Cake - Fashion Nugget
Release Date: 17 September 1996 (Capricorn)
Date I Got: Summer 1999
Best Track: The Distance
Other Notable Tracks: Nugget, Stickshifts and Safteybelts
You know "The Distance" just as everyone knows "The Distance." It came out about the time I got into popular music, though I don’t have the memory of hearing it on the radio the way I do with other songs of those months. I liked the song well enough and eventually picked up the album used for cheap.
Although, I gotta say: listening to it again for the first time in a couple years, I’m at a loss as to why it got big. The insistent baseline and story of single-minded determination are good, but the song feels like it lacks a foundation. It is a novelty song.
And it would be on a novelty album, if the other tracks were catchy enough to be memorable. The songwriting isn’t strong enough to support the "cleverness." The two almost exceptions, not including "The Distance", are "Nugget" and "Stickshifts and Safetybelts."
The latter doesn’t fully succeed because it’s still too tongue-in-cheek, but it’s pretty decent lyrically and the jaunty guitar work doesn’t detract. In the hands of a better (by that I mean: more earnest) artist, it would take a trivial disconnect — lovers isolated in personal bucketseats — and make it into a lament on the barriers technology erects to discourage human bonding. I give points for trying.
"Nugget" is a different beast. The copious uses of "fuck" seem out of place on an album that is, more or less, kid friendly. Indeed, while I’d like to claim that I liked this song back in high school because of it’s funk-like rhythm, it’s really because the chorus is: "Shut the Fuck Up!" (I’m no better than you.) I think it’s aged better than the other tracks, partly because the universal and timeless sentiment, and partly because it makes no sense:
Heads of state who ride and wrangle
Who look at your face from more than one angle
Can cut you from their bloated budgets
Like sharpening knifes, two Chicken McNuggets
Shut the fuck up.
Indeed.
