FEATURE:
End It On This
No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom at Thirty
__________
I know that some fans and reviewers…
IN THIS PHOTO: No Doubt (from left: Adrian Young, Tom Dumont, Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal)/PHOTO CREDIT: Joseph Cultice
were not fans of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, as they felt it was too ‘poppy’ and maybe a departure from their Ska roots. Calling the album too commercial or Pop-leaning seems insane! It is not at all. In any case, No Doubt, like any band, are allowed to evolve and change. In terms of the songs on their album, there are more than a few classics. Just a Girl, Spiderwebs and Don’t Speak are all huge songs. Led by the super-cool and legendary Gwen Stefani, I think you can hear D.N.A. from Tragic Kingdom in work by modern groups. Those that definitely are compelled by No Doubt’s underrated third studio album. It would be another five years until they followed this album with 2000’s Return of Saturn. On 10th October, 1995, Tragic Kingdom came into the world. Just a Girl was released on 21st September, 1995, so fans had an inkling into what the new album would sound like. A number one album in the band’s native U.S. and a huge success around the world, there were a lot of positive reviews for Tragic Kingdom upon its release. At the 1997 Grammy Awards, No Doubt was nominated for Best New Artist and Best Rock Album. In 2003, Tragic Kingdom was ranked number 441 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. NME included Tragic Kingdom on its 2020 list of "The best new wave albums ever". Because this immense album is coming up for its thirtieth anniversary, I want to spend some time with some features that take us inside its recording, the amazing songs and also the aftermath and legacy. I remember when Tragic Kingdom came out. I was twelve and I had heard a few No Doubt songs. I think the release of Don’t Speak in 1996 was a huge moment. One of the defining songs from my high school years.
Let’s start off with this article from last year. They provide a thorough and forensic breakdown. Providing insight and technical details. A lot of great information about the recording of Tragic Kingdom. Produced by Matthew Wilder, this was a moment when No Doubt ascended to new heights. Iconic songs like Just a Girl regularly played on music T.V. and widely shared on the radio. Songs from the album still popular and heard to this day. Maybe the best album No Doubt released:
“The creation of Tragic Kingdom was set against a backdrop of musical experimentation and personal upheaval. By the early 1990s, No Doubt had already established themselves as a band with a distinctive sound, blending ska, punk, and pop influences. However, their self-titled debut album, released in 1992, failed to make a significant impact commercially, largely overshadowed by the grunge movement that dominated the airwaves.
Despite these challenges, the band persisted, releasing The Beacon Street Collection in 1995, a self-produced album that demonstrated their growing confidence and musical maturity. This period of creativity and experimentation laid the groundwork for Tragic Kingdom. With the departure of Eric Stefani, who left to pursue a career in animation, the band was forced to reconfigure their songwriting process, with Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal stepping into more prominent creative roles.
The album’s main contributors included Gwen Stefani on vocals, Tony Kanal on bass, Tom Dumont on guitar, and Adrian Young on drums. Additional musicians and collaborators enriched the album’s sound, bringing a vibrant mix of influences to the fore. The album’s title, a playful twist on Disneyland’s “Magic Kingdom,” reflects the band’s Southern California roots and the bittersweet themes explored throughout the record. The album artwork, created by photographer Daniel Arsenault, captures this duality, featuring Gwen Stefani in a striking red dress amidst an orange grove, symbolizing both the beauty and decay inherent in the “Tragic Kingdom.”
Recording Process
The recording of Tragic Kingdom was a meticulous process, spanning over two years from March 1993 to October 1995. The sessions took place across 11 studios in the Greater Los Angeles area, each contributing to the album’s rich and diverse sound. Studios like Total Access and The Record Plant provided the band with state-of-the-art facilities and a blend of vintage and modern equipment, essential for capturing the album’s eclectic style.
Matthew Wilder, the album’s producer, played a crucial role in shaping the sound of Tragic Kingdom. Known for his work with artists like Christina Aguilera, Wilder brought a polished yet dynamic approach to the recording sessions. His collaboration with engineer Paul Palmer ensured that each track was meticulously crafted, balancing the band’s ska-punk roots with broader pop sensibilities.
One notable challenge during the recording was the tension arising from the band’s personal dynamics, particularly the breakup between Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal. This emotional backdrop added a layer of intensity to the sessions, with tracks like “Don’t Speak” capturing the raw vulnerability of their relationship. Despite these hurdles, the band managed to channel their personal experiences into the music, creating an album that resonated deeply with listeners”.
I am going to jump to a review from Pitchfork. They provided some interesting and excellent backstory and history. The lead-up to the recording of Tragic Kingdom. I think one of the most notable and important aspects was the lyrics by Gwen Stefani. A feminist whose lyrics on songs like Just a Girl very much fitted with a scene of incredible women who were using their music to hit out against sexism and the patriarchy, this anger and defiance mixes with the more colourful and heartbroken:
“Following the surge of third-wave feminism in the early ’90s, the mid-’90s became the peak of the “angry white female” era in rock and pop. It was a time when feminized aggression—from Hole and riot grrrl to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette—was suddenly perceived as being on-trend, as if women haven’t been furious forever. Stefani, girly tomboy ultra, arguably benefited from this kind of branding, even while she maintained the fun, energetic personality that led Courtney Love to dub her a “cheerleader” and others to call her the “anti-Courtney Love.”
Lead single “Just a Girl” was Gwen’s bridge to planet angry. Upon its release in September 1995, it became a theme song for any girl fed up with living in a boy’s world—with the emphasis once again being on girl. Spice Girls would soon turn “girl power” into a full-on marketing technique, but “Just a Girl” was some kind of magic middle-ground in the context of ’90s pop-feminism: sassy, addictively sweet and sour, yet still accessible. Dumont’s indelible looping riff adds a taunting feeling, while the lyrics leave interpretation conveniently ajar with lines like “I’m just a girl/So don’t let me have any rights.” Never has Stefani’s vocal style—with its forays into babydoll voice and its breathless, swooping belts—felt more intentional as a performance technique meant to amplify her message. “Just a Girl” is not a subtle song, but what it’s doing is quietly masterful: The sarcasm subverts the underlying victimhood in a sneering way, but victimhood is also something girls (particularly white or privileged girls) quickly understand as a tool for getting what they want.
Gwen’s Tragic Kingdom-era pain was incandescent because it felt off the cuff, uninhibited, and barely removed from its cause. You saw that up close in “Don’t Speak,” the breakup ballad that pushed No Doubt’s success over the edge, topping the Billboard airplay chart for 16 weeks. Starting in late 1996 and continuing for much of 1997, flutters of Spanish guitar and angelic whispers of “hush hush, darling” were inescapable; for those listening across radio formats or watching MTV at the time, the song’s ubiquity reached “if I hear this one more time…” levels. But people also could not look away from the saga of Gwen and Tony, SoCal ska’s Stevie and Lindsey. Every night they’d hit the stage and seemingly be forced to relive their split through “Don’t Speak,” a song musically at odds with nearly everything in their upbeat catalog.
Not every song on Tragic Kingdom is overtly about the breakup or the frustrations of girlhood—this is ’90s California ska, after all, a few mostly positive chillers are required. But the album tracks skew cheesy, especially now. Ska bands of the era would sometimes show off their funk chops with a disco cut on their LPs, but No Doubt’s take, “You Can Do It,” is plagued by fake disco strings and a guitar jangle that borders on musical clip art. “Different People,” a brass-and-keyboard-led ska track about how the world is big and diverse, has the tension of a child’s picture book, and the depth of one too. Eric’s musical-theater-strikes-back closer “Tragic Kingdom” is cringeworthy in highly specific ways: the sampling of theme-park announcements, the egregiously drawn-out tempo changes, the fact that it seems to be about how evil Walt Disney is. (Besides, on an album like this, the most tragic of kingdoms is actually Gwen and Tony’s love story, not the suburbia surrounding Mickey’s castle.)
The rush of energy you get from Tragic Kingdom’s opening run is enough to keep the album within spitting distance of the ’90s canon, emblematic of a specific time and place. Other highs include sixth single “Sunday Morning,” where the seasoned band easily finds the pocket with nimble, driving percussion, reggae rhythms, and overdubbed harmonies. “End It On This,” one of the only songs credited to Dumont, Kanal, and both Stefanis, is low-key pummeling: Gwen, in all her high-low vocal glory, recalls the last kiss with Tony while the band fires on all cylinders. Every player gets to show off a little with their “thing,” but Dumont is the secret all-star: His tough opening riff sets the song into intricate lockstep. Dumont, much like fellow unlikely-’90s-rock-star Rivers Cuomo, was a Kiss fan and longtime metalhead; you can hear that in his guitar hooks, which lent Tragic Kingdom a fizzy edge”.
It is another review that I want to get to now. Billboard write how No Doubt sort of pogoed into people’s lives in 1995. The Orange County band had endured enough tragedy and dislocation for a few albums. However, Tragic Kingdom does not get bogged down with too much baggage. It is a spectacular album that does show its tears and scars, and yet there is a lot of pleasure, joy and a range in terms of emotions and themes:
“It was the outcome of three years of struggle,” said bassist Tony in a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone. “And there were casualties.”
There sure were. During the making of Tragic Kingdom, Eric quit to become an animator on The Simpsons, and Kanal ended his eight-year romantic relationship with Gwen. These things transpired as the group — rounded out by guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young — tried to reverse their commercial fortunes while maintaining their artistic integrity. Fate was trying to break their stride and slow them down, but luckily, they had producer Matthew Wilder — he of “ain’t nothing gonna break my stride” fame — at the controls. While not exactly the hippest guy in the world, Wilder helped Gwen and the boys strike the right balance between the bouncy ska of their early years and the other sounds they were already drifting toward.
That last point is crucial. While some ska fans blasted the band for abandoning its roots, this was no overnight ka-ching thing. No Doubt’s sophomore effort, 1995’s self-released Beacon Street Collection, is all over the map, and even the group’s 1992 self-titled debut isn’t a front-to-back genre record.
And besides, by blowing out ska’s borders, No Doubt was following in the proud footsteps of fellow California acts like Fishbone and Oingo Boingo — not to mention all those 2 Tone groups from England that Gwen and Eric grew up worshipping. After nearly a decade in action, No Doubt circa ’95 was an ambitious foursome with a metal guitarist, a Prince-loving funk bassist, and a drummer comfortable in various styles. They’d have done themselves a disservice by sticking strictly with ska, and they’d have never made it out of Anaheim.
Of course, they did make it out. Tragic Kingdom sold 16 million copies and reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Only one of the singles, “Just a Girl,” cracked the Hot 100, but that’s because the rest weren’t released as proper singles. That technicality meant that tunes like “Spiderwebs” and the mega-smash “Don’t Speak” could only climb the Billboard Hot Airplay chart, and climb they did, reaching No. 23 and No. 1, respectively.
As dramatized in the “Don’t Speak” video, Gwen’s emergence as a superstar was a huge part of the group’s success. For teen girls in the late ‘90s, she was a different sort of idol, a glamorpuss in track pants who’d play girly-girl one minute and raging punk chick the next. In a pop landscape filled with power female figures, (Alanis Morissette, Shirley Manson, Courtney Love, etc.), Gwen’s bindi-dotted, bare-abbed, Barbie-warrior-princess aesthetic made her an alternative to all the alternatives.
Eric’s departure left her to handle the bulk of the lyrics, and the Tony situation left her with lots to write about. It was serendipitous, suddenly having this forum to express the greatest heartbreak she’d ever experienced, though it couldn’t have seemed like it at the time.
Thanks to Tragic Kingdom, No Doubt became one of the era’s biggest bands, and two decades later, it still tours and records when the mood strikes. Gwen, meanwhile, is a bona fide solo star and beloved TV figure, thanks to The Voice”.
I am rounding off with two retrospective features. The first is from VICE. Writing back in 2015 for Tragic Kingdom’s twentieth anniversary, we get to discover why the band and the album proved so popular. I think it is their relatability and accessibility. Especially Gwen Stefani. Not ego-charged or concerned with fame, this was (and still is) an artist who could connect with her fanbase and was writing songs that they could identify with:
“What Gwen wanted to sing about was, and still is, incredibly relatable to anyone still figuring their shit out. On “Different People” she grapples with her place in a world full of “different people and all their different minds” as impending pop stardom beckons. “You don’t have to be a famous person just to make your mark,” she sings on the first verse, sounding as though she’s trying to convince herself as much as anyone. She continues: “A mother can be an inspiration to her little son / Change his thoughts, his mind, his life, just with her gentle hum.” Twenty years on, this couplet feels like the motherhood versus career conundrum neatly summed up for the TMZ generation.
“Different People” is one of several Tragic Kingdom highlights that could only have been written by a smart, ambitious, somewhat conflicted woman. “Hey You!” has Gwen suspiciously eyeing up a newlywed couple who are “Just like my Ken and Barbie Doll,” while “Just a Girl” is a wickedly sarcastic feminist anthem inspired by a scolding she received from her father after she stayed out too late with Kanal and drove home alone. “Oh I’m just a girl / All pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights,” she sneers at the top before sighing, “Oh, I’ve had it up to here!” over the outro.
Elsewhere, “Spiderwebs” is essentially Destiny’s Child’s “Bug a Boo” for the pre-cellphone era, while on “Excuse Me Mr.” Gwen casts herself in the role of a girl simply desperate to catch a guy’s attention, complete with a sonically slapstick middle eight. Funnily enough, the summer before Tragic Kingdom dropped, Gwen caught the attention of a man who would at least in part inspire her art for the next two decades: Bush’s Gavin Rossdale. Their fateful meeting and instant attraction occurred when both bands toured with the Goo Goo Dolls. They began dating soon after and married seven years later, with Rossdale inspiring numerous future No Doubt and solo songs including “Don’t Let Me Down” and “U Started It”—can you guess what those two are about?—before Gwen filed for divorce this past August citing “irreconcilable differences.” Both personally and professionally, 1995 was a massive year for La Stefani.
But nevermind Rossdale, a selection of Tragic Kingdom’s best songs hinged around another key relationship for Gwen: her long-term boyfriend and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, and aching power ballad “Don’t Speak” became the summation of her heartbreak in the wake of their split. At the time it was utterly inescapable, but perhaps because it’s been dimmed by over-familiarity, the album’s lesser-known breakup songs hit harder today. “Happy Now?” is filled with bitterness and defiance, “Sunday Morning” documents an unexpected role reversal—suddenly he wants her back—and “End it on This” sees Gwen finally throw in the towel. But far from becoming subsumed by, “You Can Do It,” is Gwen’s stop-wallowing-and-get-yourself-together song.
No Doubt would go on to make a more sophisticated album with 2000’s Return of Saturn (the lion’s share of the lyrics for which are dominated by the rollercoaster early days of her relationship with Rossdale), followed by 2001’s Rock Steady, which was precision-tooled by The Neptunes and William Orbit for chart success, before Gwen made her inevitable solo move in the mid-aughts. But Tragic Kingdom remains the band’s defining moment, a career-altering record that’s earnest, passionate, and reassuringly flawed. An album about breaking up, growing up, and thinking about shit; about not always knowing the answer and getting on with it anyway. Dumont summarized its personal impact on his Tumblr recently: “The whirlwind of world-touring and extensive promoting of Tragic Kingdom went on for two and a half years, and at the end of it we emerged, not only rock stars, but as men and women.” It shouldn’t take an act of God for you to give it another listen, but the passage of 20 years seems a perfect excuse to dive back in”.
I am going to finish off with a feature from 2020. GRAMMY revisited Tragic Kingdom on its twenty-fifth anniversary. Even though they say Tragic Kingdom was No Doubt’s sophomore album – it was their third, but 1995’s The Beacon Street Collection was an independent release, though it is technically their second album -, they wrote how it is a masterpiece. An album that had an impact on the Rock and Pop world at large. It still resounds to this day. It has translated and endured through the decades well. It has lost little of its magic:
“Tragic Kingdom is widely considered a breakup album, and it is, but the heartbreak also extends to more than just Stefani and Kanal. The band faced so much tragedy in their formative years, starting with suicide of co-founder John Spence in 1987 when they were only a year old. Spence shared vocal duties with a then-bashful Stefani and was a charismatic frontman who did backflips on stage. Days before No Doubt were to perform at the Roxy Theatre, a gig they hoped would be their big break, he shot himself. The Roxy was announced as the devastated band’s final show. They reunited a month later because, Stefani told Interview, it’s what Spence would have wanted. The unreleased song, "Dear John," pays tribute to their friend.
And then there was Eric’s exit. While it set No Doubt on their course, it rattled their confidence emphatically. It was traumatic, Dumont said. "We were just a group of friends who were really tight, and we had our band for years. Our band just got rocked with this intense, personal stuff." And, Stefani admitted, it almost made them give up. "We were sitting there saying to ourselves, ‘O.K., we are 26. We’ve been doing this for eight years. Maybe we should finish up and get adult lives now.’ Then the record came out and people thought it was good, which was really weird, because we were always the dork band from Anaheim." "The Climb," a psychedelic slow burner that alludes to overcoming obstacles, is one of Eric’s two solo offerings to Tragic Kingdom—the other being the freaky title-track, which describes a dystopian Disneyland and Walt’s cryogenically frozen tears as dripping icicles—and has emerged as a fan-favorite over the years.
But while No Doubt’s early years may have been flooded with drama, plumbing the depths of it helped them find their voice. Collective agony cultivated the strength of their bond and dug into an honest narrative about navigating loss that is not only powerful, but universally relatable. We all experience pain. It’s an intrinsic part of the human experience. And we tend to relate to art that, even if ever so slightly, taps into our grief because it expresses it in a way that we perhaps exactly can’t. It hits a nerve. And that’s deeply comforting—which is arguably why Tragic Kingdom continues to endure in the powerful way that it does: yes, it’s poetic, gorgeously dynamic, and sounded fizzy and fresh against the band’s radio contemporaries. But it’s also a symbol of hope in the wake of tragedy”.
I think I will leave it there. On 10th October, we will listen to Tragic Kingdom thirty years after its release. It seems hard to think it is that old! I remember the album fondly, and it was an important part of a special time in life. Even though most people know Tragic Kingdom for the singles, there are deeper cuts like End It on This and Tragic Kingdom which deserve more discussion and exposure! Go and listen to this truly great album. You only need to listen to it the once before you are…
TOTALLY smitten.