Chart Watch: Spin Doctors

Title: Pocket Full of Kryptonite (1992)
Label: Epic
Genre: High-energy folk

Pro-Social Content: None

Objectionable Content: "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" bids good riddance to a "b—ch" who totes a shotgun ("I hope you heard this song and it p—ed you off"). Superman's sidekick propositions Lois Lane to dump the Man of Steel on "Jimmy Olson's Blues" ("Come on downtown and make love to me... I got a pocket full of kryptonite"). "Refrigerator Car" refers to alcohol as a means of escape.

Summary/Advisory: Weird, bizarre stuff. This 5-million-selling album's dismal tone is accompanied by lyrics that devalue meaningful relationships and the establishment in general. In addition, Spin Doctorism has become a psychedelic cultural phenomenon with fans traveling across the country to take in concerts, an appeal due mostly to the group's high-energy, R&B-inflected funk. Spin past this downer of a disc.


Let me just start by saying that if you needed a reason not to buy this album it's because if you've heard any one of it's ten tracks, you've heard the entire album. If you feel the need to exert more energy than that on an album as repetitively mundane as Pocket Full of Kryptonite you're not just wasting your time, you're insulting the intelligence of your readers. That is of course unless you're writing for an audience of bible-humping fascist parents who fear the world around them and completely misunderstand and constantly misrepresent their own religion...

Now that's off my chest I think I can say with some degree of certainty that the Spin Doctors are not the first band in the history of Rock n' Roll to condone alcoholism. They also are certainly not the first band to be stalked from city to city by a horde of zombie-like cultists wreaking of Patchouli and burnt cannabis. Actually, I'm more shocked that anyone would want to see the Spin Doctors in concert ONCE, let alone an entire tour. Finally, "weird" and "bizarre" are just about the last two adjectives I would use to describe Pocket Full of Kryptonite; mediocre and derivative maybe, but never "weird" or "bizarre."