This piece originally ran on July 4, 2014.
Boston’s annual fireworks display may have been rescheduled to last night due to the oncoming hurricane, but it’s just not Fourth of July around these pink-V parts until someone puts on Jennifer Love Hewitt’s 1995 classic Let’s Go Bang.
We’ll likely prepare a larger, 20th anniversary retrospective for this brilliantly titled pop disasterpiece, but for today, let it simply soundtrack your cancelled BBQs and interrupted beach trips.
Hewitt, who made her music debut as a backup singer on Martika’s 1989 hit “Toy Soldiers,” released the Let’s Go Bang LP on Atlantic Records in 1995 shortly after joining the cast of television hit Party of Five. It followed 1992’s Love Songs (which didn’t get a US release until five years later and featured an ABBA cover as its standout track) and all three of its lackluster singles, including the bubbly title track, failed to chart.
But perhaps on title alone, it gained a bit of cult status among horny suburban teenaged boys rummaging through the CD racks at Sam Goody and Tower Records (or maybe that was just me). Oddly enough, one of the album’s tracks, “Free To Be A Woman,” would go on to be the theme song to the Style Network’s mid-2000s TV show The Modern Girl. Hollywood connections are a wonderful thing.
Hewitt released another record in 1996, and that one, boringly-titled Jennifer Love Hewitt, tanked commercially as well; lead track “Cool With You” would follow her around long enough that a 2006 Asia-only compilation would re-use its title.
Hewitt, of course, would go on to find greater fame in ’90s-defining teen movies Can’t Hardly Wait and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and enjoyed perhaps her greatest musical success in the latter’s sequel; 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer featured her kinda-sorta hit “How Do I Deal.” That twangy pop ditty reached Number 59 on the Billboard Hot 100, Number 36 on its Top 40 Mainstream, and got as high as Number 8 in Australia. It’s been Number 1 in our hearts ever since, and got a decent amount of airplay on MTV.
Hewitt went on to star in a few music videos in the years that followed (LFO’s “Girl On TV” and Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero”), and despite a 2002 record deal with Jive and being paired with songwriter/producer Meredith Brooks, her music career never really took off quite like her acting career. Fleeting 2002 single “BareNaked”, with Brooks, reached Number 25 on the Billboard Top 40 Mainstream, but we can’t remember ever hearing it.
Regardless, we’ll always have Let’s Go Bang, and all the intrigue and wonder of how something with that absolutely ridiculous title ever got released. On this American holiday full of fireworks, sexual innuendo, explosions in the sky, we are forever grateful.
Listen to the record’s three singles below, and gazing lovingly at the album artwork after the jump.
