The Alternative Number Ones: Cracker’s “Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Camper Van Beethoven never made music for teenagers. I'm sure plenty of teenagers liked them, but it seems unlikely that teenagers were that band's target audience. They were one of the prototypical college rock bands of the '80s -- the flighty absurdist quasi-punks who were too giddily intellectual for their own good. (Granted, plenty of college kids are still in their teenage years, but you get what I'm saying.) Cracker, the band that former Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery started after the end of CVB, probably didn't really make music for teenagers, either, but they happened to come along with a song called "Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)" at the exact moment that American teenagers were starting to embrace the messily defined thing known as alternative rock en masse. I wasn't even a teenager yet, and I thought "Teen Angst" was awesome.

"Teen Angst" is a funny phrase because the first word trivializes the second. Everyone who has been a teenager can remember the stage of life when everything seemed way too heightened, when everything mattered so much. But plenty of people have a tendency to look at other people who are going through that stage and dismiss it. In early-'90s alt-rock, bands publicly grappled with what it meant to become avatars of teen angst. About a year and a half after Cracker released "Teen Angst," Kurt Cobain opened Nirvana's third album with this: "Teenage angst has paid off well; now I'm bored and old." With that line, he essentially wrote off both his teenage audience and himself as trivial clichés. This was the alt-rock way.

Looking back at the Modern Rock charts, the funny thing about the grunge revolution is that it didn't happen all at once. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" spent a single week at #1 in fall 1991, and then America's small web of alternative stations went right back to playing post-punk veterans and quirkily intellectual singer-songwriters. MTV was a different story, but we don't have a chart that measures that particular impact.

Cracker didn't look or sound anything like Nirvana, but there's a strong indication that their "Teen Angst" was the first real post-Nirvana Modern Rock chart-topper, the first one after "Teen Spirit" that truly embraced a particular strain of stereotypically gen-X ironic frustration. And like "Teen Spirit," it's a fucking banger.

This column has already gone into the history of Camper Van Beethoven, a pure cult band who never had a hope in hell at mainstream stardom but who got a few chances to shoot for it anyway. Camper Van Beethoven somehow got a corporate label to bankroll their indulgent excursions, and they deserve credit for that, but they were simply not capable of becoming the next R.E.M. By the end of CVB's tenure, David Lowery was simply not on the same page as his bandmates, and he basically treated their 1989 swan song Key Lime Pie as a solo record. CVB made it to #1 on the Modern Rock charts with their quasi-ironic cover of the Status Quo's classic rock nugget "Pictures Of Matchstick Men," and then the band broke up.

When David Lowery started a new band, he wanted to make something more linear, less winkingly artsy. Lowery started making music with Johnny Hickman, a guitarist who he'd known since childhood. Lowery and Hickman grew up together in California's Inland Empire, and Hickman's style had nothing to do with Camper Van Beethoven's giddy genre experiments. Instead, Lowery and Hickman started working on a punked-up take on the classic Buck Owens Bakersfield country sound. That wasn't exactly how Cracker sounded, though. Instead, they landed on something about halfway between Social Distortion and the Black Crowes, which was a pretty good place for an early-'90s band to find itself.

David Lowery and Johnny Hickman got together with Davey Faragher, a bassist from their Redlands, CA hometown. In the '70s, Faragher had been a member of the Faragher Brothers, a blue-eyed soul family band who once performed on Soul Train. When the Faragher Brothers broke up, Davey became a session musician who played on records from people like the Pointer Sisters, Olivia Newton-John, and Martika.

I guess Cracker got their name from "This Is Cracker Soul," a song that appeared on their debut LP. They don't really sound like anything I'd call "cracker soul," but maybe that was the idea. Instead, Cracker were basically Sardonic Creedence. Like John Fogerty, David Lowery came from California but sang in a weird down-home accent that didn't sound like it came naturally to him. Lowery was born in Texas and only settled California after lots of moving around, so maybe he came by his scratchy drawl honestly. But almost everything that came out of Lowery's mouth sounded like wiseass irony, so you never could tell.

Maybe David Lowery really wanted Cracker to be a rootsy Southern-boogie blues-rock band, but their best songs are the ones where Lowery's sneer is most audible. That sensibility, combined with his Camper Van Beethoven roots, were enough to allow Cracker to fall squarely into the alternative category, even if they sounded a million miles removed from the Cure.

Early on, Cracker didn't have a full-time drummer. The band moved all the way across the country to Richmond, Virginia, and I believe they're still situated in central VA today. Richmond is a great city, so I think they made a good decision. They secured themselves a deal with Virgin, and they recorded their self-titled 1992 debut with a series of session producers, including Wrecking Crew legend Jim Keltner. A couple of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers also played on the record. The producer was Don Smith, a veteran who had credits going back to the '70s and who'd worked on records from the Tragically Hip and Dramarama.

The countrified affectations of Cracker's self-titled debut mostly don't hit too hard for me, but album opener "Teen Angst" stands out in a big way. It's big and mean and purposeful, with the sort of strident burn-it-down riff that I wanted to hear. In retrospect, it seems safe to say that Johnny Hickman was going for a Neil Young fire-scrawl thing, and he absolutely achieved it. The band pushes that riff along with driving acoustic guitars and an understated but locked-in rhythm section. ("Teen Angst" isn't one of the Cracker songs with Jim Keltner on drums, but session guy Rick Jaeger knew what he was doing.) "Teen Angst" sounds like a big gumdrop-looking '70s van careening across frozen cornfields, chased by a fleet of small-town cop cars. It's that primal, urgent twang-rock shit, and it hits hard.

That riffage was enough to capture my 12-year-old lizard-brain attention, and that made me notice David Lowery. I am sure that Lowery was not going for a Kurt Cobain thing when he recorded his "Teen Angst" vocal, but there's a similar hoarse, desperate tunefulness in there. On the other hand, Lowery wasn't singing on overpoweringly loud music, and he was enunciating his words. I didn't really know what those words meant, but I wanted to know.

Lowery never uses the phrase "teen angst" on "Teen Angst." Instead, as the parenthetical informs you, it's a song about what the world needs now. David Lowery did not know what the world needed. He wasn't Burt Bacharach or Hal David. He was just a big ball of horny aggravation, and that's what the song is about. Lowery knew what the world did not need: "What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head." I didn't get that one. There was an acoustic guitar on the song, and in my mind, folk singers were people with acoustic guitars. This was an early indication that maybe I didn't have everything figured out yet -- not like now. Now, I understand everything, all the time. You can't get shit past me.

The lyrical standpoint of "Teen Angst" is almost hilariously, definitively gen-X. It's an encapsulation of an irony-poisoned viewpoint that I found terribly compelling as a kid. (Depending on where you draw the line, I just barely make the gen-X cut.) Lowery asserts, again and again, that he doesn't know what the world needs. He just knows what he wants, and one of those things is "a place to be surly." Every prescription that he has is a joke: "What the world needs now is some true words of wisdom, like 'la la la la la la la la la.'"

As for Lowery himself, the things that he wants are fairly pedestrian: "a good stiff drink," "a V-8 engine," "your long sweet body lying next to mine." So: alcohol, cars, and sex. I'm a pretty big fan of all these things, though I wouldn't recommend indulging in all three at once. The trick of "Teen Angst," I think, is the way Lowery sings about these normal rocker-dude desires with self-critical distance. He doesn't know shit, and these are the places where his brain goes. It's a confession, not an anthem, and it's funny. To me the funniest line is this: "What the world needs now is a new Frank Sinatra so I can get you in bed" -- just the idea of early-'90s hipsters trying to use Sinatra music as a seduction tool. I'm sure it happened, but that makes for a goofy image.

You couldn't make a song like "Teen Angst" today -- not because it would get you canceled or anything but just because the cultural temperature is someplace else. In 1992, you could make a song that rocks hard while also commenting on the futility of rocking. That seemed innovative then. It would be hopelessly clichéd today. Maybe that disconnect is the reason that "Teen Angst" hasn't become a standard, like so many other early-'90s alt-rock songs. But I thought it was a great song in 1992, and I think it's a great song today.

The "Teen Angst" video, the first real look at Cracker that the world got, is a Replacements-style pisstake. The whole clip is a static shot of band-members lip-syncing in what appears to be a very cold field. They're all dressed crazy, in heavy bright-colored layers, and they aren't too dedicated to making their lip-syncing look natural. A little while in, Lowery puts down his guitar to rub get his hands warm, and the music doesn't change. His bandmates dance around like goons. The drummer gets up and runs around his kit, flailing at cymbals. Something blurry, maybe a dirtbike, zooms by in the background. Dogs mill around. Eventually, the guys in the band trash all their instruments and run off toward the mountains, and the song just keeps playing. It's the opposite of slick professionalism. Cracker presumably just made this video to mock the idea that they should make a video, but this got MTV play! It was in the Buzz Bin! I remember seeing it at a friend's house and having no way to process it.

The Modern Rock chart was really the only place where "Teen Angst" did well, though it also grazed the Mainstream Rock chart. Cracker's self-titled album came out in spring 1992 and didn't make too many waves. Much of the record is more self-consciously countrified than "Teen Angst." Cracker followed their breakout single with "Happy Birthday To Me," which had a similar lyrical sensibility but which went hard on accordions and harmonicas. It peaked at #13.

Just over a year after their debut album, Cracker came back with sophomore album Kerosene Hat, and their lead single tapped even deeper into the zeitgeist. The dazed, stumbling, anthemic "Low" peaked at #3 on the Modern Rock chart, but I remember hearing it way more often than "Teen Angst." Today, it's Cracker's biggest song by far. (It's a 9.) "Low" even crossed over to the Hot 100, where it peaked at #64. That's the only time that Cracker have made it onto that chart.

Cracker also made it to #6 on the Modern Rock chart with "Get Off This," a Kerosene Hat single that got even more sardonic about the state of the young and rock 'n' roll. "Get Off This" is basically an alt-rock song about player haters. There were a lot of songs about player haters in early-'90s alt-rock, since it may be the mass movement with the greatest concentration of haters in pop history. The whole point of "Get Off This," I think, is that people need to stop bothering David Lowery about the fact that he's making a living by making music. The track itself is ebullient and weirdly funky, and it represents a viewpoint that Lowery continues to champion to this day, as he tries to ensure that lots of people can make a living by making music. (It's an 8.)

I loved the Kerosene Hat singles. (Cracker also made it to #25 with the semi-novelty "Euro-Trash Girl.") I didn't listen to the album that much after I bought it, but the singles were fire. Enough people bought Kerosene Hat that it went gold; it's the only Cracker record to get any kind of plaque. Cracker toured hard behind Kerosene Hat, and they eventually came back with the 1996 album The Golden Age. Lead single "I Hate My Generation" -- a real theme for this band -- peaked at #13.

Cracker haven't been on the Modern Rock chart since their Golden Age track "Nothing To Believe In" peaked at #32. They were drifting in one direction, and alt-rock radio was drifting in another. They released a couple more major-label albums and kept touring. Davey Faragher left the band after Kerosene Hat, and they worked through a gang of drummers, but the core of David Lowery and Johnny Hickman has remained intact. Camper Van Beethoven got back together in 1999, and David Lowery has split his time between his two bands, sometimes touring as his own cult-act double bill. He's also made solo records, started a studio and a publishing company, and become a music-business lecturer at the University Of Georgia.

Cracker still play shows, though they don't record as often as they used to. (Berkeley To Bakersfield, their most recent LP, came out in 2014.) These days, Lowery stands as a big advocate of decent financial compensation for musicians, and that's pitted him against the streaming economy. He's made public statements against companies like YouTube, Pandora, and Genius, and he's filed lawsuits against Napster and Spotify, some of which have actually put more money in musicians' pockets. In a 2017 class action settlement, Spotify agreed to set aside more than $40 million to cover unpaid royalties. I didn't like the whole 2012 episode where Lowery blasted an NPR intern who wrote an article about how she'd used file-sharing sites, but Lowery's crusade is a net positive for society. Maybe he's figured out what the world may need.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: I was honestly surprised to learn that there are not a lot of "Teen Angst" covers out there. I can, however, tell you that David Lowery and Johnny Hickman got together with the bluegrass band Leftover Salmon to record 2003's O' Cracker Where Art Thou?, an album with a bunch of bluegrass versions of Cracker songs. This is profoundly Not For Me, but it exists. If you really want, you can hear its take on "Teen Angst" right here: