Kasabian - Too Much, Too Young
[1980, UK Chart Peak: 1]
[MySpace][The Specials Version]
[5.50]
Ladtacular…
Martin Skidmore: One more track that I rather dreaded, and another that is as close a copy as they are capable of, adding some inevitably horrible guitar. It wasn’t one of my favourite Specials songs - there seemed a class contempt in it, to me - and the lifeless singalong vocal does nothing for it. I’d give it a lower mark, but there are more deeply horrible tracks on this.
[3]
Iain Forrester: They make one last ditch attempt to claim it for their own, but there’s extremely little of Kasabian here. Just a great song struggling valiantly against a deep reverence that ill-suits it, and in the end just barely winning.
[6]
Joseph McCombs: I feel terrible every time I laugh at “Ain’t he cute? No, he ain’t!†Faithful reading, if a bit hastened, and I can appreciate a dose of lecturing in an age when pop icons aren’t exactly prodding people into maturity. I’m not enough of a Specials devotee to care whether Kasabian are fit to carry their water, but they offer a serviceable facsimile here.
[6]
M. H. Lo: I guess Kasabian deserves some points for covering a track that was originally banned—and placing it on a tribute CD to the institution that banned it. But the Specials song was pretty stupid in 1979, and its “politics†sound even more confused in 2007. An attack on a woman who is content to bake “currant buns†and also houses other buns in her oven, the song can only posit being young and acting like a twat (“I’ll spread manure in your bed of rosesâ€) as an alternative. Furthermore, even though the lyric on one level targets a bourgeois woman (or at least bourgeois values), her child is described as “another burden on the welfare state.†The result is a song that sounds like it dislikes women in general (and of course the father is never critiqued in the song, though it is entirely possible that the man who’s gotten the woman pregnant now continues to run around: in other words, he is the narrator). In a time when the issue of young mothers on welfare grows more complex, not to mention more racialized, “Too Much Too Young†hardly needs a faithful Kasabian cover.
[2]