![hoobastank the reason hoobastank the reason](https://images.eil.com/large_image/HOOBASTANK_THE%2BREASON-316911.jpg)
While there is nothing wrong with a love song, there is something wrong with a love song filled with a fourteen-year-old's poetry. Douglas Robb generated these embarrassingly generic and cliched lines: "I've found a reason for me, to change who I used to be / a reason to start over new, and the reason is you". This track is an ordinary, bland rock ballad. While this is definitely going to pay their bills, it's ultimately going to leave their listeners feeling empty and looking for another band to fill their stereo.Ĭhances are most people interested in this album came from the self-titled single, "The Reason". They simply rehash what they've heard and what has generated them their platinum-selling success. Hoobastank does nothing for post-grunge, alternative rock, or top 40 pop/rock. The worst flaw a band can have is to lack innovation. Unfortunately, this ignorance is running the current mainstream music scene. They find comfort in the repetitious power chords and the uninspired lyrics about watered down teenage angst. Unknowledgeable people flock to the boring, trite post grunge from the likes of Puddle of Mudd, Nickelback, and Hoobastank. This is the type of music where ignorance thrives. Hoobastank didn’t trouble the top forty again, but a year later Green Day would score the biggest hit of their careers with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a tour through Billie Joe Armstrong’s mixed emotions and two years later The Fray’s “Over My Head (Cable Car)” was a gauzier version of “The Reason.” Aggressive white angst never dies - it peeks from beneath tempos.I reviewed this for my school's newspaper, so tell me what you think Meanwhile “The Reason” is perfect for adult contemporary listeners to this day because the sentiment is pure A/C radio: the reassurance of the phony build, of the obvious sentiment, of those NyQuil guitar lines. 2” and “Yeah!” yet “Burn” has vanished from even adult R&B radio (in South Florida, that is). As a performance it’s superior to “Confessions, Pt. Usher, at the peak of his powers as singer, extends lines as if he’s in the middle of sorting out the situation he’s in. He holds notes when he should be farting them out he holds the wrong, obvious notes.Ĭomparing “The Reason” to “Burn” does it no favors. “I’m not a perfect person/There’s many things I wish I didn’t do,” Doug Robb sings, aiming for fortysomething John Lennon wisdom but trapped in a Dr. Dependent on an electric guitar arpeggio that resolves in power chord strumming for the chorus, “The Reason” is written to take advantage of its paucity of imagination and blow dried melodrama. I have little to say about “The Reason” other than it sounds a bit like Coldplay’s “Yellow” and it’s structured and sung like the most oleaginous sort of prayer: reminding the beloved, your onion breath billowing across her face, why you needed her she doesn’t exist apart from you because she exists only to comfort, to offer salvation. That’s how I remember Hoobastank’s only top forty hit: the white answer to “Burn,” the Usher tune that kept “The Reason” at #2 for weeks. To remember that Hoobastank released “The Reason” during the season when Usher ruled all is to learn how divide and conquer politics works just as pop radio tired of “Yeah!” “The Reason” reminded listeners that white people could rock and whine as they always had. The early 2000s were the peak for dashboard confessionals - white men in tattoos sharing the secrets of the therapy session, the inebriated late night chat with bros, and the Livejournal account.
#Hoobastank the reason full#
Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.