Backstage at Warped Tour in 1998, Fat Mike had a stroke of genius. The NOFX frontman had formed his own record label, Fat Wreck Chords, about a decade earlier. In the mid-90s, they started releasing a series of compilation albums called Fat Music For Fat People—basically just samplers featuring various bands from the label lineup.
But what if they took it a step further? What if they made a different kind of compilation? Old Music for Old People? Ugh, please no. Skinny Music for—no, that doesn't make sense.
What about Short Music For Short People?
The proverbial line bulb went off, and an icon of weird albums was born. Released on June 1, 1999, Short Music For Short People contained 101 songs by different punk and punk-adjacent bands, each one clocking in at less than 30 seconds. (Due to the technical limitations of CDs at the time, the last 3 songs were all put together on Track 99, which therefore technically clocked around 1 minute and 30 seconds.)
Short Music For Short People managed to crack the Billboard Top 200, and remains a pretty fascinating cultural gem. Less than 10 of the tracks submitted had been previously released—which meant, for the most part, that some 90 bands rose to the challenge of writing and recording their own weird little 30-second ditty.
And they took many different approaches to this. Blink-182's "Family Reunion," in which the band just repeats "shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat" became a regular part of their live shows. GWAR sang about fucking a fish, which is also your mom. The Mr. T Experience crammed as many complete sentences with the word "fuck" in them as possible. Some bands eschewed curse words for topical rants, such as White Flag's "Rage Against The Machine Are Capitalist Phonies" and Terrorgruppe's "A.C.A.B. (All Comic Heroes are Fascist Pigs)." There were plenty of fun meta songs, too: Mad Caddies' "Mike Booted Our First Song, So We Recorded This One Instead," about getting their first attempt rejected; H2O's "Mr. Brett, Please Put Down Your Gun" about pissing off their engineer in the studio while attempting to record a song; and the brilliant album opener, in which the Fizzy Bangers take all of 7 seconds to sing, "Why can't people understand I've got a short attention span? Short attention span."
Is there a lot of filler crap? Sure. But every song is a weird fun experiment on its own; and if it sucks, just wait 30 seconds, and you'll be onto something new.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of this weird gem, Fat Wreck is re-releasing Short Music For Short People on colored vinyl. It also comes with a digital download, which correctly breaks up the last track into 3 different songs. In the meantime, I'm left with the old CD-rip on my hard drive, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
