Video Time-Warp #8: Citizen King – “Better Days (And the Bottom Drops Out)”

The record industry is nothing if not a pack of copycats, so I guess the mentality at some point in the 90s was "We need another Beck. Find him." And one of the results, clearly, was Citizen King.

I mean, seriously, these lyrics:

In my shoes my toes are busted
My kitchen says my bread is molded
I got a good job at the dollar store

One foot in the hole
One foot gettin' deeper
With a broken nail and a blown out speaker
I ain't got much else to lose

Those somehow manage to be more Beck than anything Beck has done since One Foot in the Grave. Even the album cover looks like a Diet Shasta version of Beck:

You can even see the recipe from one glance:

1. Slacker rock chic (including the guitarist with a dumb hat)
2. The supremely-late-90s-DJ-as-a-full-time-member-of-the-band trend
3. Aliens
4. Plop them all down right into the middle of Clerks., and there you go.

There aren't enough facial piercings or bowling shirts for this to be the definitive late-90s music video, but it might be the closest we've yet come to finding it.

Man, it feels like this song was JUST being pumped into my ears 6x/hour for an entire summer. Is it really 15 years old? Now I feel old. As always, kids, stay off my lawn.