I know what you're thinking. "The Bloodhound Gang? What is he, some kind of fucking retard?" While I won't deign to answer that question, I will tell you this: if you're open and receptive to it, this album can actually be very enjoyable. No, really.
When Hefty Fine came out, six years had passed since the release of the hit-laden Hooray For Boobies, which itself followed relatively soon after the band's breakthrough album, One Fierce Beer Coaster (which may or may not have the most hideous artwork ever to grace a mainstream rock album). These two remain the band's biggest-selling albums, and contain all three of their recognizable hits: Fire Water Burn, The Bad Touch and The Ballad Of Chasey Lain. More important than that, they established the band's MO. After two embarrassing forays into white hip-hop, they had shifted styles and tones, becoming slightly more rock-based and graced with a more cynical and sarcastic sense of humor. Musically, they completely ditched any attempts to conform to a specific genre, mixing cheap samples and rudimentary synths with the late-nineties garage rock of their more serious contemporaries.
But people had mostly forgotten about their puerile antics in 2005. When the album's lead single Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo broke the charts, the world squinted in unison, nodding as it muttered with one voice: "Oh yeah... those guys." They had been dismissed as part of the American turn-of-the-millennium wave of teen-oriented music, a wave that had risen as a direct result of nu-metal and hip-hop's popularity. They and their cohorts were then rendered basically obsolete by the arrival of The Strokes and their contemporaries, which demonstrated that teen-friendly music could also be mature and forward-thinking enough for adults to appreciate.
So what was a post-millennial teeny-bopper to do? Korn stuck to their guns, falling into relative obscurity as they pumped out album after album of overproduced mediocrity and their founding members dropped like flies. Eminem became an embarrassment, Marilyn Manson turned to even more drugs and alcohol and Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park basically disappeared. Weirdly, only Insane Clown Posse would continue to rise in popularity, using their status as teen idols to become leaders of their own sub-genre of music.
Meanwhile, Bloodhound Gang were faced with the same dilemma, and, characteristically for them, decided to not really make a decision at all. Instead of continuing on with their watered-down, rock-and-metal infused hip-hop or attempting to tread new ground, they retreated into the past, becoming basically a mid-nineties pop-punk band.
Listening to Hefty Fine at the time it came out was like going ten years back in time. With a chugging nu-metal opener that is best skipped, a song lyric constructed entirely from Simpsons quotes, lots of cheap dancey euro synths and a guest appearance from Villie fucking Valo of all people, Hefty Fine is the ultimate anachronism, bouncing back to a time not gone long enough to be truly missed, yet far too much had changed for anything like it to be even vaguely pertinent.
Most of the album is slickly produced pop-punk that has a relaxed, detached atmosphere about it, and it's as if the band couldn't be bothered to try to please anyone anymore. While Hooray For Boobies saw them desperately scrambling in all directions trying to prove they weren't one-hit wonders, Hefty Fine has no need to prove itself. The easy nonchalance of songs like Pennsylvania, the aforementioned Ralph Wiggum and the truly wonderful Farting With A Walkman On gives off the distinct impression that, rather than top charts or sell copies, this time, the Gang really just wanted to make an album they could all get baked and listen to on a lazy summer afternoon in Philly.
Also, rather than resorting to samples and genre affectations as a crutch, Hefty Fine sees frontman Jimmy Pop emerge as a more-than-competent songwriter. All of their previous albums contained glimpses at their pop-punk side (I Just Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks, Going Nowhere slow and their legitimately excellent cover versions of Kim Wilde's Kids In America and The Association's Along Comes Mary), and maybe this was the album they'd wanted to make all along. Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo trails legitimately catchy vocal hooks from tried-and-tested chord progressions and has a pre-chorus you could fuel a jet plane with. It's weird listening to such a warm, heartfelt little pop song like that when every line of the lyrics is an insanely distasteful euphemism for sex.
But perhaps it is Farting With A Walkman on that best represents the album. It pretty much writes itself, meandering through its chords and drum machine beat with a very, very simple slow build. The guitars kick in, fresh and crisply distorted, first with thundering power chords and then with a surprisingly ornate, sliding series of arpeggios, building to a final refrain that has to be the only example of the Bloodhound Gang playing in anything other than a 4/4 time signature. The point I'm trying to make here is that this is real music, not just a backdrop for a series of dick jokes. Just ignore the lyrics for a second, and try telling me that this isn't one of the finest little guitar-pop tracks you've heard. The same goes for Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo, Ralph Wiggum and Pennsylvania.
Whether you ignore them or not, Hefty Fine's lyrics are an interesting meditation all by themselves. Pop's lyrical persona has shifted from the horny, boisterous youngster of their early work to a seasoned, acerbic hustler. This is especially audible on I'm The Least You Could Do and No Hard Feelings, which are basically the musings of a bitter, heartbroken man who is simply spewing out sexual invective and innuendo as a defense mechanism. It's unclear exactly how accurately Pop's rhymes reflect the actual thoughts of the then thirty-three-year old James Moyer Franks, but I'd like to believe there's some truth to it.
Basically, it's as if Weezer's Tired Of Sex had been used as a prototype for most of an album. Here is a man grown jaded at the ease of seducing young women and has evidently fallen in love with at least one of them along the way, only to be fucked over and left a cold, lonely shell of a man whose hump-'em-and-dump-'em attitude is only a mask for a human being desperate for some kind of physical affection. "I'm the least you could do/if only life were as easy as you," claims the refrain, and the incredibly outdated nineties dance piano hooks somehow just make it even more sad, as if Pop is trying to appeal to a girl far younger than him by playing music he thinks she'll find cool, but she just finds tragically unhip.
It's the perfect reflection of the album as a whole, really: an aging loser clinging to relevance and semi-celebrity status in the face of obvious obscurity, but there's something lovable about this loser, and much like the dopey mug that is Jimmy Pop's face, you just can't deny its simple charm. At the very least, it is a legitimate exploration of how well the musical ideologies of the nineties stand the test of time, and what can be gained and lost by staunchly refusing to grow up.
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