‘Tis amazing, if not annoying, the importance of cultivating one’s image. In life, your modus operandi is to make yourself look like a hard worker, but that the ability to work hard comes effortlessly. In modern music (and in all of modern art to a certain extent), the point is to make it all look effortless, in a vague and sludgy teeter towards defining what is “cool”.
Those who claim to be oblivious to the imbalance between hard work and image in the music industry (i.e., “I just listen to the music. I don’t get into all the other stuff.”) are liars. Those who acknowledge it, but claim that it doesn’t bother them are not to be trusted.
Sometimes though, rarely, image is fun, not pretentious. A musician, in a kind-of-Warhol fashion, legitimately makes his image important to what is important about his music. And it doesn’t come off as forced, but as necessitated by what he aims to tell the audience. It’s actually cool.
This exception is what makes a band like the Fun Lovin’ Criminals so rewarding to listen to. In the mid-90s, they received moderate attention, mostly a product of the Tarantino influenced ultra violence movement in film. Fun Lovin’ Criminals had a small hit, “Scooby Snacks”, which heavily sampled Reservoir Dogs and dealt with robbing banks on drugs.
Their pseudo-Mafioso personalities failed to take them much further than that, however. In 1998, they released “100% Colombian” to virtually no critical or commercial acknowledgement.
After listening to the album in its entirety, the most obvious question is, “how much of this stuff was sampled?”
The answer is, “not a whole lot.” With the exception of “Big Night Out”, which borrows its chorus from Tom Petty and its ending from the Marshall Tucker Band, virtually all of the album is, as the liner notes claim, “written, performed, and recorded by Fun Lovin’ Criminals”, three professional musicians from New York.
For all Huey Morgan’s lyrics, which overwhelmingly revolve around drugs, prostitutes, broken dreams, and people getting their faces smashed in, the sheer professional musicianship on this album leads one to seriously doubt that Huey, or any of the members of this band have firsthand experience with the aforementioned topics.
Nevertheless, the atmospherics of “100% Colombian”, the seamless flow from lounge jazz to funky blues to heavy rock, make Morgan’s subdued but comically over-the-top rapping more endearing than would usually exist in nature.
Clearly, this is a band that relies heavily on the romanticism of New York crime life for its own image; just look at these guys.
If a black and white picture in Central Park with thin moustaches and goatees and the wifebeater showing beneath the tattoo-artist button down bowling shirt isn’t an attempt to look cool, I don’t know what is. Nevertheless, an question you might ask is, “Where are they now?”; or even better, “Why aren’t they still around?”
The answer is that they are still around, but not really. They have a huge following in the U.K., which apparently digs its caricaturist portrayal or New York City’s criminal underground. Because of this little nest egg, they’ve made absolutely no attempt to reconnect with American audiences since 1998. But why haven’t they tried to become relevant again?
They had an opportunity in the 2000s with the rap-metal craze. It really wouldn’t have taken a whole lot of effort to end up on a tour with Kid Rock or someone like that. It would have taken even less effort to collaborate with one of those bands. Furthermore, America's Mafia-fascination never fully went away, as “The Sopranos” demonstrated.
Regardless of the popularity of the Sopranos, remaining relevant on the American music scene most probably would have required that the Fun Lovin’ Criminals re-cultivate their image, form it and mold it in a way that would have made their music more palatable to the listening public.
Given that they were so willing to build a ridiculous "supercool" image, which was leagues from their real personalities, in the mid-90s, wouldn’t they be willing to rebuild it in the 2000s?
It would seem that the answer should be “yes”. However, it isn’t. The clearer answer to this question, as well as to why they never even attempted to regain any relevance, is simply that the Fun Lovin’ Criminals are hard-working professional musicians.
That’s pretty fucking cool when you think about it.
