OR: Day three of the unofficial pentalogy of great 90s sample-based tracks.

I like black and white videos, me. I’m easy to please and even if the song isn’t the best around, a good black and white video is mother’s milk for a pretentious fiend like me. So when The Lightning Seeds’ magnificent, haughty cover of You Showed Me premiered, I got hooked. I recognised the sample from AM radio, and it took a few searches on Yahoo Groups (!) to find the name of the original song.

I wasn’t done with Grunge by ’97, but I wanted different sounds. Not talking about being refined, just something new, fresh. Radiohead, Oasis, Pulp, Blur, Spacehog, Sleeper, Elastica, Portishead, all of them quenched that thirst. Lightning Seeds did too, with both Pure and You Showed Me, the singles that made a dent on the radio over here, in sunny Mexico.

The song got a massive boost as it was part of Austin Powers International Man of Mystery’s OST. The movie, like many SNL-based movies, didn’t make much of a splash in Mexico, but sales of the soundtrack, pulled by indie darlings Broadcast, Space, and The Cardigans did.

I always had the temptation of putting this on a mixtape and giving it to someone, but the occasion never arose. Maybe it was my musical disconnection with a lot of my peers, since I was listening to whatever MTV Latino peddled and my friends listened to whatever was on radio. Perhaps its the oddity of a reworked classic, more in style of triphop than flowery britpop. Whatever the case was, this is an instant classic.

PS: The ending of the video kinda rips the later part of Talking Heads’ Road to nowhere video.

-Sam J. Valdés López