The sleeves of most compact discs have one barcode; Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too, the debut album by The New Radicals, has seven. Trainers, faces and hands all get the corporate stamp. There's just one image which escapes the electronic zebra: it's a photograph of multi-instrumental leader Gregg Alexander draped over his moped, Quadrophenia-style, but with Alexander bleached out and transformed into the ghost of a mod-rocker. "It's a comment," explains Alexander, "on pop co-opting and making irrelevant a million different images that once meant something. I'm basically saying that the only way to be free unfortunately appears to be death."
Unless you've been busy potholing in the Hindu Kush for the last month, chances are you've heard of the New Radicals. They went into the charts this week at number five with You Get What You Give, the first Top 10 single since Cornershop's Brimful Of Asha that actually sounds like it was made by people who aren't descended from polystyrene off-cuts. It's the one with the funked-up 1980s stadium vibe that shouts about "the dreamer's disease" and makes you want to throw the sofa out of the window and snowboard off the eaves of next door's house.
You might also have picked up on the lyrics: "Health insurance rip-off lying/ FDA big bankers buying/ Fake computer crashes dining/ Cloning while they're multiplying." Or, immediately afterwards: "Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson/ Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson/ You're all fakes, run to your mansions, Come around, we'll kick your ass in."
"I don't have nothing against the artists mentioned in the song," Alexander sighs. Something tells me that he's been interrogated about this before. "With the Monica Lewinsky scandal we had 14 months where 98 per cent of American news output was pontificating on celebrity crap while no-one was up to speed on the real atrocities going on in the world. Nobody cares that we haven't got an environment for people to talk about and improve things. Everything is entertainment.
"What we wanted to do was find out if that's down to the people or the media. So we put a human, life-affecting lyric next to a petty, celebrity-driven one. Real people asked us about the human aspect while the American media couldn't care less that it was the first rock song in about 20 years to be specific about what's going on in the world." You Get What You Give is a modern-day protest song drenched in infectious optimism.
Like the remainder of Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too, it's designed to make people stand up and move, jump, do something - anything. Alexander doesn't want to be a barometer of the times; he just wants to give people the energy to care about them. "I don't know if I would want to take on the role of documenting the sad state of the world right now, but I think that music is still a really powerful opportunity to knock down walls, blow-up the house and spread some euphoria. This is the time when you would have expected rock 'n' roll to come to the rescue, but it seems that people are more apathetic than ever."
Alexander grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, learning "to see the world through other people's eyes". As a 13-year-old he would fake his way into inner-city house and hip-hop clubs. In 1989, he caught a flight to Los Angeles, shacked up with a pair of gospel singers he met at the airport and spent his afternoons wandering in to record companies on Sunset Strip and playing impromptu sets to A&R executives ("coked-up sheep sizing up the freak of the week"). "I was 16, I'd just arrived in California, and I didn't know anyone. If ever there was an environment for getting stoned, jumping on someone's desk and kicking coffee in their face, that was it."
He got a deal, the label collapsed, his solo debut album was lost somewhere in between. But now he's signed to a major label again.
Isn't that ethically questionable from someone who writes a line like, "So cynical, so hip/ they told us to shut up and write another hit?" (from Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too's title track)? "The whole thing about independent labels, after the grunge explosion, is that multinational companies buy them up. If you're working within the framework of popular music, you can try to live up to a non-existent Utopian ideal, or you can go straight to the people who you'd end up going through if your record was successful anyway. You can make the most indie, leftfield record in the world, but if it makes people want to dance, it's going to be brought to you by Sony Music." Alexander might have the dreamer's disease, but he's no sleepwalker.