Lit – "Miserable" (1999)

You make me come

You make me complete

You make me completely miserable

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Lit, an Orange County band that released the first of its five studio albums in 1997.

I had certainly heard "My Own Worst Enemy," Lit's biggest hit single, which reached #1 on the Billboard "Modern Rock Tracks" chart in 1999 and which was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines.  But I couldn't have named the band that recorded it if you had put a gun to my head.

Lit is a pretty generic band – I've heard better, and I've heard worse.  But I've rarely heard worse than today's featured song, the aptly-titled "Miserable," which I heard for the first (and hopefully last) time on a recent bike ride.

Lit: bad clothes, bad hair, bad tattoos, bad music

"Miserable" (which was Lit's second-biggest single) would be a completely forgettable (and forgotten) song but for the tasteless (and unfunny) play on words contained in the lyrics quoted above.  (Those lyrics are repeated several times just in case you are the world's dumbest human being and didn't get it the first time you heard it.)

One other note about Lit: its song "Addicted" is such a ripoff of the Offspring's brilliant 1994 hit, "Self Esteem," that Lit should still be blushing with shame.

Here's "Miserable."  Feel free to stop listening after the first 20 seconds.  In fact, I would encourage you to stop at that point.  (Life is short, and it would be a sin to waste four minutes of your life listening to the entirety of "Miserable.") [NOTE: I crossed out the previous text after watching the video, which features a magnificent 50-foot-tall Pam Anderson and should definitely be watched in its entirety – although you might want to mute the audio after the first 20 seconds.]

Click below to buy the song from "Amazon."  (Hey, it's your money.)

Agent Orange – "Bloodstains" (1979)

I've lost my sense

I've lost control

I've lost my mind

Agent Orange is a surf-punk band that formed in Orange County, California in 1979.  Their song "Bloodstains" became a big hit in southern California when legendary KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer (who introduced a number of punk and new wave bands to his Los Angeles listeners) played it regularly.  

Agent Orange's frontman, Mike Palm, contended that the Offspring's 1994 hit, "Come Out and Play," appropriated a Middle Eastern-sounding guitar riff from "Bloodstains."  But the Offspring's publisher declined to pay royalties, citing a musicologist who opined that while both records did use the Phrygian scale, the two guitar parts were not identical.

(If you want to know what a Phrygian scale sounds like, play a C-major scale with the D, A, and B flatted.)

Another Orange County band, the Vandals, poked fun at Palm's claim in their 1996 song, "Aging Orange":

Back in ancient Egypt 

Many pharaohs went to jail

For misappropriation

Of my Phrygian scale

I said, "Listen, Tutankhamen, 

You're driving me insane

It's obvious those bellies are all

Dancing to 'Bloodstains.'"

Click here to read a 1996 Los Angeles Times story about the dispute.

And click here to read a discussion of the whole meshugganah mess on an Offspring.com forum.  (Robbie Fields, who contributed the most content to this discussion, was a former high-school substitute teacher who founded Posh Boy Records, which released records by Agent Orange and other Orange County punk bands.)

The "Bloodstains" saga came to a very odd conclusion in 2000, when Offspring covered the song for the soundtrack of Ready to Rumble, a forgettable "comedy" movie about World Championship Wrestling.

Here's the trailer to that movie:

Here's Offspring's "Come Out and Play."  The riff that Offspring allegedly stole from "Bloodstains" begins about 25 seconds into the song:

Here's Agent Orange's "Bloodstains."  The guitar riff that was allegedly stolen by Offspring begins at 1:12 of the song:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: