Bran Van 3000

Summer 1998, more or less. The writer was an eleven-year-old kid, and the MTV Generation was at its peak. The Italian branch of the network had only launched a year earlier and marked a small revolution for the youth of the time, both for those a bit older, orphaned by Videomusic, and for those who — for reasons of age — never got to experience that earlier era at all. The arrival of MTV, for a boy who — like the undersigned — was just starting to prepare himself to cross the threshold into the chaos of adolescence, took on the value of a vehicle for a certain kind of imagery. Having been a pre-teen in the second half of the Nineties meant having seen that era only through a shop window; having breathed it in, seen it reflected on older kids, mythologized through films and TV shows. But never actually lived it. MTV Italy's first murmurs were an epiphany, especially for those too young to have any precise grasp of what was happening around them. In those marathons of video clips and Anglo-accented programming there was, unlike anything ever seen on the old terrestrial networks, a revelatory sense of those elusive Nineties — elusive for a child, yet so electrifying and penetrating that they still managed to exert their own particular fascination.

The encounter with MTV was, for the writer, a flash of enlightenment on the road to distortion; compared to my peers, I was immediately drawn, as if by some primal instinct, to scorching, dissonant guitars still paying off their enormous debt to Nirvana. And this was one of the first building blocks in the construction of my exasperated anemoia for the Nineties. Yet there was something else I felt the need (or simply the desire) to grasp about those years: the more multifaceted, carefree, goof-off side of things, along with those trends that, while still filed under a broadly "alternative" umbrella, carried more metropolitan, urban-cool connotations than the angry, provincial nihilism of the alternative rock ushered in by grunge.

Perhaps that's why, in that summer of 1998, on a lazy, sweltering mid-August afternoon spent at home, what struck my inexperienced senses was something different: a video awash in gaudy colors, dominated by the orange tones of its bizarre protagonists' jumpsuits. There was a certain lysergic nonsense to it, there were DJ turntables spinning, there was a brief snippet of grainy live footage, in which those bodies writhed to a rhythm that seemed far more driving than the music playing underneath it.

The track opened with synthetic ticking sounds hammered into an endless loop and unfolded into a hypnotic trance that mixed fuzzy murmurs reverbed into vague shoegaze distances, slow-motion dance cadences, adorable lo-fi, laid-back hip-hop flows, doo-wop harmonies submerged in dream-pop swell, and a stunning soul refrain declaring: "What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at twenty-six?". In 1998 I obviously couldn't decode any of this, but the sum total (which, in the end, is what matters) hit me like a river in flood and swept me away.

"Drinking in LA" was a massive hit in its day. Building an earworm is a far more complex job than one might think, and pulling it off with such refined intent and results puts it in a category that's statistically off the charts. It's easy today to remember Bran Van 3000 as a textbook one-hit wonder; it's true that this phenomenon was particularly common at the time, with countless artists managing to top the charts worldwide with one specific song, only to carry on a mid-tier career in the best-case scenario (think of Germany's Liquido and their "Narcotic"), or fade into obscurity in the worst. However, this label is inaccurate when applied to the Canadian ensemble led by James Di Salvio and producer E.P. Bergen, at least if taken literally; it would be more accurate, in fact, to call them a one-record wonder. Yes, because "Drinking in LA" is really just one piece (undoubtedly the most representative one) of a sprawling album called "Glee".

Released in Canada in 1997 and put out a year later in the rest of the world, the record (propelled by its flagship single) became a bestseller at home, was met with a lukewarm reception in the States, and scored huge success in Europe. Indeed, "Glee" sounds unabashedly European. Bergen and Di Salvio drew from the American legacies of the time mainly the elements tied to old-school hip-hop and R&B, laced with funk and soul undertones. Nods to conventional American indie-rock are there, but they don't dominate the rest, except at times in its more strictly lo-fi soul. Still, it's above all from Europe that the two draw heavily; "Glee" in fact has an electronic aesthetic that blends the psychedelic swagger of big beat, the elegance of French Touch, the cheesy flash of eurodance, the decadent atmospheres of trip-hop, the urban transcendence of dub, the ethereal, dreamlike airs of dream-pop, a pop-rock harmonic sensibility drawing on British and Northern European references, a wild, sped-up punk humor, and the odd stubborn free-jazz digression.

The album moves through all these elements with grace and sophistication, but also, and above all, with a self-satisfied, irrepressible sense of fun. "Glee" is the art of alchemy pushed to the highest pop level; in a sense, a "total" pop album, one that here channels, shapes and exemplifies all the aforementioned nuances, some of them quite noble, under discussion. It's exaggerated and ambitious, so much so that by its very nature it's unrepeatable. In fact, the sprawling Bran Van 3000 collective would fall apart right after the "Glee" experience, with Di Salvio and Bergen carrying the moniker forward into a fate marked by mediocre output, not unlike what befell other one-hit wonders of the era.

The fact remains that a project with the ambitions of Bran Van 3000 could only ever reveal itself in a single flash of lightning; that lightning bolt was, indeed, "Glee", which viewed today — in its anniversary year, celebrated with a reunion tour in Canada — feels like a perfect, in some ways pandering but always irresistible, summary of the Nineties. Or at least, of the rest of the Nineties, of the pop culture that was its direct rather than derivative offspring, setting aside the chronicles of despair belonging first to the Nirvana generation and then (on the other side of the ocean, and under a different guise) to the Radiohead generation.

Needless to say, these reflections only came much later than that summer of 1998. I was only eleven years old and had no interest in understanding; it was enough to let myself be swept up in the winding vortex of "Drinking in LA", one of the few songs I could actually share with my schoolmates. One of those rare songs with the potential to please everyone; kids like me liked it because the video was cool and it was in heavy rotation even on Dancefloor Chart, and the older kids liked it too, the ones who usually despised anything with even a faint whiff of pop about it. A track that could slot into DJ sets at trendy clubs just as easily as at social centers. And indeed, throughout my teenage and young adult years, I kept hearing it dug up again and again at all sorts of parties, almost always used to strike a nostalgic note during the final wind-down. Still, I had never listened to "Glee" in full until the day I found a copy in a record shop.

Once I dropped the needle onto the record, my first sensation was exactly that of watching a parade of those fragments of my Nineties imagination that I'd never managed to piece together coherently, even though, with hindsight, I'd by then come to know them much better musically.

"Glee" is a long album (seventeen tracks, rising to nineteen on the international release) but never boring, never redundant, and yet never incoherent. It jumps from one genre to another, pulling it all together with a masterful synthesis of complexity. It engages, it entertains, at times it downright thrills.

It opens with a sampling game ("Gimme Sheldon") in obvious homage to DJ Shadow, then moves into the lopsided lo-fi dance of "Couch Surfer", which conjures up an image of Pavement getting into hip-hop under the influence of an acid trip, evoking the hangover after a night on the interrail. Then, further down the tracklist, the phenomenal rendition of "Cum On Feel The Noize" could be the ideal continuation, the perfect soundtrack for the return from that journey, in that last reserve of adrenaline giving way to nostalgia, dressing a track originally conceived and performed in the flashy glam packaging of Slade and Quiet Riot in a sumptuous, roughly electrified britpop suit with dreamy seductions.

"Problems" is the encore to "Drinking In LA", with the bpm tripled, darker, more restless and frantic; "Forest" and "Rainshine" blend dub and trip-hop in a sweeping way, with saturated rock choruses that still remain steeped in the dreamy atmospheres provided by the female vocals. The purest hip-hop comes through in the funky flips of "Old school" and in "Afrodiziak" (a duet with Gravediggaz). "Une Chanson" could pass for an Air track, "Lucknow" returns to a trip-hop tease with hushed spoken word over reversed echoes. In between, there's everything and its opposite, from fleeting instrumental flights of fancy that wink both at flashes of electronic psychedelia and jazz deconstructions, to exquisitely pop tracks that even venture into folk and anti-folk territory (and here too we're back to more distinctly American references).

"Glee" is the apotheosis of pan-stylistic totality. An album to listen to, or to spin at a party. It is, in fact, itself a party, with all its moods dissolved into the mess. It owes its entire success to "Drinking In LA", but perhaps, looking closely, that success was even smaller than what it actually deserved.

It's a nostalgic snapshot of the Nineties, taken right as their run was coming to an end, showing them perhaps in a slightly glossy, cocky pose, with baggy trousers and gelled hair, a scratch turntable and a cheap electric guitar - but that's exactly how it's nice to remember or imagine them. It hardly matters how truthful that snapshot really is to what actually happened. It's enough to tell us a story, one that everyone will then make their own in their own way. Mine is a deep sense of nostalgia for an era I never fully lived through, for that decade in which I wish I'd been ten years older, and which, in a naive kind of unawareness, I like to filter through Bran Van 3000's "Glee".

It's probably not an album you could call "influential". After all, it didn't change the course of events one bit. But it summed up and contained so much. And if the paroxysms of "retromania" waves eventually come around, as they inevitably and cyclically do, to dust off Nineties styles and trends, "Glee" might not end up in the essential anthology, but it could well serve as an excellent CliffsNotes.

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21/02/2026