Redd Kross - After School Special
“After School Special” is the last and, in my opinion, the best song on Phaseshifter. I tend to be suspicious of keyboard players in bands, so I’m sure I wasn’t too stoked the first time I heard this song and it started with a keyboard-drum intro. Despite all that, though, this song won me over with the quickness, and I still love it to this day. Once the intro has played through a couple of times, Jeff starts to sing, and demonstrates that he’s still closely connected to the snotty teenage mindset from which he and Steve were operating back when they formed the band. That’s a bit less surprising when you consider that, despite Phaseshifter being released in Redd Kross’s fourteenth year as a band, the two of them were still only 29 and 25, respectively. Anyway, Jeff begins the first verse of the song by singing, “I had a hunch you stole a bunch of your little brother’s Ritalin pills today.” And if that’s not the invitation to a party, juvenile-delinquent style, I don’t know what is. “Come and get me out of class,” he demands. “We’ll call in a bomb threat, it’ll be a blast!” By that last line, he’s gone from quietly singing to yelling excitedly, and as the verse ends, Eddie Kurdziel’s distorted lead guitar has stormed in and completely disrupted the mannered, melodic piano part that Gere Fennelly is still gamely laying down underneath the fast-erupting chaos.
The chorus that they then start playing is indeed a blast, with both Jeff and Steve screaming the song’s title, and Steve holding out a scream of “Speciaaaaaalll!” after the last line ends. It’s not an anguished or angry but a joyous scream, the scream that kids let out as they peel out of the school parking lot after a long boring day—a day that, perhaps, is not even over, at least according to the administration.
I’m not sure how well-remembered the phenomenon of the After School Special even is at this point. For those who don’t know, though, these were TV movies produced by ABC in the 70s and 80s, generally aired between 4 and 6 PM on weekday afternoons. They dealt with controversial social issues that were relevant to teens in a totally heavy-handed and over-the-top manner, generally focusing on some delinquent character or other who was exhibiting some behavior pattern that was troubling for adults. By writing a song about truancy, teenage drug abuse, underage sex, and of course that horrible demon rock n’ roll, Redd Kross were displaying the exact sort of scorn towards this televised moralizing that any halfway cool teenage kid would have felt whenever they were forced to encounter it. They would have wanted to have fun, they would have been convinced that the potential consequences and downsides of that fun weren’t ever going to affect them, and, let’s be honest—for the most part, they’d be right.
From the jubilant screaming and distorted-guitar choruses to the snotty, defiant lyrics, Redd Kross choose in “After School Special” to avoid any sort of moralizing in favor of an overt celebration of the delinquent impulse in teenagers, one that at least in the short term is far more likely to lead to fun and happiness than any sort of melodramatic disaster. In fact, halfway through the song, they even allude to the sort of televised melodrama that usually makes up the climactic scene of any After School Special, suddenly stopping the entire song right after the second chorus for a dramatic piano breakdown that, come to think of it, wouldn’t sound out of place on a modern piece of prog-emo melodrama such as those that appear on Chiodos or My Chemical Romance albums (bands whom, to avoid misconceptions, I thoroughly enjoy). Behind the piano, a synthesizer on “human voice” setting adds a choral effect that sounds like typical dramatic TV score music at first, but soon grows sick and bizarre sounding as the piano plays lower and lower notes. The whole thing begins to fade out as an equally sick-sounding blast of guitar feedback fades in, and after a few seconds, Steve’s bassline brings the entire band back in and they leap full-speed back into the song’s chorus as if nothing ever happened. After a couple of repetitions of this chorus, the misappropriated speed pills start getting to the entire band, and they play faster and faster, finally losing cohesion and bringing both the song and the album to a grinding halt as both Steve and Jeff scream incoherently. With “After School Special,” Redd Kross proved that, regardless of how long they’d been playing, and how old they might have gotten, they were still firmly in touch with the spirit of delinquent teenaged joy that had originally inspired them to form a band.
