Opinion
Tom W Clarke
Lyrically nonsensical and infuriatingly catchy, with rapid-fire verses that tumble through random references to filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, manga series Sailor Moon, TV show The X-Files and Toronto’s Birchmount Stadium, Canadian pop-rockers Barenaked Ladies are most famous for their 1998 hit, One Week.
These days, that iconic opening yelp of “Yiiiiit’s been” will either fill you with joy or send shivers down your spine, remembering a time when this chaotic pop-rap earworm was inescapable. One Week was huge, a global hit that went to No.1 in the United States – as it happens, for exactly one week.
However, their biggest commercial triumph was a gift and a curse. In achieving mainstream success, One Week became their legacy. Mentions of Barenaked Ladies typically lump them in with a certain calibre of late-’90s nostalgia – alongside The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and The Presidents of the United States of America – as punchlines, reminders of the kind of rock-adjacent silliness that presaged “the saving of rock music” by The Strokes and The White Stripes.
I’m not necessarily here trying to convince you that One Week is a stream-of-consciousness masterpiece of pop absurdism, James Joyce for the MTV generation – though if you reach that conclusion on your own, I won’t disagree.
But Barenaked Ladies are not one-hit wonders. In fact, they are among the most underappreciated bands of the ’90s, brilliant songwriters with a long record of indie success, and pioneers who dared to have fun at a time when music was at its most dour.
They are a treasure. Geniuses persecuted for their whimsy, whose combination of existential suburban ennui and fun-loving irreverence preceded the breakouts of Green Day, Weezer and The Offspring.
Rock criticism is often an exercise in musical elitism. Goodness knows I’ve been guilty of it myself. The main reason that Barenaked Ladies were dismissed by mainstream critics, and why their legacy and talent continues to be ignored, is that they are funny. “Novelty acts” don’t make the Hall of Fame, don’t make real music, can’t be taken seriously. Ahem, “Weird Al” Yankovic would like a word.
And music in the early ’90s was SO serious. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden. In response to the cheesiness of ’80s hair metal and new wave, grunge was heavy, raw, sludgy and just overflowing with angst. Angst for days.
And in 1992, at the very height of grunge, Barenaked Ladies released their seminal debut album, Gordon. Less than a year after Nevermind by Nirvana, months before Dirt by Alice in Chains and Core by Stone Temple Pilots, Barenaked Ladies eschewed flannel shirts and Nietzsche in favour of offbeat observations and folk-flavoured good times.
When Oasis – one of the acts set to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during next month’s ceremony, alongside Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order and Phil Collins (solo), among others – released Live Forever in 1994, Noel Gallagher called it a response to the misery of grunge. Barenaked Ladies had already beaten him to it.
Gordon is a unique concoction of silliness and poetry, routinely hilarious and poignant in a single beat. Be My Yoko Ono is a charmingly eccentric love song. If I Had $1000000 is a quaint delight, aspirational dreaming for a generation growing up in significant economic instability; all they want is a house, a mini-fridge and to buy their love a fur coat (“but not a real fur coat, that’s cruel”). Brian Wilson is the single most underrated song of the ’90s, as pained and contemplative an exploration of creative anxiety and world-weariness as there has been in pop.
They were frontiersmen of fun, punctuating real-life struggles with self-deprecation and witticism – before the pop-punk juvenilia of Green Day and Blink-182, before the geek rock of Weezer and Ben Folds Five. You didn’t need to be brooding or apathetic to express discontent. Life can be hard without being overwhelmed by darkness.
The band also presaged two major trends in 2000s pop songwriting. On Gordon, and later on songs like One Week and It’s All Been Done, they used niche pop culture references as emotional touchstones to connect with Millennial audiences through irony, fandom and nostalgia.
And they were early masters of the “sad songs disguised as happy pop” movement (think Hey Ya! by OutKast or Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People). The Old Apartment is an upbeat dissection of domestic heartbreak and bitter memory, while Pinch Me is a desperate search for meaning in the so-called suburban dream.
Maybe Barenaked Ladies will forever be misunderstood, their legacy forgotten everywhere outside the Great White North. Or maybe it’s all just karmic punishment for writing the theme song to The Big Bang Theory. But if Phil Collins can get inducted into the Hall of Fame twice, anyone’s still got a shot.
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