50 Cents Cheaper Than The Real Thing

The Network “Right Hand-O-Rama” – Don’t be fooled, this is actually Green Day with two extra members who may or may not be former members of Devo. The joke goes like this – The Network are meant to be proteges of Green Day, and their record is out on Green Day’s vanity record label. However, they sound suspiciously similar and are playing up the press hype about them being Green Day in disguise to their own advantage, pissing off the real Green Day in the process. I guess they are going for a Klaatu/Beatles sort of thing, with the twist being that unlike Klaatu, they really are themselves pretending to be a new band.

The record is a nice surprise; it’s a dynamic throwback to new wave which often sounds exactly like Devo, with occasional homages to Wire and Magazine. With or without the presence of the guys from Devo (I’m pretty sure that’s Mark Mothersbaugh singing on a few of these songs, by the way), this seems like a logical progression for Green Day, moving on from aping the Buzzcocks, The Ramones, and The Undertones to their immediate successors, as though they were slowly working their way through the punk/new wave canon.

Though I respect their desire to pull off a cute hoax and have some fun with the music media, I really wish that they had instead had the courage to release these songs (or at least the ones which are obviously sung by Billy Joe Armstrong) as Green Day. It would have been much more impressive, and would have allowed them to subtly reinvent themselves while remaining a dependable radio/singles band. This hoax thing seems as though they want some distance from the music on the record, or feel that it wouldn’t be acceptable to their image, label, or fans if it was under their own name, which is sort of ridiculous since it really doesn’t sound that different.

This song, “Right Hand-O-Rama” is one of the cuts that I’ve pegged as a Wire soundalike. It specifically sounds like a reworked version of “Three Girl Rhumba,” particularly around the chorus. It’s not a dead ringer like “Connection” by Elastica, but if you’re familiar with both songs, I’m sure you’ll catch the similarity. As with “Connection,” it’s a pretty great song on its own terms. Lyrically, we’re in familiar Green Day territory – it’s about some creepy loser compulsively masturbating.