Re-Acquiring Old CDs: Lit's "A Place in the Sun"
In my previous "Re-Acquiring Old CDs" post, I had off-handedly referenced the lead singer of Lit, Ajay Popoff, who at one point around the turn of the millennium had these wild sideburns that were sharpened into triangles on his cheeks. With that, perhaps that makes for a good segue to lead into a new article, specifically talking about a Lit album I managed to get back into my possession this year.
Lit's "A Place in the Sun"
Despite having five studio albums, I think that perhaps "A Place in the Sun" is the only one that really took off to any sort of critical acclaim. I was familiar with only one track off of the album that would follow it, and only because it was on the soundtrack to the Don Bluth animated movie "Titan A.E." (which perhaps I'll talk about in the next blog, since that sounds like a pretty good lead-in). There are only a couple of songs on this album that have really had any lasting impression on society, and even at the end of the day, only one of those singles continues to get any sort of public airplay at all anymore.
The second song on the album, "My Own Worst Enemy", tends to be the one song most people would know if you asked them, "Hey, have you ever heard of Lit?" Released in 1999, it seems the song solidified Lit as a one-hit wonder band. Surely you've heard it before. It's a song that depicts a man who apparently got so drunk the night before that he has now woken up the next day to find his home in shambles, completely unable to remember how the place got that way. It's the hangover anthem of the new millennium. Weirdly, the music video doesn't depict anything that happens in the song. It's just the band waltzing into a bowling alley, dressed like sleazebags, and somehow bowling the best games of their lives despite throwing every ball like an asshole.
The rest of the album is your standard pop-punk, and all of it sort of sounds like each other. But at least it's largely inoffensive. The first song of the album, titled "Four", is a lot like SR-71's "Right Now", which is once again depicting a guy who's in a relationship with a woman that clearly isn't right for him, except at least Lit isn't shit talking the poor woman and calling her a bitch.
But Lit kind of has a lot of songs like that. Their second most popular single off the album, "Miserable", is yet another mismatched relationship anthem, except this time they have a music video featuring Pamela Anderson as some 40-foot woman that eats the band for some reason, I guess.
"Zip-Lock" isn't an awful song in any way. The narrator speaks about wanting to make sure he doesn't completely nuke his relationship from orbit and is trying to take preventative measures to keep it from ever happening. But the music video is, uh, the band performing at a pool party with a bunch of hot women in swimsuits, and also Blink-182 shows up streaking through the music video because that's something they had done in a music video of their own off their own album, I guess. Anyway, none of Lit's music videos off this album actually had anything to do with any of the lyrics in their songs, but they were good party rock anthems, I suppose.
It's difficult to pick out any particular song that really jumps out off the album, aside from the ones chosen to be singles that were more heavily promoted, because a lot of them simply sound so similar to each other. At least songs like "Perfect One" are more about a relationship that seems to be going well, and about somebody the singer actually likes. "Happy" is unique enough because it's just a very relatable feeling of being down on one's luck and having a bunch of little bad things add up together to make life feel just a little bit miserable. "Happy" also sticks out just a little bit by having a horns section, so it comes really close to sounding like ska for a second, though never totally hitting that ska-like rhythm.
The album ends on the title track, "A Place in the Sun", talking about finally being up on his luck and having a great time and wishing he had left his town and a former partner sooner to go and do this.
None of the songs are especially bad or gross or vulgar in too many ways. There's a little discussion of sex and drinking, but none of it is something that is bad enough to make me think it was abnormal or offensive. And certainly, when I was 13, 14 years old, all of the songs sounded perfectly cool enough. The only problem is that, 25 years on, it just doesn't have lasting power, and because all of the songs sound just a little bit too similar to one another, most of the album just sort of blends together. But it's perfectly fine music to throw on in the background during a house gathering or a long car ride while you're also having a conversation with whoever's in the passenger seat.
The aesthetics of the album and the band members were this pop-punk image that also pulled a lot of inspiration from rock in the 1960s. A lot of classic cars, images of old highway motels, bowling alleys, hairstyles that were both millennium modern while also trying to affect Elvis Presley somehow. It's a visual that isn't all that far removed from Smash Mouth during their "Astro Lounge" days (released the same year, as a matter of fact, so it's little wonder they looked a little similar).
Seems like Lit still occasionally does stuff together to this day. But once again, I honestly haven't kept up with them, and I don't really know much about what their career has been like since the early 2000s. It's just yet another thing that I should probably educate myself on at some point to see what they've been up to.
As always, if you're interested in seeing my thoughts on some more of these albums as I reacquire them, stay tuned for further blog updates, and feel free to check out my Amazon wish list for some more of the albums I'm still trying to get back. Thanks again for stopping by, and I look forward to talking about more music soon.
