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Cracker - Get On With It -The Best of (CD and DVD)

What the world needs now is a new album by Cracker. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, though, so we’ll have to be satisfied with this, a collection of their best recordings. Cracker was certainly one of the most fun and interesting alternative bands of the nineties, with an appeal that crossed all sorts of boundaries. Rockers liked them, grunge kids got them, stoners loved them, and even the latest breed of country-rock fans found something to appreciate. David Lowery’s ‘dumb-as-a-fox’ vocal delivery provided the perfect means of expression for songs about American White Trash (“Mr. Wrong”), European white trash (the self-explanatory “Euro-Trash Girl”) and a generation self-defined by Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys (I Hate My Generation”). The band rocked hard with a rootsy groove and enough energy to turn some of these songs into brilliantly sardonic anthem-masterpieces. Who could deny the droll power of “Teen Angst (What the world Needs Now”) or the stoner scream-along entitled “Low”?

Five albums of original material defined their output in the ‘90s, but since then, they lost their contract with Virgin Records and have graced us only with a pair of sporadic collections - a live album and a collection of cover tunes that manages to find common ground with Dwight Yoakam, Merle Haggard and Bruce Springsteen. As a means of capitalizing on the band’s past success, Virgin saw fit to release this collection of the band’s greatest hits, and although the band might not want to hear me say this, it is undeniably excellent. I say that the band might not want it that way, because they apparently hold a bit of grudge against their ex-label, and have released their own collection of their previous hits, all in re-recorded versions. If you love the band, then “Greatest Hits Redux” might be interesting and fun, but if you’re a casual fan who wants to own the genuine best of Cracker, then you need to “Get On With It.”

For those interested in DVD’s instead of CD’s, the collection is also available as a DVD release, with a significantly different line-up of songs. The DVD features five videos, followed by a nine-song live set that touches on their most well known songs. All of the videos are amusing, particularly the bizarre Sandra Bernhard cameo in “Stoned,” and the faux-audition footage of contenders for “White Trash Girl.” “I Hate My Generation” is the only video that misfires, probably because it misses the lyrical point of the song by focusing on octogenarian sideshow types instead of the artistically and ethically-challenged twenty-something freaks who couldn’t even acknowledge the existence of a band with the temerity to call themselves ‘Cracker’. Instead of outrage, though, Cracker made me feel good about their generation, because in the midst of artistic disaster, they rose above the mediocrity of lightweight nineties nonsense, and provided me with the means to smile. This collection captures a few of the musical highlights from an otherwise mediocre decade, and I’m grateful for it.