Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

This is the first part of a summer series of Track This entries that will focus on lesser-known power pop songs. I first discovered Ultimate Fakebook in the cheap bin at one of my favorite record stores, Radio Kaos, and I am not exactly sure why I picked it up. Looking at the album cover for their major label debut, the repackaged This Will Be Laughing Week , now, I do not see how it attracted me. I'm assuming that I had heard the name in reference to shows they played with The Get Up Kids or other Kansas area emo bands that I was heavily into at the time. However, when I played the CD, I realized that Ultimate Fakebook was not an emo band but a power pop band that loved hooks. When I played them for friends, I always compared them favorably to Weezer's early albums. Recently, I listened to an interview with them on the 90s music podcast, Dig Me Out , and they explained that now they tell people they sounded like Weezer. Apparently, at the time they were more interested i...

Oddly enough, Bob Dylan's songs on the Wonder Boys soundtrack marked a watershed moment for me as the 90s blended into the 2000s. I started going back to college in 1999 after a two-year break where I mostly worked and listened to records. My first attempt at college had been unsuccessful due to deep depression and homesickness that I did not realize was happening at the time. The period for me was full of change. I was trying to figure out who I was in an adult world, figuratively and musically. I was shifting between genres and personas like a man possessed.  My high school musical interests ran the gamut from 70s punk to melodic hardcore to indie rock, but I had fallen away from most "alternative" music as I reached that age in a young person's life where I felt like I needed to be defined by a "style." Needless to say 90 percent of my listening tastes were firmly entrenched in punk circa 1999-2000. While I never gave up the punk rock and indie rock o...