Tuesday, November 24: Liquid Jesus, “W.H.Y.B.”
The first half of the ‘90s saw metal stretching itself very thin in an attempt to broaden the genre’s base and maintain commercial relevance by claiming a place in the rapidly exploding “alternative” movement, resulting in a lot of bands that were only tangentially metal being at least partly embraced by the likes of Headbangers Ball. And as the previous sentence would suggest, this didn’t really work for anyone, with Liquid Jesus among the bands first touted as a revolutionary leap forward before being discarded. It wasn’t entirely the group’s fault, since tracks like “W.H.Y.B.” (“Where Have You Been”) were enjoyable enough on their own terms. But the track was also only the slightest bit metal- and many reading this would be well within their rights to not consider the track metal at all- and tried both to be a few too many things at once while also coming off as too cool for school. It was one of those things that immediately dated itself, just as much as the ‘80s hair metal it was supposedly vanquishing. Liquid Jesus had a lot of good ideas and came fairly close to pulling them off, and in another time might not have carried the burden of this particular era.
