Chim Chim's Badass Revenge

Midway through “Rock Star,” singer Angelo Moore offers the most personal and revealing confession of Fishbone’s career: “Unaware of how propaganda works/I soon became a victim.” Rather than let itself be stymied by creative and commercial obstacles, Fishbone did the most Fishbone-esque thing possible and channeled its frustration into Chim Chim’s Badass Revenge, a document of a band on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Top 40 R&B producer Dallas Austin hoped the album would reinvigorate Fishbone’s career, but instead it accomplished something more interesting. Though the album contains all the musical diversity that made a success of 1991's The Reality of My Surroundings, here the earlier album's sense of merriment is replaced by doubt, frustration, and resentment. Of course, Fishbone addressed these themes in its hyperactive fashion, which was an anomaly among the morose post-grunge acts of 1996. While many fans criticize this album's inexplicably dry mix, its portrait of internal strife is too raw and imaginative to dismiss.