Music video description

We recently added a new music category to the site, One Hit Star, and started looking for songs and music videos that would fit into it. That's how we came across the band "New Radicals," which turned out to be a perfect example of just such a star. This band has one studio album and two singles promoting that album. Of which only the first was successful on the world music market. And it is this first single by the band New Radicals that I would like to focus on in this post. The song You Get What You Give, as it is referred to, was released in 1998 and climbed the charts quite quickly. In Canada, the single even appeared at the top of them. As for the band, the so-called main fiddle in it was played by the founder, namely Gregg Alexander. He was responsible for producing, writing, singing and playing so you can safely say about him an orchestra man. In addition, the band featured mostly his friends as guests, and none of them were part of the permanent lineup. But coming back to the song itself, "You Get What You Give," I myself had never before delved into the song's message and interpreted what message it had. Now, years later, I only realized that the message and the words themselves were quite controversial. The song itself can be divided into two parts, in the first part the singer focuses on criticizing consumerism and misguided life values. In the second part, actually at the very end of the song he criticizes between stars such as Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love and Beck known for such songs as "Loser." As he later confessed such an arrangement of the song he did deliberately, because he was curious what the media and critics would focus on. Just as he suspected, everyone focused on the artists being criticized and few focused on the actual issues that the song "You Get What You Give" addressed. Finally, I'd like to add that the video was shot in a shopping mall in New York, a location chosen by Gregg Alexander himself because it perfectly matched what he wanted to convey in this song. I invite you to watch and listen to it.

Last edited: 16-07-2023