, but she says her decision to chase what felt best for her ties back to the film. “Obviously not every kid in the movie, if they were a real person, was going to go on to become somebody in a rock band,” says Smith. “But having that experience with Mr. Schneebly would have opened up all of their minds to be like, ‘Oh, what is it that I love, what do I wanna do, and how do I pursue that?’ I don’t think I ever put together that that was something that I really learned from my experience on School Of Rock.”
Aleisha Allen, who played Alicia in the film, says the film gave her a similarly discerning approach to her work. She had been acting since she was three years old, but realized that by young adulthood, she was being typecast in specific roles. “Because of the passion and respect and love for the art that I do have, I didn’t want to just take jobs that would keep me relevant,” says Allen. Like Smith, she decided to go to college, and now works as a speech language pathologist, where she uses her vocal skills in exercises to empower her clients. In the face of conservative political movements working to erase queerness and critical race theory from schoolrooms, Allen says “rebellion is needed more overtly than ever.”
Gaydos, too, says there have been ebbs and flows in his musical life. Sometimes guitar would be a thrill. At other points, whatever job he had to work to pay the bills would nudge it out of his day-to-day routine. He suggests that in the long run, “evenness” is the best you can hope for. “I never lost my passion, but I got so far disconnected from it that it wasn’t a part of everyday necessity,” he says. “But it’s like air, man. Start choking without it. As far as my sanity just dealing with living, I gotta have it.”
Infante is starring as Angel in a production of Rent at the Oregon Shakespear Festival, and Hassan is prepping new music for release this year. Falduto released his Gay Country EP in early March. (Black lip-synced to one of the singles on his TikTok.) Reyes is busy writing and acting. The School of Rock alumni have each found a path that feels right for them. It’s not all smashed guitars and stage dives, because it was never about those things in the first place.
“That’s the real beauty of rock and roll,” says Smith. “It gives people an outlet to be exactly who they are.”
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here as we invite the creators behind one of the year’s most iconic indie rock songs — and one of our favorite ’03 deep cuts — Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” to tell the story behind its humble beginnings and unlikely growth to true anthem status.
Park that car. Drop that phone. Sleep on the floor. Dream about me.
You’re probably familiar with those words in one way or another. Maybe you’ve heard them in a movie. Maybe you’ve bawled your eyes out to them. Maybe you’ve seen them in a meme. Maybe you have them tattooed on your body. Regardless of how trivial or meaningful the encounter was, if you’ve heard or seen them once over the past 20 years, chances are pretty good that they’ve stuck with you until now.
Those lyrics are repeated 13 times in a row to form the climax of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” one of many classic tracks that make up Broken Social Scene’s breakout second album, You Forgot It in People. Originally released in the band’s native Canada in 2002 and more widely reissued in 2003, the album announced the arrival of an unbelievably eclectic, stacked collective, the likes of which would dominate Toronto’s indie music scene for years to come.
At various moments on You Forgot It in People and BSS’ self-titled 2005 follow-up, you can hear members of Metric, Feist, Stars, Do Make Say Think, and Apostle of Hustle, to name just a sliver of the band’s overall constellation. “Anthems” itself features Metric’s Emily Haines and James Shaw, as well as the prolific Montreal-based violinist Jessica Moss, who’s played with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Arcade Fire, A Silver Mt. Zion, and many others.
Fading in after the playful, wide-eyed “Pacific Theme,” the song kind of comes out of nowhere after You Forgot It in People’s rollicking first half. It’s an impressionist version of a tearful ballad, with wisps of banjo, guitar, tom-toms and vocals gradually locking step into a structure-averse buildup that peaks and then immediately dissolves into ghostly reverberations. The only entirely female-sung track on the album, “Anthems” is also a star-making turn for Haines, whose lyrics are cut-and-paste snapshots that exude fraught nostalgia, the likes of which would be snuffed out by extraneous words. It’s impossible to catch the song with your bare hands, but also impossible to walk away unmoved.
“Anthems” has spent the past two decades flitting between temporary and unlikely homes to form its lasting legacy. From hormonally charged AIM away messages to irreverent memes, from the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World soundtrack to a Meryl Streep and Tracey Ullman guest appearance at a BSS show, from a cover by gothic indie-folk singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger to an interpolation by rapper/comedian Open Mike Eagle, this song means many different things to many different people. Somehow, a humble tune wafted out of a Toronto basement and into the lives of many. These days, Haines views “Anthems” as “A song that’s definitely achieved that thing that we all want a song to do – which is [to] outlive us all and welcome everybody in its own way with a life of its own.”
The song’s not the only enduring classic from the album — ”Lover’s Spit” in particular has been licensed for a litany of film and TV syncs, and also got some visibility from a name-drop in Lorde’s “Ribs.” But “Anthems” has a separate legacy that feels almost divorced from the group of artists that made it. In some ways – namely, its folky, twee melodrama – it is distinctively 2003. In others, it feels mysteriously timeless: it is specific but universal, comforting but opaque. Here is its story, as told by those artists, as well as a few key others.
In 2002, the original Broken Social Scene core of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning were recruiting members for their second album. Their 2001 debut, Feel Good Lost, was a mostly instrumental affair, but they had a more adventurous, collaborative process in mind for this new material.
Brendan Canning (BSS Co-Founder, Bass on “Anthems”): Talented as Kevin and I may think we are, it’s great to have other people on base when you’re a band.
Kevin Drew (BSS Co-Founder, Keys and “Backwards Guitar” on “Anthems”): At that time, it was all about impressing each other and trying to keep up with whatever was happening in the room. I feel as if there was a freedom, but also an urgency. It was the wildest ride, just trying to have this completely different sonic perspective in the songs we were doing, and a completely different approach as well.
Canning: It’s not like there was any fake, “Okay guys, we’ve gotta make a pop song,” [direction]. It’s not an awkward conversation about band direction, everyone is able to communicate without having to talk about it. Everyone who plays in Broken Social Scene, past or present, has always communicated musically, and that’s why it worked. It’s not, ‘Okay everybody, The Strokes are really popular, so we gotta keep up with those guys.’
Charles Spearin (Vocal Effects on “Anthems”): There was some butting of heads in the studio, but most of us were just excited. I think the fact that the majority of us had other projects on the go meant we weren’t wholly invested with our egos in the project. There was a sense of just adding to the stew without getting too anxious about it, and that was really helpful. Kevin was really good at making people feel welcome and admired—it was almost like bringing somebody in was this admiration, just the sense like, “We really love what you do, can you come in and add to this mess that we’re making?”
John Crossingham (Banjo on “Anthems”): I initially joined as a drummer, but I really got a sense very quickly that it was very, very loose in terms of roles within the band. I was definitely intimidated. I was keenly aware of the fact that there were a lot of really good players in there. Justin Peroff was a much better drummer [than me], Andrew Whiteman and Charles Spearin were much better guitar players. I was like, ‘Okay, this is my chance to show my stuff and push myself to do better.’
Rehearsals began in Drew’s basement. On the day of “Anthems”’ conception, a typically eclectic group had assembled.
Canning: Myself, Justin Peroff, John Crossingham, Jimmy Shaw, Emily Haynes, and Jason Collette were in the basement. Kevin was upstairs while we were playing, and he came downstairs at one point and was like, “You guys sound like a bar band.” I was like, [disconcertedly] “All right.”
Drew: Yeah, I said, “It sounds like a bar band.” I’m sure that’s it. When Brendan tells the story, I always chuckle. Like, I was not there for the [actual creation of the] song.
Canning: We weren’t playing “Anthems” or anything [yet], that was more like the impetus to change what we were doing and play something different, just a subtle directorial direction. So I came up with a bassline and then everyone started playing it. Like, all of a sudden we have an idea that hopefully wasn’t like a bar band.
Emily Haines (Vocals on “Anthems”): I remember Canning just playing [imitates his delicately descending bassline] on the bass, and Jimmy came in with a riff, and I just went [sings] ‘Used to be one…’
Canning: I whispered a vocal motif to Emily. I whispered in her ear, something like, “Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that,” but maybe I didn’t have all those lyrics, and then she just took that and ran with it.
Drew: I remember coming back downstairs later and hearing what they were working on and thinking, ‘Okay, here we go. This is cool.’
Haines’ “Anthems” lyrics have become a frequent subject of interpretation, even within the band.
Canning: She took a few days, added some lyrics, next thing you know, you got the “bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash’ part.
Haines: The time that I wrote “Anthems” was one of the moments when Metric came back to Toronto from New York, a little hiatus. I remember walking around in the smallest leather jacket possible when it started getting cold—I remember actually writing [Metric’s] “IOU” the same way, just walking around. I guess when you’re so broke you can’t really go inside anywhere. So it was just like, “Uh, I guess I’ll walk around”’ I had been working on this melody and this idea of like, that pain of having to let go when you’re growing up and you’re moving on from being someone that you were.
Drew: [Emily] is one of my favorite lyricists. I found the simplicity of “Anthems” so haunting, lyric-wise, and that’s the power of Emily. The selection of her words was just perfect.
Emily Haines of Metric during Napster 2.0 Launch Celebration – Performances at House of Blues in West Hollywood, Calif.
Lee Celano/WireImage
Haines: [It was] this tale of a lost kid, or someone who was about to go off to LA, maybe. I was definitely aware of the fact that something was ending. If you’re gonna be a super stubborn independent person like myself and want to change the industry at the same time as you’re trying to launch your band, you’re gonna have a bit of an uphill grind. So it’s not a sad thing, it was just the sense of “Oh man yeah, things are gonna change.”
Crossingham: It taps into that mysterious quality of being young and at odds with things. It’s opaque enough that you can put anything you want on it, but it’s specific enough in its emotion that you recognize what’s being intimated.
Haines: It’s funny because the idea of selling out or the idea of integrity was such a theme at the time, and now it’s not – I feel like you’d be hard pressed to even explain the concept to people. But there was definitely an element of that – “Bleaching your teeth, smiling, flash, talking trash under your breath.” Like the idea of, obviously there’s a depiction of someone that you don’t wanna be, and maybe that person already exists, or maybe that’s what not to become, but it’s such a throughline of the music from that time that I made.
Ryan Schreiber (Pitchfork founder and You Forgot It in People reviewer): [You Forgot It in People] is very much a coming-of-age record; almost all of its songs grapple with some degree of personal turmoil and self-discovery through tribulation. “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is almost the centerpiece in that way; it’s the clearest distillation of the album’s broader theme – how growing up forces us to shed youthful ideals and pieces of our identity that once felt like they defined us in whole, and how, with enough remove, it can start to feel like that person you used to be no longer even exists.
Drew: There was a warm welcoming into what we all were trying to think about, which was, it’s okay to be lost, it’s okay to be an individual, it’s okay to get through all the angst that you’re coming out of as you become an adult – but still having so much baggage of youth and so much trauma of youth and so much joy of youth. I think it was the youth of that feeling that ended up being why I titled it the way that I did.
Haines: Kevin, who has such a gift for song titles – he named it “Anthems for Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” Which just made sense.
Drew: I felt that we were anthem makers, and not in a bombastic way, but in a way that music is there to take care of you. It’s there to make you not feel alone. It’s there to help describe how you’re feeling or to give you identity. When we were all together, in the basement. I felt like we were little anthem workers.
BSS recorded You Forgot It in People with local producer David Newfeld in his makeshift studio.
David Newfeld (Production on “Anthems”): For about three years, basically all I was doing was working on their stuff. “Anthems” was one of the first songs they did at my place.
Drew: [“Anthems”] was definitely one of the easier songs to do, and Newf took to it right away. He was already bringing us to a place that I had never been to before. It was such an education into sound, but not realizing that you were being educated.
Newfeld: They were hearing it after it was laid down, and it was funny, they were like, “This is too normal.”
Spearin: Everybody thought it was a little bit too pretty or a little bit too sweet, or something like that. So I took the vocals and ran it through some guitar pedals, and that’s how we ended up getting that [pitch-shifted] sound, which I think was super cool.
Drew: One of the things that [Charlie and I] loved doing the most was affecting [Emily’s] vocals, messing around with her sound.
Newfeld: At that point, I would never have dared do something like that, ‘cause they’re just mangling the shit out of [the vocals]. I’m like, “Oh okay, I didn’t know you could take those liberties, cool.”’ They’re like “Yeah, we’ve gotta make this f–king weirder.”
Crossingham: I had some E-bow type guitar parts in mind for “Anthems,” but Jamie’s guitar was already so dreamy and Emily’s vocal had the pitch effects, so it didn’t feel quite right. I got in my head that maybe a banjo would be cool. I was flying blind a little bit, but I found an open tuning that was in the key of the song. I just sat there for 40 minutes and wrote a part and felt pretty good about it and said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot.” When you listen to it, it’s quite tentative. It sounds like someone who isn’t a super confident banjo player, but it really suits the vibe of the song.
Newfeld: The other thing I really remember about that tune was that they wanted to bring in Jessica Moss to come in and play violin on it.
Jessica Moss (Violin on “Anthems”): Kevin was a friend at the time and I knew a few of the others, but it felt a bit like something weird and brave and unknown to do. I had really enjoyed [playing on Feel Good Lost], but I went back to Montreal and continued building my world here as Broken Social Scene was on the rise – and then in our world, Godspeed and Mount Zion were on the rise. It really felt like the difference between Montreal and Toronto was the difference between Godspeed and Social Scene. I don’t know anybody else actually who’s straddled both of them, lived in both worlds in the same way.
Drew: Charlie and I loved working with Jessica Moss. When she walked into the room, my whole spirit would be intimidated. She has this incredible way of bringing sadness and comfort into melody with violin. I had worked with her on three records, and I knew this had way more of a pop sensibility and I was a little bit afraid of that.
Moss: If you saw a description of Broken Social Scene written on paper and description of Godspeed written on paper, you would be like, “Yeah, that’s a similar kind of thing.” But I suppose at the time there were feelings of animosity and feelings of competition. In retrospect, like, what a load of bullshit, in some ways. In other parts, I still feel like our deeply held values are still my values.
Drew: The violin line that she plays, she just did it off the cuff. You never had to give Jessica direction.
Newfeld: She came into the studio one afternoon and she basically went, ‘All right, just play me the song. Let me hear how loud the headphones are. Okay, a little too quiet. Okay, put my violin in. Nah, that’s fine. Okay, just play the song and let me do takes.’ She did a few passes like that, and that’s what you hear. It was pretty damn cool at that time, ‘cause I was also working with some people that were not super talented and were total a–holes.
Drew: I don’t believe there’s ever a time when we would be recording her that I wasn’t just completely captivated by her. I’ve never worked with somebody that had such an immediate melodic understanding of what you’re presenting them and brought so much identity. The identity was melancholy to me ‘cause it’s a violin, but there was an honesty that was very intimidating about her musicianship – which, of course, when you’re scared or you’re intimidated, it’s an amazing place to be in art.
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is slotted as song seven of You Forgot It in People’s 13 tracks, smack-dab in the middle of the album.
Schreiber: Clearly, a lot of thought was put into the sequencing, production, and pacing of the album, and that goes a long way towards holding it together musically. It manages to sound like the product of one band, despite how its core players criss-cross genres and styles and swap vocal leads.
Crossingham: The thing that really works for “Anthems” for me is how — there’s examples of that all over the record — it’s a really excellent mixture of synthetic and organic instrumentation. It’s not a folk song, but it’s not quite a future-leaning indie ballad [either]. It’s got its own enigmatic character and every single piece of it coalesced in a pretty magic way.
Spearin: [“Anthems”] has a pop sensibility. All the songs did in their own way, for a band somewhat intentionally trying to shy away from pop structure – verse chorus, bridge, chorus, that kind of thing. We found a way to write pop music that totally eschewed your standard format. And that was something that I felt we were proud of and was a highlight for us.
Canning: Why would you hem yourself in with starting to second guess whether these songs fit together? F–king, I don’t know, you ever listen to The Beatles? They seem to make a lot of different ideas work all together. But you know, what did they know? That’s more of a modern curse.
After discovering the CD within the “boxes upon boxes of promos” he received at the Pitchfork mailbox, Schreiber awarded You Forgot It in People a 9.2 score in his glowing review on February 2, 2003.
Newfeld: At the time, Brendan and I were like, “Yeah, this track’s okay, but we’re really intrigued with some of the other ones we were working on”’ Whereas Charlie’s like “No, a lot of people are gonna like this.” I remember he felt strongly about that track. And then when it came out, there was the Pitchfork review, and it’s like, “I’m listening to the album, and then I get to track seven, and then there’s that song!”’ I’m like, “Holy shit, Charlie was right, a lot of people are gonna really dig this.”
Schreiber: You Forgot It in People was really the first record that indicated I was on the right track with that strategy [of digging through promos]. It’s an album I would never have discovered any other way. I remember doing a double-take about three or four tracks in, because there was absolutely nothing about the packaging, the band name, the label, or anything else that would have indicated what was encoded on that disc. I was completely floored by it on first listen, and that inspired me to keep digging through the rest of the stacks for other albums that might be flying under my radar. That process ultimately led to discoveries of music by Sufjan Stevens, M83, The Books, The Unicorns, and others.
Canning: With this album, we really established ourselves in such a significant way. It gave us all really good careers in music.
Broken Social Scene photographed on Feb. 27, 2003.
David Cooper/Toronto Star via GI
Newfeld: They went from just an indie band in Toronto to suddenly a worldwide sensation, which definitely created a huge impression in Toronto itself. It was a real dynamic change. Before that, Canadians always looked at other parts of the world, like England or the United States, like that’s where the really happening stuff was, and us in Canada, we’re just observers in a backwater. I don’t wanna diss the scene too much, but I feel that when we got this project going and the album came out, it really sent the message that we can do our own thing and interpret popular music and come up with our own angle on it that’s valid in any country.
Haines: I remember how I felt at that time, before [Shaw and I] moved to LA. It was really early days and everyone was struggling, but also there was so much determination – certainly from me and Jimmy, where we were like, “Oh, we’re gonna do this.” We felt like we had to leave, and [BSS] felt like they could stay to achieve what they wanted to achieve. It’s totally different now in Canada, but in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, it really didn’t seem conceivable that you would be able to become an international entity without leaving Canada. But I’m so happy that now people realize they maybe don’t have to, things have changed enough.
Over the past 20 years, “Anthems” has remained a staple of BSS shows. As Haines has only sporadically toured with the group over the years, lead vocals have been handled by a rotating cast of members. Most of the time, Drew plays Moss’ violin part on a keyboard.
Drew: It’s humbling to have one of your most successful songs be one you didn’t write. That song just became such a warm duvet for so many that I’ve just spent the next 20 years trying to constantly honor it live every night. I love it and I love playing it every night – it’s a signature piece that must be played. We don’t have many must-be-played [songs] but we know that “Anthems” is such a comforting song for people who come out to the shows that it’s on the set every night.
Haines: I haven’t toured with [BSS] in forever, but whenever I do, “Anthems” is the peak of the set. There was one pretty intense instance where I was with Social Scene in 2017 in Europe.
Drew: We were in Manchester the day after the bombing at the Ariana Grande show. [Smiths guitarist] Johnny Marr was gonna come and play with us that night, but then he canceled because of everything that was going on.
Haines: I remember it was such a weird dilemma for [Kevin] because it was like, do you play the show or don’t you play the show?
Drew: I sent [Marr] a message saying, ‘Look, this is the song we’re gonna do now. We’re gonna open with this tune, and if you find it in your heart, come out.’ He called and said, ‘I’m coming.’ That was an iconic moment within the band, just due to the circumstances and the loss and the city, we were there when they were coming together. We weren’t sure what was going on. There was talk of martial law happening and all these things. And there we were, these Canadians who had this song, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” and we had James and Emily with us. We had the original writers in the room and it gave me shivers.
Haines: To just be saying those words, that it was this loss of life of all these literal 17-year-old girls, was just the strangest end of metaphor. The song seems to have many lives.
Drew: This song just constantly keeps giving back to us. It keeps giving us moments where it breaks down that barrier, it makes a connection to everyone. It’s the power of the tune.
Whether in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World or a Spongebob meme, “Anthems” seems to consistently pop up where you’d least expect it.
Canning: There would be no “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” memes without Emily’s lyrics. That’s kind of meaningless, but at the same time, they’re lyrics that stuck around and still apply to this day. She was ahead of the curve with that, the conversation, “Oh, people are on their phones too much.’ That wasn’t really a thing.” I didn’t have a cell phone in 2002.
Crossingham: I literally just finished signing not one, but two different release forms for the use of that song in a TV show or film or whatever. It’s funny too, I posted something on my Instagram about how I was gonna finally play this banjo on stage for the 20th anniversary shows that we did in Toronto. And this friend of mine was like, “I had no idea you played on that song and that you played the banjo. Like, you’re a freaking legend. What the hell?”
Moss: I’d been talking to a few younger friends who had no idea that’s my violin on that song like, “What? I f–king love that song! I lived with that song on repeat when I was a teenager.” I just went to YouTube just to listen to it and as I was listening, I was scrolling through the comments and – oh my god, have you done that? There’s comments from 10 years ago and two months ago, like, “I’m 17 now” or “I was 20 when this happened and my mom died.” And actually if you keep reading down, it’s so sweet — ‘cause every once in a while someone says, “This has gotta be the sweetest place on the internet.” I think that’s so lovely.
Haines: It’s funny, you never really know what song it’s going to be, right? I don’t really compare it to anything in Metric. I just feel like “Anthems” is its own very cool universe, because it’s so well suited – given the nature of Social Scene and the rotating live performers – it’s just so suited to the Meryl Streeps of the world coming in for a cameo.
Drew: [Meryl Streep and Tracey Ullman’s guest performance] was two best friends having a really fun evening. It was an unscripted moment that we, as a band, spoke afterwards and said “What that was, stays what that was.” It was such a joyful moment that they shared with us, just two besties.
Canning: You just get lucky, right? You get lucky with a song and it continues to have a different life of its own and outside of the album. On any album, there’s gonna be one song, [even] To Pimp a Butterfly—in another 10 years from now, what are gonna be the big songs that are gonna be remembered from that record? Or what about like, SZA’s last record? You can only be very grateful for the fact that your songs are still being considered and talked about in the conversation of popular music.
Crossingham: It’s an example of how, if you’re allowed to have that moment to be creative, you don’t know what effect a couple hours’ worth of work is gonna have. If you’re a musician, you do that kind of thing hundreds of times over in many different situations, but that one particular, the way everything fell together turned out beautifully. It’s one of the least-planned out and least fretted over and least massaged into form things I’ve ever done, which does really say something, right?
Drew: There’s been magical moments of all different kinds of people singing it and different moments of when we played it. I’m indebted to that moment in the basement where they all came up with something that in the end has been nothing but an honor to play.
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here with the story of the Diwali dancehall riddm — and the Jamaican producer who originally created it — which became as crucial a part of the year’s sonic identity as anything helmed on U.S. shores.
If you were listening to pop radio in the spring or summer of 2003, you’re probably very familiar with Steven Marsden, whether you recognize his name or not. Affectionately known as “Lenky,” the Jamaica-born and bred musician, instrumentalist and producer is best known as the mastermind behind the now-iconic “Diwali Riddim.”
Named for the annual Festival of Lights in Indian religion and culture, the riddim – easily identified by dancehall fans through energetic synths, a bouncy drum loop and infectious handclaps – can be heard in myriad songs across genres. Three songs featuring Diwali (Sean Paul’s debut single, “Get Busy,” Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Ooh, Uh Ooh),” and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go”) hit the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 during a three-month span in mid-2003, undeniably making it the defining beat of the year. Thanks to patience, perseverance and an affinity for doing things his way, Lenky’s place in dancehall music history is indelible.
A self-taught pianist who recognized his “natural knack” for music while in grade school, Lenky worked as a touring keyboardist alongside veteran Jamaican artists like Lloyd Parks, Blood Fire Posse, Rita Marley, and his mentors, Sly & Robbie. Though Lenky prides himself on being a musician above all, by the late ‘90s, he was interested in producing new sounds – and was encouraged by Sly & Robbie to toy with different elements in order to create his own magic.
“At the time, regular dancehall beats were similar to the ones from the ‘80s,” he explains to Billboard over Zoom. Though dancehall originated in the ‘60s, it found its boom during the ‘80s after digital instrumentation, or “riddims,” became the central focus of the songs. Because of the easy accessibility of digital riddims, many dancehall artists would record songs featuring the same riddim as other artists, which granted them the ability to release a larger volume of tracks, reducing studio time and costs.
“I’m sitting there saying, ‘I’m gonna try to do something different…what would Sly do?’” Lenky continues.
Enter the Diwali Riddim. Created in 1998 with a Tascam DA-88 multitrack recorder, the riddim was initially called “Ethnic Journey.” This served as an ode to Lenky’s time experiencing new cultures while on the touring circuit, specifically while in Buju Banton’s band, Til Shiloh. The first element developed for the riddim was a kick, followed by a basic synth. But a bassline just wouldn’t cut it if the beat was to stand out.
“We needed something to get people to dance,” he recalls. “I’m the type of person who needs to get people dancing, so I came up with the clap. I did several different takes of the clap stacked together. I wanted one more thing to make it more ‘dance.’ So in the original cut of Diwali, you hear this Congo drum. And I said, ‘That’s gonna get them on the floor – this sounds like something Sly would do. [Laughs.]”
Despite its hallmark handclaps, the rhythm was deemed “too noisy” and “weird” for many artists. At the turn of the century, more monotonous, bass-heavy dancehall beats like the Filthy Riddim and Bagpipe Riddim were taking over, thanks to tracks like Mr. Vegas’ “Heads High” and Beenie Man’s “Year 4.” Diwali didn’t fit the mold of what was working, making it an extremely hard sell, and leading Lenky to shelve the riddim. Yet, after touring throughout the U.S. came to an abrupt halt as a result of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the musician found himself in a bind.
“I just had [my] first child, so we needed to make money,” he recalls. “I’m just thinking back and saying ‘…but that beat, there’s still something about that [Diwali] beat.”
Though he received some of the same iffy reactions to the riddim during his second trial run, Jamaican artists like Zumjay and General Degree did show Diwali some love. (Their respective uses of the riddim can be heard in “Zumjay Is My Name” and “Inna.”)
“I gave it to artists that I knew, I gave [the beat] to a guy from the radio station [in Jamaica],” Lenky says of Diwali’s early-’00s resurrection. “I was broke and trying to make anything happen. When I came back [from touring again], it was, like, the biggest thing. The riddim is just all over.”
Diwali spread even further after the record label Greensleeves centered it for the compilation project Rhythm Album #27, which features 19 songs with the riddim as the backing track. Artists heard on the project include Buju Banton, Elephant Man, and Wayne Wonder, and the riddim’s appeal – specifically in Wonder’s sweetly melodic love song “No Letting Go” – spread to the United States. A New York Times article highlighting Lenky and Diwali resulted in a phone call between him and the A&R team at VP Records, who hoped the musician would be interested in working with one of their up-and-coming Jamaican-bred solo acts: Sean Paul.
“I did [“Get Busy”] very casually – again, as an experiment,” he affirms. “Sean had some ideas, he came with his song, I came with some melodies. The rest is history.”
After the widespread, positive response to “Get Busy,” both Lenky and Sean Paul secured their first No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 2003. Shortly after “Get Busy” peaked, Harlem-based teen Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” – also set to the Diwali Riddim – debuted on the chart, eventually peaking in August at No. 3. With “No Letting Go” also peaking at No. 11 that May. Diwali Fever had officially swept through America, bringing Jamaican dancehall and the “Lenky sound” to the masses.
“[Going] from zero to 100 is a rush,” says Lenky of his overnight success. “I was just doing my thing, just living life, [trying to] make ends meet … Sly said, ‘You’re No. 1 on Billboard!’ I’m saying, ‘what is Billboard?’ I didn’t have a computer at the time!”
While dancehall artists gravitated to the beat first, the selling point for the Diwali Riddim for across genre lines is its versatility, something that Lenky made sure of while crafting it. Different sonic accouterments were added or subtracted from Diwali songs he has had a hand in producing in-studio, based on the needs of the musician and the vibe of the song itself. Though the rhythm itself doesn’t change, “Get Busy” features the addition of keyboard synths and vocal sound effects, while the claps don’t appear until the chorus of “No Letting Go,” providing a strictly R&B vibe until then. This is why Sean Paul’s “toasting” over the beat works just as well as Wayne Wonder’s crooning over it.
“Listening to dancehall in Jamaica, we have 20 artists on the same beat, and it’s boring!” Lenky says. “So for me as a musician, I wanted to make every song special. I wanted to make [Diwali] into a song that was not linear…All of these [versions of the beat] are tailored for [different artists].”
While super producers like Pharrell and Timbaland were often just as visible as the artists they produced for in the mid-2000s, Lenky never wanted to be a front-facing producer. For him, the music was always – and will always be – the priority.
“If I have to talk about myself, it’s fine, I will talk about myself,” he laughs. “But I wouldn’t try to put myself out there, ‘cause I think that takes away from the [creativity]. I don’t know somebody else in that position would be as focused. They’ll see the parties and the girls, and it’ll throw them off.”
Lenky continued to make beats during Diwali’s growth and subsequent boom: 2002’s Masterpiece Riddim (heard in Sean Paul’s “Ever Blazin’” from 2005’s The Trinity), 2003’s Time Travel Riddim, and 2004’s Dreamweaver Riddim catching on in the Caribbean. While they all caught on in their respective rights, Diwali clearly endures as the producer’s signature riddim.
In fact, music lovers and artists alike have recognized the riddim’s utility throughout the last two decades, which has allowed it to stand the test of time. You can hear the Diwali claps in Rihanna’s “Pon De Replay” and Brick & Lace’s “Love Is Wicked” from 2007, or you may have noticed the beat’s kick within Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” from 2017. At the top of this year, a full-on sample of Lumidee’s Diwali cut set the tone for Nicki Minaj’s latest Hot 100 hit, “Red Ruby da Sleeze.” (Though Lenky admits his favorite versions of his beat are found in “Get Busy” and “No Letting Go” – due to their production overdubs and the fact that both were crafted in Jamaica’s Paddington Terrace Studio “with no budget.”)
As the beat has taken new shape through the years, so has dancehall. However, Lenky doesn’t have a problem with the ever-changing sound, and subgenres spawned in recent years, like tropical house or reggae fusion.
“I’m just a tiny dot in dancehall,” he notes. “Nothing is ‘killing’ dancehall. You can’t kill reggae, Bob Marley will always be Bob Marley. For me, it’s just different branches from the [reggae/dancehall] tree, bearing different fruit. I think it should grow, and we should just make it happen.”
These days, Lenky (now 52) continues experimenting and growing. He runs Diwali Records, a label based in Kingston. His solo album, Self Taught, was released in 2018. He still works with Sly & Robbie, most recently on their 2021 album Red Hills Road, as well as on a 2019 collaborative instrumental album, Project 1966. He also boasts a writing credit on “Take Me Where Your Heart Is,” the lead single from acclaimed R&B singer-songwriter Q’s major label debut EP, The Shave Experiment. (That wasn’t too hard to secure though, as Q is Lenky’s son.)
Lenky’s values have not only worked in the long haul of his career, but his music-first focus has contributed to his work changing the face of Jamaican dancehall. From the Diwali Riddim’s late-’90s creation, to its early-2000s resurrection, to its 2023 TikTok footwork challenge – it’s clear that the beat no one wanted to use is the sound we still can’t get enough of.
“I’m not into the lights and the cameras and all that – the light is gonna burn out,” Lenky says of his lifelong dedication to his craft. “I’m into the music, the making of the music and getting it out there. Everybody reacting to it wanna know my name, have parties, and that’s fine. But, I’m not gonna join that, you know what I’m saying? I’m creating the music for you guys, and hope you enjoy the music.”
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here with a look back at the controversial and ultimately shelved Iraq War-themed video for Madonna’s “American Life,” a rare moment of self-doubt and second-guessing from the Queen of Pop.
This summer, Madonna will embark on her Celebration Tour — the promised showcase of her four decades as a hitmaker, a title she’s rightfully held onto since 1983’s “Holiday.” But while certain landmark songs from the icon’s discography are, like “Holiday,” practically guaranteed to appear on the setlist, there’s one that feels like more of a toss-up: the doomed title track from 2003’s American Life, which served as both midpoint and turning point in her career.
Madonna is to some extent synonymous with the controversial lead singles (and especially music videos) she released on her rise to superstardom — from 1984’s VMAs-inaugurating “Like a Virgin,” to 1989’s Vatican-condemned “Like a Prayer,” to 1992’s NSFW “Erotica.” But 2003 was a rare case where provocation didn’t quite translate into sales. “American Life,” ill-timed for release within days of the United States invading Iraq, paired radio-unfriendly critique of Madonna’s home country with an anti-war video designed to shake people up. Her subsequent decision to pull the clip remains divisive even among her biggest fans, but its existence arguably foiled the album proper all the same — one of her most ambitious and introspective sets, however idiosyncratic. And though the song and video have, for many Americans, aged about as well as the Iraq War itself, the scandal of “American Life” seemed to force a permanent change to Madonna’s playbook as a provocateur.
Despite public-opinion speedbumps that led many to declare her career over at various points in her 30s, Madonna had ultimately forged into her 40s with 1998’s Ray of Light, the blockbuster new-mom album considered by many to be her magnum opus (and still her sole album of the year nomination at the Grammys). Then came 2000’s Music, which Encyclopedia Madonnica author Matthew Rettenmund calls “the exclamation point on her salvation in this period” — the first Madonna album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in more than a decade, having sold 420,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week. Critics and consumers alike had clearly responded well to her pivot into spiritual techno-pop and then folktronica, forward-looking sounds that heralded her into the burgeoning TRL era. “It was cool to love Madonna again, and to respect her,” says Rettenmund, “and motherhood was no small part of the equation.”
By 2003, the “Material Mom” — as she’d been nicknamed by the press — was raising two kids with director husband Guy Ritchie, and had settled into a notably mature and reflective iteration of her ever-changing persona. But Rettenmund adds that the stage had in many ways been set for a bumpier period, noting “some fatigue from all the feel-good.” The new millennium had also brought a string of poorly-reviewed acting performances on Madonna’s part, including a live stint in London’s West End and a starring role in Ritchie’s panned 2002 film Swept Away. In a March 2003 piece, The New York Times noted these failed forays into acting and her “somewhat older audience” — largely north of the 11-25 age range most likely to buy CDs — and concluded that the 44-year-old star “may be looking at the final stages of a long career.”
Madonna had first started working on her ninth studio album, American Life, shortly after 9/11 — a period that, as Rettenmund puts it, “politicized the pop cultural environment to the extreme.” While President George W. Bush initially focused his retaliation efforts on Afghanistan, Hollywood edited the Twin Towers (and anything that might evoke them) out of movies, Disney Channel stars sat for bizarre PSAs extolling the American flag, and the country music world mobilized to provide (occasionally questionable) comfort to a wounded nation.
Around this time, Madonna was apparently feeling let down by the priorities and preoccupations of her country’s culture. Reflecting on what she characterized as her relatively immature past selves, who’d been obsessed with things like stardom and superficiality, she explained, “A lot of times, you go through life looking for distractions to cover up pain, when what you should really do is face the pain, and then you don’t need the distraction.”
Teaming up again with French producer Mirwais, whose sound had provided the backbone for Music, she unpacked these feelings over ten tracks — also throwing in “Die Another Day,” the theme from the 2002 James Bond film of the same name (which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November of that year). In all, American Life would see Madonna interrogate the American Dream, chide herself for both perpetuating and being conned by it, and spell out what she’d realized was important: love, family, and spirituality.
The project was quite cohesive, if sometimes abrasive — confidently jumping between acoustic-folk and Euro-techno sounds, and containing the odd decidedly wacky lyric. Penultimate track “Die Another Day” (“Sigmund Freud / Analyze this”), which some figured had been included mostly to guarantee the album a hit, makes the most sense when read outside of its Bond context, as a kind of refusal to disappear — tying it to American Life’s closer, “Easy Ride,” where Madonna at once expresses a wish “to live forever” and “to work for it.”
While the star had made art about being successful but only semi-happy before, the album’s promo cycle turned things into more of a sweeping statement about, well, American life. When journalists questioned whether Madonna was the best medium for that message, multi-millionaire and global icon that she was, she argued that it should be most believable coming from her: “I do think that we’ve become completely consumed with being rich and famous … I have all those things and none of them ever brought me one minute of happiness.”
This mindset was best exemplified by American Life’s title track, a bitter yet sporadically danceable lonely-at-the-top anthem that’s at least 75% squelchy bassline. Its most infamous component is its rapped bridge, where Madonna runs through the markers of her success — “Three nannies, an assistant, and a driver and a jet,” among other things — that don’t actually satisfy her. (The story goes that Mirwais had prompted her to improvise a rap in the studio, and while she was hesitant at first, they eventually made things work.)
There was nothing lyrically about “American Life” — or American Life, really — that made explicit reference to the so-called War on Terror. But by the time Madonna was finishing up the album in late 2002, there was talk of a looming invasion of Iraq. It seems to have been around then that the album’s visual aesthetics started to click into place. In October, she appeared on the Craig McDean-shot cover of Vanity Fair, in a look that nodded to a wartime Marlene Dietrich. She also premiered her six-million-dollar video (one of the most expensive of all time) for “Die Another Day,” which — while obviously an extension of the Bond film — fused her Kabbalism with a storyline involving her character escaping a military torture chamber.
Sometime in November, Madonna got the idea to turn a potential video for “American Life” into an anti-war statement, what she’d later call a “last-ditch effort” to galvanize people to join the cause. She reached out to Swedish director and fellow controversy-magnet Jonas Åkerlund, with whom she’d been working at least once per album as of 1998’s video of the year VMA-winner “Ray of Light” — a rate the two have more or less kept up since. (Madonna had first sought him out in the aftermath of his MTV-banned “Smack My Bitch Up” video for the Prodigy.)
Åkerlund says that while his goal as a director isn’t always to generate controversy, it was very much the intention behind “American Life.” “It was a whole plan,” he remembers of the thinking. “We’re gonna wake people up with the video.” Its concept, conceived with Madonna’s go-to choreographer Jamie King, involved her and a group of women revolutionaries — cast specifically for their “real” body types — crashing a war-themed fashion show (literally, in a Mini Cooper). The show’s audience, full of fashion-world lookalikes, consumes this violent imagery as if it’s perfectly normal, and as the line between fiction and reality gets progressively blurry. “We were intrigued by fashion but then started to realize what a weird world we live in,” Åkerlund explains, “and then used the catwalk as a way of portraiting what was going on.”
With things in pre-production, McDean returned to photograph Madonna for the official American Life shoot, which French designers M/M (Paris) then converted into its Guerrillero Heroico-esque album cover and booklet. Much was made of her rare return to her brunette roots — something she’s suggested signifies a “more grounded” state of mind — and of course her black beret and fatigues. Some immediately saw Che Guevara, others Patty Hearst; stylist Arianne Phillips has said she was inspired by both, additionally citing the Black Panthers.
Phillips’ “insurrectionist chic” look was carried over to the video, shot in Los Angeles over a few days in early February. Seemingly not put off by the fashion-world skewering, Jeremy Scott cameos in the video as the show’s designer, and, according to Åkerlund, made the camouflage looks that are sent down the runway. The director also remembers the set being the first he’d been on where everyone had to check their phones; peer-to-peer file sharing was the big thing keeping the industry up at night, and Madonna had watched Music leak in its entirety on Napster in 2000. (Her camp would later upload fake American Life tracks to discourage piracy, including one where she asked, “What the f–k do you think you’re doing?”)
Immediately following the shoot, a statement was issued that Madonna’s upcoming video would “[depict] the catastrophic repercussions and horrors of war.” When accusations of ‘un-Americanism’ started to build in response, she issued a first-person statement: “I feel lucky to be an American citizen for many reasons — one of which is the right to express myself freely, especially in my work … I am not anti-Bush. I am not pro-Iraq. I am pro-peace.”
Throughout the rest of February and ultimately March, many different versions of the video — “about ten,” Madonna guessed at one point, including a longer cut with car chases and dialogue — were made, as things progressed both behind the scenes and on the world stage. Though MTV ran a teaser ahead of the February 23 Grammys, there was privately some sort of back-and-forth happening with the network, which was at once objecting to certain images and actively covering any cutting-room developments. During these same weeks, Bush moved from laying the groundwork to invade Iraq — including delivering his famous March 17 ultimatum — to officially beginning the war on March 20.
With the “American Life” video set to premiere across networks in early April, the timing was less than ideal. One of the bigger questions was how to conclude it, since multiple options had been filmed: “We never really nailed the ending,” Åkerlund explains. The winning one, so to speak, had Madonna throwing a grenade at a Bush lookalike sitting among the fashion-world ones. “Bush” coolly picks the weapon up to reveal that it’s actually a novelty lighter, and uses it to ignite a cigar. (Åkerlund happened to find the lighter the other day, and demonstrates how it works over Zoom.) At first, it wasn’t public knowledge that Madonna would be throwing a grenade at Bush — just that she’d be throwing one, and that its as-yet unknown recipient would “[take] the destruction out of it by turning it into something else.” In her view, it was a tongue-in-cheek way of asking for an alternative to war.
Åkerlund says that he and Madonna were less antsy about the video’s message — he stresses that they’ve always stood by it, and still do — and more about its delivery, which was reading differently a season removed from their ideation stage. “We’ve been planning the video for months and months,” Madonna said while editing it, “and we didn’t know everything that was going to be happening in the world.” Though Åkerlund suggested in 2016 that it felt insensitive to release the project while parents were sending their kids to war, he says now that the pair was mostly focused on the question “Is this really the best way to prove a point?” He continues: “And it’s the first and only time I’ve seen her go, like, Well, maybe it’s not. Maybe we’re wrong.”
At the very last minute — late enough that it had already started airing abroad, the Bush detail by that point out of the bag — Madonna withdrew the video, writing on March 31: “Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.” Besides, she’d add in the coming weeks, the public seemed to have already made their minds up about it. Writes Rettenmund in the 2015 update of his book, “Not only was it a total loss on a major creative statement, it was a rare example of Madonna flinching under a barrage of criticism.” Months of hard work notwithstanding, Åkerlund still believes pulling it was the right move: “Those weeks when we were supposed to release the video, it really felt wrong … just the way we did it.”
Through the remainder of American Life’s rollout, Madonna was careful not to sound apologetic in discussing the scrapped video. Instead, she credited her decision to a too-tense viewing public, one that she sometimes implied lacked the intellectual maturity to understand her intentions: “I think that what people would misconstrue was that I was slagging on President Bush, and I’m not … that I was making light of what’s happening to the soldiers in Iraq, which I’m not … Things are so serious and people are so volatile that they’re not gonna see irony, they’re not gonna see subtlety, they’re not gonna see the message.”
Still needing to deliver a visual, likely so that the single (released in the U.S. on April 8) would have a chance, Åkerlund edited together yet another version — this one almost bizarrely inoffensive, the original concept virtually non-existent. Released as the official “American Life” video in mid-April, Madonna performs the song in front of a number of flags, from Sweden’s to the Stars and Stripes. “That whole thing was like, What do we do now?” the director explains. He doesn’t remember there being much intention behind the choice of flags or their placement, just that he felt lucky to already have them on hand: “We needed [the official video] fast … and we didn’t want to lose the momentum, so I remember doing that video in a day or two.” Åkerlund admits that it isn’t terribly impressive on its own, and probably only flew at the time with the context of the pulled video behind it.
In some circles, the biggest offense in this story was that Madonna had walked the original back. Rettenmund argues in his book that she’d replaced “her most daring video” with “one of her worst,” adding now that the official version unfortunately “lends credence to the idea that Madonna’s political revolutionary phase was not grounded and well-conceived.” In one April 2003 essay, writer Heather Havrilesky voiced frustration that even America’s staunchest pop-culture provocateurs were faltering at such a heated moment: “It’s a particularly bitter irony that the disaffected, reality-averse culture [Madonna] savages so well in ‘American Life’ seems to have persuaded her to shelve the video indefinitely.” (Various stations around the world opted to play the original anyway, with some openly flouting the withdrawal.)
But there was also that other thing that had happened in March: A week before the invasion, the Chicks’ Natalie Maines kicked off the group’s world tour by declaring that they were ashamed Bush was from their home state of Texas. Becoming the subject of national scorn practically overnight, country radio stations ceased playing their music and former fans destroyed CDs in the street. The Chicks weren’t the only other Bush-critical American celebrities — it’s worth noting that the president also had his share of international celebrity critics, including George Michael, who’d ruffled feathers of his own with his 2002 “Shoot the Dog” video — but domestic country listeners overwhelmingly supported Bush at the time.
“You know, it’s ironic we’re fighting for democracy in Iraq because we ultimately aren’t celebrating democracy here,” Madonna said. “Anybody who has anything to say — against the war or against the president or whatever — is punished, and that’s not democracy.” Naturally, she was asked whether she’d been looking to avoid a similar fate as the Chicks in scrapping her video. “I give you my honest-to-God promise that that is not the reason,” she insisted. While she’d paid attention to their (temporary) fall from grace, she maintained that she was worried about that kind of ire being directed not at herself but at her family. She implied that it might’ve been hard on Ritchie’s career, and at one point specified, “I didn’t want people throwing rocks at my children on the way to school … If you’re one person on your own and you have no responsibility for people around you then that’s one thing, but I had to think about the bigger picture.” (Whether these fears were based on any credible threats she’d received, as has long been rumored on fan forums, it’s hard to say.)
The track itself may not have been destined for anything other than infamy, considered as it is by many to be among Madonna’s worst, or at the very least her most inaccessible. From its choppy sound, to its expletives, to its inelegant rap — “I’m drinking a soy latte, I get a double shoté/ It goes right through my body, and you know I’m satisfied” — it didn’t exactly scream radio smash. In the end, the single peaked at No. 37 in the last week of April, staying on the Hot 100 a total of eight weeks. And while Madonna continued to promote it through the rest of the spring, and would eventually perform it on 2004’s Re-Invention Tour, there was an ensuing stint where it was unclear how she felt about it herself: In 2009, for instance, she left it off her greatest-hits compilation, Celebration, where “Hollywood” and “Die Another Day” were American Life’s only reps.
But perhaps it was more so the video’s message — and especially who it was coming from — that had rubbed Americans the wrong way. “Madonna having anything to say about the war was an irritant,” Rettenmund says, “and the fact that she was criticizing high fashion and the way in which elites ignore global strife struck people as disingenuous; they did not want the lady who showed her boobs to present herself, albeit in fantasy form, tossing a grenade at a wartime president.” It doesn’t feel insignificant that the single performed far better outside of the U.S.: It was a No. 1 hit in Canada and multiple European countries, and made the top 10 just about everywhere else, even if it didn’t always stay for long.
In any case, the hiccup didn’t bode well for American Life as a whole. Released on April 21, it sold 241,000 U.S. copies in its first week — not nothing, but a huge drop on the heels of Music. By the summer, Madonna was back to her blond ambition, hanging up her guerrilla-revolutionary guise until her tour. To promote the album’s second single, “Hollywood” — its message not unlike that of “American Life,” though with a comparatively accessible sound — she and Jean-Baptiste Mondino (another frequent collaborator) reunited for a video that funneled ideas like conformity and cognitive dissonance through the work of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, leaving the war behind. Despite their efforts, the single completely missed the Hot 100.
At this point, it’s something of a side note that “Hollywood” is what the star was performing, alongside Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, when the three kissed onstage at the 2003 VMAs in August — the headline-making moment that, for a lot of people, overwrote anything else Madonna did that year. The performance, which technically commemorated her two decades in music, saw her willingly play the role of elder stateswoman for one of the first times in her career — and to Aguilera, one of the “younger female pop artists” the Times had named as threats to her relevance back in March.
Madonna’s subsequent collaboration with Spears that October, “Me Against the Music,” landed her back on the Hot 100 in time for the year’s end, since American Life’s final two singles — “Nothing Fails” and “Love Profusion” — couldn’t crack the chart (no matter that “Love Profusion,” a starry-eyed earworm addressed to Ritchie, was given the album’s tamest video). Rettenmund points out that American Life was mostly a failure according to Madonna’s own hitmaking precedent: It did debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — “something even Ray of Light could not do” — and was later nominated for two Grammys, even if both were for “Die Another Day.” In keeping with many fans’ feelings on the album, the author characterizes American Life as a cool-to-hate project whose red-herring title track had kneecapped it: “No other song on that record has an overtly political slant, and many of the songs are on par with her best work.”
Nevertheless, while Madonna has continued to make daring and indeed inflammatory art — and is obviously not known in the cultural imagination for having faded into unobjectionable obscurity — she’s opted not to lead with said art in promoting any of her post-2003 albums, arguably saving the bulk of it for tried-and-true fans most accustomed (and generous) to her M.O. She kicked off 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor with “Hung Up” – a sure-to-please, ABBA-sampling disco track whose video paid tribute to John Travolta’s dance movies – and was rewarded with her first top 10 hit since “Die Another Day.” (To see her flirt with blasphemy and BDSM, two things that cursory listeners likely don’t associate with Confessions, you had to catch the 2006 tour.) Madonna’s most controversial video since “American Life” is undeniably 2019’s gun-control plea, “God Control,” which she and Åkerlund made for a non-single from that year’s Madame X before simply uploading it to YouTube — the advent of the platform having been a godsend for artists who’d often butted heads with MTV’s censors.
Going by the content that didn’t survive even the original cut of “American Life,” it seems that Madonna actually got off relatively easy in 2003. Depending on which since-leaked version you find online, you might see her throw her grenade indiscriminately at the crowd, or maybe the Bush lookalike cuddling up to a Saddam Hussein one (footage that she incorporated into tour performances of the song — not exactly an act of contrition). Some fashion shows are more gruesome than others, the crowd ranging from complacent to actively amused. And though most cuts incorporate genuine war footage, it varies from blink-and-you-miss-it mushroom clouds and artillery to pretty graphic images pulled from news broadcasts.
Some might instead read Madonna’s original intentions more charitably two decades later, when recent polling suggests that most Americans think invading Iraq was a mistake. The star, for her part, resumed performing “American Life” in the late 2010s, around which time the album itself was deemed “eerily prescient of Trump-era despair.” (A few months after Trump’s inauguration, she happened to attend the Met Gala with Jeremy Scott, wearing another of his camo designs.) On 2019 and 2020’s Madame X Tour, the song was even punctuated by a new twist: Several dancers in uniform act as pallbearers for a fallen colleague, an American flag draped over the coffin. “I think she returns to that song to double down on why she recorded it,” Rettenmund says of these more recent performances.
Of course, the same social media era that’s given Madonna a direct line to her fans has also seen several of her projects re-evaluated and/or revived by the general public — most notably 1998’s “Frozen,” which many younger listeners discovered through Sickick’s viral 2021 remix of the song. No matter the cut, uploads of the “American Life” video on YouTube are littered with comments expressing admiration for it. “In a weird way,” Åkerlund says while watching one of them on mute, “we kind of always knew … Give it a beat, and then this video’s going to be seen differently. I never really feared that it wasn’t going to see the daylight.” The director adds that the video’s message is a depressingly timeless one: “There’s always a war. I can look at the execution and think I would have done it differently today or whatever, but that goes with the fashion of things we do. I am still proud of it. I’m proud of everything I’ve done with her.”
Only time will tell whether the star has plans to perform “American Life” on the Celebration Tour; while we wait to find out, plenty of fans have been praising it as it turns 20, and artists like HAIM have even posted TikToks using its rap. But seeing as Madonna faces her biggest opportunity yet to recapture its narrative — and with the promise of hundreds of thousands of faithful supporters there as witnesses — the song’s odds have perhaps never been better.
“I think it is to Madonna’s credit that she tried,” says Rettenmund of the 2003 blunder. “And if it is a rare example of her waffling regarding her artistic integrity, it speaks volumes that in 40 years this is the only arguable example that comes to mind.”
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