Spoon — “The Underdog”

60 Songs That Explain the '90s

This episode of '60 Songs That Explain the '90s' explores Spoon's song 'The Underdog,' examining how the band transformed their experience o

Key takeaways

• Spoon's major label experience with Elektra Records shaped their identity as underdogs, fueling the defiant energy in 'The Underdog.'

Main topics

• Spoon's relationship with Elektra Records

Notable quotes

"The city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive."

Conclusion

Spoon's journey from being dropped by Elektra Records to becoming one of the most

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:04) The Speaker 2 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (0:15) The new Speaker 2 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 3 (0:36) Hello, friends. A quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube, and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 Songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion, and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube. Check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well. Thanks for listening and or watching, and we'll see you on the internet. Speaker 3 (1:27) There are, historically, three phases to major label rock stardom. Phase one, the young, scrappy, unsullied rock band attracts attention. Speaker 3 (1:57) They went and cut a record. The record hit the chart. And someone in the newspaper said it was art. That's how rock and roll works, my friends. That's how rock criticism works. Also, here we have a song called Shake and Pop. Released in 1978 by Nick Lowe, L-O-W-E, a young, brash, dapper, subversive, and incomprehensibly rad English gentleman. The God-tier singer and songwriter and producer Nick Lowe, whose 1978 debut solo album is called Jesus of Cool. Phenomenal album title. Get out of town. Every instrument here. Every member of the band on this song, Shake and Pop, thinks they're the star of the band. I love it so much. The guitar player is like, I'm the star. The bassist is like, no, I'm the star. Meanwhile, the drummer is just whacking the snare drum indiscriminately. I'm the star. This song's got a fascinating combination. of total band cohesion and zero band cohesion. Shake and pop sounds like these goofballs will be breaking up violently in the next 90 seconds. Better sign them fast. Major label rock stardom, phase two, the vultures descend. Speaker 5 (3:44) We Speaker 3 (3:45) have a late-breaking challenger for star of the band. The keyboard player is like, no, I'm the star. Meanwhile, these fellas have attracted major label interest. CBS are going to pay a great big advance. CBS used to be a big record label. It confuses me every time. This is going to go great. This is going to be awesome. This band's going to love signing. to a major label. Nick Lowe is best known for writing and first releasing a modest little tune called, parenthesis, What's So Funny About, close parenthesis, Peace, Love, and Understanding. The only thing cooler than rock songs with parentheses in the title is when the title starts. With the parentheses. Nick's original version with his old pub rock band Brinsley Schwartz comes out in 1974. From the parentheses on down, you cannot quite tell if Nick is joking. You're 98 % sure he's sincere, but the song doesn't work without the 2 % chance that he's mocking the very concept. of peace, love, and understanding. You need that 2 % chance that he's taking the piss. That's a popular English expression. Speaker 3 (5:19) Also, I love it when singers harmonize on the word harmony. There's a K-pop Demon Hunter song where they harmonize on the word harmony, and sometimes it makes me cry. So then Elvis Costello covers that song, not the K-pop Demon Hunter song, the other one. You can find the Elvis Costello version of What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding on his 1979 album. Armed Forces, produced by Nick Lowe. And Elvis makes the song eternally famous. Then, in 1992, the jazz soul singer Curtis Stigers covers Peace, Love, and Understanding on the Bodyguard soundtrack, which sells 30 billion copies, thanks to Whitney Houston. And now Nick Lowe is a zillionaire. Nick's getting annual songwriting royalty checks. Higher than the GDP of Poland. I chose Poland at random. That doesn't happen very often. That exact wildly lucrative sequence of events. You know what does happen often? Major label rock stardom phase three. Oh, wow. This sucks. Speaker 5 (6:48) They Speaker 3 (6:48) cut another record. It never was a hit. And someone in the newspaper said it was shit. That's also sometimes how rock and roll and rock criticism works. My friends, I love how caustic, but somehow how suave Nick Lowe sounds as he recounts the now thoroughly sullied and defeated band dispersing in a disorderly fashion. The drummer is a bookie. The singer is a whore. The bass player's selling clothes he never would have wore. Incredible. Major label rock stardom is not for the faint of heart or the large of brain. Don't do it, kids. As noted philosopher Steve Albini once put it, some of your friends are probably already this fucked. Nick Lowe's got a wild, rad, elegantly chaotic... aspirational type career. Power Pop fans know him best for his lively 1979 hit Cruel to be Kind. Sopranos fans know him best for his somber 1994 tune The Beast in Me, which plays at the end of the pilot episode of The Sopranos when the camera pans across Tony's empty pool because the ducks are gone. And then... In 2001, Nick Lowe puts out an equally phenomenal solo album called The Convincer. except he's no longer the Jesus of Cool Era, rude, subversive, bomb-throwing, meta pub rocker guy. Now, he's a ludicrously debonair crooner type, fixing to charm the pants off everybody at bingo night. Yeah, this album is called The Convincer. On the album cover, an astoundingly blue-eyed Nick Lowe is tending to a cigarette and rocking an immaculately tailored suit and tie and fitted shirt. One tousled lock of white hair across his forehead. Holy crap. Lock up your mothers. Track one on the convincer is called Homewrecker. He can fix her. Speaker 5 (8:55) Three, four. You look like butter would melt in your mouth, but I know it will. Speaker 5 (9:12) Home record. That Speaker 3 (9:15) three, four count in is vitally important to me. All of a sudden, a little studio patter, a quick peek behind the curtain before Nick's plutonium strength charisma kicks in. I interviewed Nick Lowe in 2018 in his hotel room in Cleveland while he was on tour, and he made a hotel room in Cleveland feel like a hotel room in Paris. And Nick says to me, quote, people who know how to play rock and roll, this is going to sound a bit po-faced, but it's quite hard to find people who know how to do it properly. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but the roll part of the rock and roll, that's the intriguing bit to me. Otherwise, it's just rock. And rock isn't very interesting to me. Meanwhile, as Nick Lowe is evolving from rude young man to rudely handsome older man, many fine 90s alternative rock bands are acquainting themselves with the pros and cons of major label rock stardom. Speaker 3 (10:43) One perk of major label rock stardom is maybe they put your song on the radio and MTV. Here we have Popular, the 1996 debut single from Nada Surf, a young, scrappy, unsullied New York City rock band signed to esteemed major label Elektra Records. Nada Surf frontman Matthew Cause sounds like he's angrily reading a one-star Yelp review of high school. Out loud. Not any particular high school, just a one-star Yelp review of the idea of high school. Now, offhand, I can't imagine anything that was more my shit as a high school senior in 1996 than a grumpy, bitterly ironic... power pop ish Weezer adjacent jam about standoffish popular girls produced by Rico Kasich from the cars. My mom says I'm a catch. That's a great line. And indeed, I dug popular quite a bit whenever it came on the radio, but I did not quite dig popular enough. to go drop $18 on Not A Surf's 1996 debut album called High Low. But that, of course, is exactly what Elektra Records needed me to do. Uh-oh. This does not bode well for the next Not A Surf album. Speaker 3 (12:23) They cut another record. It never was a hit. That song, energetic, hooky, propulsive, splendid. That song is called Hyperspace. And it appears on Nada Surf's modest but feisty second album called The Proximity Effect and released by Elektra Records in 1998 in Europe. Uh-oh, The Proximity Effect does not have... any radio-friendly tunes that might get as popular as popular. And so Elektra Records declines to release the album at all in America. It does come out eventually. And Nada Surf get dropped. So the dudes in Nada Surf get day jobs. Not the drummer-is-a-bookie type day jobs. Normal. Respectable. day jobs, web designer, record store employee, etc. But as a successful, enduring rock band, Nada Surf are toast. Right? They can see it all and they're okay. They wish there was another way. And it turns out there is another way. Not a major label. Speaker 3 (13:51) In 2002, Not A Surf released their third album called Let Go on prestigious Seattle independent label Barsouk Records, best known for putting out early indie pop albums by Death Cab for Cutie and Rilo Kylie and whatnot. That song. Soaring, yearning, heartbroken, defiantly hopeful. That song is called Inside of Love, and it will eventually soundtrack soaring, yearning episodes of One Tree Hill and How I Met Your Mother. Do Not-A-Surf put out more fine albums and eventually land a song on Grey's Anatomy? You bet they do. Not-A-Surf have quietly, modestly survived. Not a surf of expertly transition from a raucous mid 90s buzz bin ironic alt rock band to thoughtful early 2000s Garden State extended universe super sincere indie rock band that's hard to do popular is a great and alarmingly memorable song that is nonetheless so strange and grouchy and novel that it has major novelty hits It felt like a career-ending hit song. When rock critics write about Not A Surf in the 2000s, you get headlines like, A band just now recovering from success. That's the New York Times in 2003. Or Not A Surf colon, life after the one hit wonder. That's Time magazine in 2012. In that Time article, Not A Surf frontman Matthew Cause says, We've tried playing popular at concerts now. If we don't play it, someone is grumpy. If we do play it, someone else is grumpy. We can't win. End quote. Speaking of grumpy, dig the wildly appealing rasp in this dude's voice as he literally sings the words, Who sucked out the feeling? Speaker 5 (16:09) Here Speaker 3 (16:10) we have Sucked Out, the 1996 breakout single from Superdrag, a young, scrappy, unsullied Knoxville, Tennessee rock band led by singer-songwriter John Davis and signed to esteemed major label Elektra Records. Holy shit, it's Elektra again. Not a surf and Superdrag toured together and everything. Sucked Out is an insidiously catchy major label hit song about how being a major label band totally sucks. This was my dream, played out rockin' routine. Note the past tense. there. I loved Sucked Out, which appears on the 1996 Superdrag album Regretfully Yours, but regretfully I did not buy that CD for $18 either, which does not bode well for the next Superdrag album. Speaker 3 (17:27) They cut another record. It never was a hit. The next Superdrag album is released in 1998 and is called Head Trip in Every Key. And it rules, actually. That song is called Do the Vampire. Note the ferocious defiance. Note what you might interpret as the willful disinterest. in major label type shenanigans. We don't want to know what's really going on. Head Trip and Every Key is recorded at fabled LA studio Sound City with producer Jerry Finn, best known for his extensive work with Green Day and Blink-182. We got ambition on this record. We got a bigger budget. We want to go 100 % analog in an increasingly digital world. We want a rhyme alternative station with bankrupt vibration. We got a sitar and a melatron and a theremin and some horns and some strings and no hit songs. And so Elektra drops the band and good fucking riddance. You know what might restore Superdrag's previously sucked out feeling? You know what this band needs? Not a major label. Speaker 5 (18:41) Rock and roll, but I don't want to deal with the hassle. I know what I know, but. I don't want to feel like an asshole. I Speaker 3 (18:54) want rock and roll, but I don't want to deal with the hassle. Super Drag signed with the modest, splendid Portland, Oregon indie label Arena Rock Recording Company, and they put out their next album in the year 2000, an album called In the Valley of Dying Stars. Talking to Vice in 2014, John Davis says, quote, that's the one. where it just makes me proud that we lost our deal. We went back to putting records out on an indie label, got back in our van, kept doing us, because we weren't going to let the dude that wrote the Vitamin C record tell us what our band was supposed to sound like. And if we had knuckled under and been like, yeah, we'll make it more like Third Eye Blind, then we would still be in the same boat today. sitting in cubicles, but we would have had to live with that. I'd rather not have to live with that and at least know that we stayed true. End quote. Vitamin C is the lady who sang the graduation song. You know, as we go on, we remember all the times we had to get there's a time and place for that song. Commencement ceremonies, mostly. But I do take John's point that vitamin C is not his vibe. Anyway, this super drag song is called Keep It Close to Me. Speaker 3 (20:53) That's such an exhilarating moment live when the bass and drums finally kick in. It's supposed to be burnt. Someone on a podcast said it was art. I saw Super Drag play Keep It Close to Me live in late 2000 at Bernie's Bagels and Distillery, a tiny seedy basement club in Columbus, Ohio, famous for noisy rock music and beer. and bagels. Low ceilings, though. Any tall people in the band, you had to be careful not to jump around on stage because you might whack your head on the pipes overhead. And John Davis rolls into Bernie's with a whole rack of guitars, like six to eight to ten guitars, like he's in ACDC. Like he's playing a sold-out football stadium. It's like bringing a fog machine into a storage unit. But Superdrag kicked ass that day, my friends. Superdrag treated that bagel shop basement like it was a football stadium. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. And if the record industry demeans you and discards you and turns you into the underdog, well, that's when you make them fear. The Underdog. Speaker 3 (22:19) My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 47th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, colon the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing The Underdog by Spoon from their 2007 album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Yes, Spoon, the Austin, Texas rock band that used to be on Elektra Records, and now they're not. Right off the rip, I got to tell you, The Underdog is a truly fantastic mouth horn song. You know what I mean, Mouth Horn, when you go... Speaker 5 (22:51) A first Speaker 3 (22:56) ballot Mouth Horn Hall of Fame song right here. You'll see. What did I tell you? Speaker 5 (23:19) And Speaker 1 (23:20) then Speaker 5 (23:20) the Speaker 3 (23:21) best part, you got to switch it up just a little bit right here. You go... Speaker 5 (23:26) Fantastic. Speaker 3 (23:29) Try it yourself. Give it a shot during the ad break. Speaker 4 (23:38) The Speaker 2 (23:38) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (23:49) The new Speaker 2 (23:53) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Okay. Speaker 3 (24:08) Unbelievable. Okay, real quick. Do you know the band The Mountain Goats? High IQ and even higher EQ indie rock legends. EQ stands for emotional quotient, I think. If it doesn't, just pretend it does. The Mountain Goats, who've been around since the mid-90s, based in Durham, North Carolina, now led by the brilliant songwriter and author John Darnielle. A while back, John was gracious enough to come on this show to talk about Linkin Park. In July 2026, the Mountain Goats put out an extra rad new single about a nameless fictional 90s rock band trying to make it big by touring with a real-life famous 90s rock band. The song starts with the label vultures descending. Speaker 5 (24:56) Three years on the local circuit, played twice at the county fair, and the second time then. Our friend who worked the business and said a guy from a label was there. There were two more like him at the next show, staring us down like hawks. Speaker 3 (25:12) CBS is going to pay a great big advance. And if you adjusted these lyrics slightly, or even if you kept all the lyrics but adjusted the delivery slightly, the chorus and the title of this Mountain Goat song could work as a punchline, as a rude, mean joke. At the expense of both the fictional underdog 90s rock band John is singing about and the real-life famous 90s rock band that gives this song its title. But as much as I love sardonic, merciless, Nick Lowe-type black humor, we do not need rude, the bass player selling clothes he never would have wore energy here. Trying to make it big and major label rock and roll is hard. man. And so what we need is peace, love, and understanding. Speaker 5 (26:06) And there was love in the air and all the money was there and we were going on tour with Candlebox. Speaker 3 (26:20) That Mountain Goat song is called Candlebox. Candlebox are a famous 90s rock band from Seattle who unfairly took a bunch of shit from other cooler Seattle rock bands. Shame on you if you don't know who Candlebox is. You know the Candlebox song Far Behind? Speaker 3 (26:41) You can try doing mouth horn to famous guitar riffs, but I don't recommend it. Okay, let me ask you something. Does this guy sound like Ryan Gosling to you? She was. Poking up all the Speaker 5 (26:57) cigarettes. Putting them out in his hands. Speaker 3 (27:08) Every time I hear, just wait until later, man, I picture Ryan Gosling. Specifically, Ryan Gosling in that movie, The Nice Guys, the sleazy goofball action buddy comedy from 2016 with Russell Crowe. It's a fantastic movie. When Ryan Gosling's in a shootout

More episodes

• Evanescence — “Bring Me To Life”
• Sade — “By Your Side”
• My Chemical Romance—“Welcome to the Black Parade”