Ugly Kid Joe – America's Least Wanted (1992)

This album is like the early 90's MTV generation in a nutshell. I spent much of my time in the early half of the 90's watching MTV. There was lots of Guns n' Roses, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bon Jovi, Nirvana and Metallica out there. MTV was still mostly about music, but they did have some shows that weren't just about music, such as Beavis & Butt-Head. I remember hearing at leas some of the songs on this album in that show. The Simpsons-style album cover along with the humour and American style rebelling against the authority in lyrics on this album make it a prime example of that era and what the generation X was all about. I was way too young to understand all of that, but I did try to understand the people who were older than me who I thought were really cool. Hard and heavy rock guitars were an essential part of that era.



I remember first hearing about this band at school on our music lesson where people could bring in a song they liked and we would listen through those songs and vote for the best one. One of my classmates brought in this album on a cassette and I think he played the Cat Stevens cover Cats in the Cradle that was a hit at the time. I was a huge Guns n' Roses fan and the sounds on this album really appealed to me. I ended up buying this album on a CD quite quickly afterwards.

I guess the musical style on this album is best categorised as hard rock, but there are some clear grunge influences on this album as well. The album has some heavy guitar riffs. This really was the sound of the time. The 80's were in the past and any songs that had synthesisers and electronic sounds were totally uncool. I was also learning to play the guitar and I only appreciated music that was played with "real" instruments. It took me a long time to start listening to electronic music at all and even longer to start understanding 80's sounds.

There are a number of great songs on this album. Neighbour is a typical early 90's hard rock song with some great melodies. It sounds a lot like some of the GnR songs. Goddamn Devil could almost be categorised as metal music as some of the sequences in this song sound a lot like Megadeath. So Damn Cool is a clear grunge song that has similar sounds to bands like Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots. The Cat Stevens cover Cats in the Cradle is surprisingly similar to the original song except of course the sounds are very contemporary for the early 90's. I heard this version first so for a while I thought this was actually just the most well-known Ugly Kid Joe song. Everything About You was kind of a hit as well and I remember hearing that on the radio quite often at the time. It's one of my absolute favourites from this album. It really depicts what I meant when I was talking about this album being the embodiment of early 90's MTV culture. And for that reason, I also have to link the music video to that song here. The album ends in a surprisingly laid back and a great song Mr. Recordman. I really like this song. You can immediately recognise from the sounds that this song is from the early 90's.

It's strange how trends keep changing what we think about certain things. This kind of music and the way these people dress on the music videos was considered highly uncool ten years after this album came out in the 2000's. Now the early 90's is back in fashion and I even really think that this album sounds super cool after thinking a long time that I'm over this kind of music. Time really changes our perspective and so does the society around us. This is the reason why I don't ever want to sell any of my albums away, because they may become cool again at some point in the future. Personally I would really welcome many other things from the 90's back.

Listen to the album on Spotify.