One Fierce Beer Coaster

While the album's predecessor, Use Your Fingers, was written and recorded in a more hip hop-oriented style, featuring distinct rap beats, One Fierce Beer Coaster featured a more alternative-oriented sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described The Bloodhound Gang's sound as, "smarmy, smirky alternative funk-metal, complete with junk culture references and "ironic" musical allusions."[1] Former Bloodhound Gang guitarist Lupus Thunder credits Weezer as an inspiration for "Fire Water Burn" and Lemonade and Brownies-era Sugar Ray for "Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny."[5]

To create the hip-hop and rock fusions on the album, Jimmy Pop utilized the standard hip hop technique of sampling. The chorus for "Fire Water Burn" is taken from "The Roof Is on Fire" by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three[6] and also features the lyrics 'I am white like Frank Black is / So if man is five and the devil is six then that must make me seven / This honkey's gone to heaven,' a direct reference to the post-1993 stage name of Black Francis who wrote the Pixies song "Monkey Gone to Heaven" to which the lyrics allude.[7] "Why's Everybody Always Pickin' on Me?" is built around a re-recorded sample of "Spooky", by Mike Sharpe as performed by Classics IV[6] and also features a small lift from the Bill Cosby track "Greasy Kid Stuff."[8] Finally, the track "Your Only Friends Are Make Believe" features a chorus melody lifted from the Duran Duran song "Hungry Like the Wolf."[9] "Lift Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)" is built around a sample from "Get Up and Boogie" by the Silver Convention.[10]

The lyrics for One Fierce Beer Coaster utilize over-the-top parody and toilet humor as means for comedy. For instance, the album opener, "Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny", is a song about a man and his new girlfriend and their adventures in cunnilingus. It was written by Jimmy Pop about his then-girlfriend; the next two albums would each have one song about said girlfriend - "Three Point One Four" and "No Hard Feelings”.[11] "Lift Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)" spoofs people who have considered suicide to go through with it, asserting that their lives are not worth the unhappiness. Three minutes into the song, Jimmy Pop says "Rewind and let me reverse it backwards like Judas Priest first did." Immediately after this, a four-second segment of backwards vocals repeats four times. When played in reverse, this segment says, "Devil shall wake up and eat Chef Boyardee Beefaroni."[12]

The album's best-known single, "Fire Water Burn", is a diatribe against a white boy who attempts, and fails, to act like a black thug. "I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks" parodies the belief that girls only like gay men, playing on the stereotype that gay men are often better looking and more sensitive than straight men. "Why's Everybody Always Pickin' on Me?" is mainly about how Jimmy Pop was constantly picked on in high school and has since developed extreme katagelophobia, an intense fear of being ridiculed.[4]

The album also includes a cover of Run-DMC's "It's Tricky" and "Boom", which features an appearance by Vanilla Ice.[6]

When Geffen Records re-released the album, the label refused to release the song "Yellow Fever" because of its racial lyrical content. As such, the song was removed from Geffen pressings of the album.[17] In response, Jimmy Pop told Yahoo! Launch that his band's music and lyrics were simply meant to be humorous:

I think on the first record there's stuff that [offended people]… Really we're not trying to shock anybody, we're just saying things that we laugh at," he explained. "That was always the idea. The same things that we talk about on the bus are the same things we put on our records. On the first record we had lyrics like, 'There's little children unattended, let me get some poison candy,' which to me, that isn't very good.[17]

In 2000, the song was the subject of further controversy when students at the University of Maryland, including members of the ECAASU and the LGBT Alliance, demanded the band be removed from a concert lineup.[18]

The album has been released on vinyl three times. The first vinyl release was released on Republic Records and included "Yellow Fever" and the hidden track. In 2013, it was repressed again and did not include either "Yellow Fever" or the hidden track. A second reissue came out on 23 September 2016 through MVD Audio, using the same track list as the MOV issue.[19]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[1]
Robert Christgau	[20]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[21]

One Fierce Beer Coaster has received mixed reviews. Officially reviewing the album for Amazon.com, Roni Sarig argued that while the band was "offensive, rude, stoopid [sic], and vigorously gutter-minded", the album was "full of smart lines, great hooks, and creative arranging".[22] In a three-out-of-five star review, AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that, "One Fierce Beer Coaster was picked up by DGC about two months after its release [...] And, listening to the single, "Fire Water Burn," it's possible to hear why."[1] However, Earlewine also wrote that "what really sinks the album is the revolting, sophomoric humor that passes for lyrics."[1] In his review of the lead single "Fire Water Burn", Entertainment Weekly reviewer Matt Diehl referred to the band's music as "mumbling hip-hop slang with self-conscious Caucasian stiffness."[23] Robert Christgau awarded the album two stars and identified it as an "honorable mention" (i.e., a "likable effort consumers attuned to [the record's] overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well enjoy"), writing that the album was "fighting for [the band's] right to show you their underpants".[20]

On January 18, 1997, One Fierce Beer Coaster debuted on the Billboard 200 at number 132; it peaked at number 57 less than a month later.[24] On October 16, 1998, the album was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), meaning that it had shipped 500,000 copies in the United States.[25]