I grew up in the suburbs. We lived about 30 minutes outside of fabulous downtown Hartford, Connecticut, in a little burg crisscrossed by the interstate and assailed by fast food restaurants dying to get a piece of property in our little town. I lived in the part of town where all the farms were slowly being conquered by developments, a pretty lengthy bike ride from anything of interest.
Overall, growing up there wasn't bad. We were comfortable, the schools were decent, if underfunded, and crime was nearly nonexistent. Of course, growing up in this environment also meant long sessions spent in the blistering hell of boredom. This forced us to devise our own methods of entertainment, which by high school, often involved what Ben Folds calls "rockin' the suburbs."
My town was full of kids who had quite a bit of money, but didn't have a clue what to do with it (IRA? What's that?). This led to a war of car stereos, many of which were suped up to epic proportions for maximum suburb-rocking capabilities. I'll never forget playing a Beethoven CD on my friend Dan's 30-megaton sub-woofers-- it didn't exactly rock, but it sure sounded messed up. More often, it was the strains of Pearl Jam or Sir Mix-a-Lot wafting across parking lots and shaking the paint off of nearby houses.
I can imagine Ben Folds approving of our stereo wars. After all, he knows as well as any of us just how much boredom the suburbs can generate on a given day, and he seems to know his place as a suburban musical phenomenon. He even hired Ben Grosse of Filter and Fuel fame to produce his first solo album. "I got the quintessential suburb-rocking producer to work for me. He knows all the sliders and knobs that denote the rocking of suburbs," says Folds of his choice.
Largely, his choice seems to have paid off, as his new album is a pretty enjoyable romp that will almost certainly be rocking the suburbs for at least a few months. Rockin' the Suburbs finds Folds largely backing off from the dramatic chamber-pop that characterized his last outing with Ben Folds Five, instead bringing in former Beck cohort DJ Swamp to provide beats for a few tracks, and playing most of the instruments himself (he's actually not a bad drummer or bassist). John Mark Painter's string arrangements can still be found on a few songs here, including a couple of the best ones, but they're decidedly downplayed.
"Annie Waits" opens the album on an upbeat note, with a Swamp-provided beat and rolling Steinway. Folds intones in his trademark "I'm not a singer, but I'm singing anyway" voice, inaugurating the first tale of suburban alienation, loneliness, and, of course, boredom. If there's one thing Folds has developed over the years, it's an extremely distinctive melodic sense, and there's not a song here that fails to hook you at least somewhere.
The highlight of the album comes at about the midpoint, with the quietly waltzing "Fred Jones Part 2," a remarkably mature portrait of a man who loses his job at a newspaper to a young go-getter after years of faithful service. It's one of his finest ballads and it demonstrates admirably the effect that simple words can have. One of the things I've always liked about Folds' more serious songs was that he rarely reaches for poetry, opting usually to just lay his thoughts out for you in plain sight.
This approach serves him well on songs like "The Ascent of Stan," about an aging hippy who became The Man he once spoke out against. Then there's "Not the Same," a bizarre tale of a stoner who becomes born again after a drug experience. It helps, naturally, that both of these songs possess great melodies and interesting music to back them up. But elsewhere, the music is merely serviceable, and the stories are predictable, such as on "Zak and Sara," which tells the vague tale of a bored girlfriend sitting around while her boyfriend buys a guitar.
And then, of course, there's the single and title track, "Rockin' the Suburbs," which attempts to do to the modern rock mainstream what "Underground" did to the indie rock scene all those years ago. About half of it succeeds, with hilarious exchanges like, "I got shit running through my brain/ So intense that I can't explain/ All alone in my white boy pain/ Shake your booty while the band complains," squaring off against weak lines about driving to the store for some Preparation H.
Folds obviously sees right through the false rage of bands like Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, but he ends up leveling his guns on himself with lines like, "You better watch out because I'm gonna say fuck." Does anyone remember "Army?" Or how about the song that immediately follows, "Fired?" It ends with a big, harmonized choir of Ben Foldses shouting "Motherfucker!" It's hard to understand why Folds still feels like he has to include this kind of thing on his albums, when most of his songwriting points to the fact that he could easily move beyond it. At any rate, the irony is thicker than cheesecake.
Rockin' the Suburbs ends with "The Luckiest," a sappy ballad about watching the birth of his child, but after the debacle of the two previous songs, I don't so much mind. At least Folds is being honest when he sings about loving his wife and child. I'm just waiting for the day when Folds finally stops trying to be a novelty.
When and if that day comes, he may yet make an album that lives up to the promise of the Five's debut, while demonstrating the maturity he's acquired over the years to full effect. For now, you've got Rockin' the Suburbs, a worthy, but occasionally frustrating album that's fairly good for what its title suggests. Hell, it's probably being wielded in some stereo war back home right now. For that, at least, it beats the shit out of Beethoven.
