29/12/2025
Song slaps to this day!
There are only a handful of things I remember about the seven years I spent going to swimming lessons as a kid, and absolutely none of them involve being in the water. I remember frantically punching in the buttons to secure a 10p bag of Chipsticks from the vending machine after every class. I remember eating them in the back of my dad’s car, the salt mixing with the smell of chlorine clinging to my damp hair, wiping greasy crumbs on my Adidas poppers.
And I remember one song blaring out through the leisure centre speakers more frequently than any other: “Drinking in LA” by Bran Van 3000.
Historically known as Bran Van 3000’s first international hit, and more colloquially known as one of the greatest comedown songs of all time, “Drinking in LA” is a trippy slacker anthem that has refused to die in the almost 30 years since its release in 1997. Why a euphoric ode to mid-20s ennui by a group who take their name from a low-grade Swedish vodka resonated with me, an eight-year-old, front crawling indifferently through the ASA curriculum, is either bleakly prophetic or a simple testament to the universal resonance of its three opening notes. Because it’s mostly that loop – those three descending notes, plus the refrain of “What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at 26?” – that anchor what otherwise should have been a wildly inaccessible tune.
From the “Hi, my name is stereo Mike” and other abstract nonsense that comprises the intro to the wandering, observational lyrics littered with in-jokes, “Drinking in LA” is a really fu***ng weird song. Sonically bridging the gap between trip-hop and lo-fi indie like the Sneaker Pimps‘ sloppy cousin, it arrived at a time when “alternative rock” – as Greg Bouchard wrote in a retrospective on Bran Van’s debut album Glee – “could mean anything from electronica to Metallica, and along with artists like Len, Beck, Soul Coughing, and Primitive Radio Gods, Bran Van 3000 embodied the identity crisis.”
