FEATURE:
Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure
Barenaked Ladies - One Week
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I am heading back to the ‘90s…
for the latest instalment of Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure. There were some great one-hit wonder bands from that decade and, to me, one of the finest comes in the form of Barenaked Ladies. That may sound a bit harsh, but I know the band did have other successful tracks. One Week was such a hit and success that nothing they did since has the same sort of gravity and impact. That said, there are many who either dislike the track or feel that it is a novelty that should be seen as a guilty pleasure. Because the lyrics are a little ridiculous and random, I can understand why some feel it is a bit throwaway. I really love the originality of the lyrics and how singalong One Week is! Before I go on, I want to bring in the Wikipedia article relating to the Barenaked Ladies’ signature song:
“"One Week" is a song by the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies that was released as the first single from their 1998 album, Stunt. It was written by Ed Robertson, who is featured on the lead vocal of the rapped verses. Steven Page sings lead on the song's chorus, while the two co-lead the prechoruses in harmony. The song is notable for its significant number of pop culture references, and it remains the band's best-known song in the United States. Coincidentally, when the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, it remained in the top spot for one week.
"One Week" is the band's best-performing single on the charts in both the US and the UK, though it slightly under-performed several other singles in Canada. It was the band's only No. 1 single in the US on both the Hot 100 and the US Modern Rock Tracks (for five non-consecutive weeks). The song spent seven weeks at No. 3 on the Hot 100 Airplay and an additional four weeks at No. 2 behind the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris". The band has not equaled this level of US chart success since, though singles "It's All Been Done", from the same album, and "Pinch Me", the first single from their subsequent album Maroon, both broke the top 50 of the US Hot 100. Apple used the song at MacWorld 1999 for presenting Mac OS X Server on a wall of 50 iMacs.
In 1999, American parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a parody titled "Jerry Springer", a song about a man's strange obsession with The Jerry Springer Show, for his album Running with Scissors.
The song has been featured numerous times in other media, including the films Digimon: The Movie, American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You, the band appear to perform it live in "College Kids", an early season 4 episode of The West Wing, the season 7 Oscar Special of On Cinema, a season 2 episode of Schooled, the video game Alvin and the Chipmunks, and in the video game Rock Band Blitz. The song also appears as a recurring element of the mashup album Mouth Moods by American musician Neil Cicierega”.
I am going to end by introducing an article from 2018 where we hear from Ed Robertson (who wrote One Week) of the band. After thirty years of One Week being in the world, it must have been interesting reflecting on a song that went to number-one in the U.S. and was a big smash around the world. Although other tracks from Barenaked Ladies’ 1998 album, Stunt - like It’s All Be Done –, are terrific and catchy, many associated the album with One Week – and they wrote the band off as a one-hit wonder. I think the album is really solid. Here is what AllMusic said in their review:
“By trying to mask their smart-ass humor in a big pop production, the Barenaked Ladies attempt to set themselves up for the big crossover that they nearly achieved with such past singles as "Be My Yoko Ono" and "Brian Wilson." Nothing on Stunt, the group's fourth studio album, is so clearly jokey (although "Alcohol" comes close), but they still rely on clever satire. That may irritate some listeners who would otherwise be won over by the group's increased musical skill. Never before has the band been able to pull off so many different styles, from jangly pop and alt-country to loungy bossa nova, so well. Musically, it could convince the doubters who have written off Barenaked Ladies as novelty pranksters, but the lyrics still will stand in the way of trad-rockers predisposed to this style of music. Of course, listeners who are a little less uptight will find Stunt to be a fine collegiate party record and one of the best albums the Barenaked Ladies have released”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Barenaked Ladies’ Ed Robertson/PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
One of the most distinctive aspects of One Week is its lyrics. There are all sorts of unusual and random scenes thrown into the mix. When I was at high school and the song came out, many people in the playground tried to memorise the lyrics and sing it back as the band did! Even to this day, I am not really sure whether there is a meaning behind them or whether Ed Robertson was writing in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style. I want to quote from a Stereogum article – where we learn more about the background to One Week. Although all of the lyrics were raised and explained, I have chosen a couple of choice selections:
“The short and spritely “One Week” is full of non sequiturs, but it isn’t entirely nonsense. It begins on the chorus (sung by Steven Page) which describes a couple in a fight. The protagonist is too stubborn to apologize, but knows it’ll blow over like it always does. In between the jaunty refrains, though, are the reasons this song was always polarizing: a rapped series of jokey, rapid-fire pop culture and brand references that don’t relate to each other nor the narrative. Robertson, the band’s co-founder and current frontman, had been known to improvise raps during Barenaked Ladies concerts and created the verses as an intentionally silly freestyle.
Mid-‘90s media was steeped in self-reflexive humor and knowing meta gags. Seinfeld had Jerry and George landing a pilot for a TV show about nothing. Scream featured a character who rattled off horror film clichés. The timing was right for a hit that mentioned contemporary songwriters like Sting and Leann Rimes.
The following summer pop radio kept the random namedrops coming with LFO’s ridiculous “Summer Girls” (which referenced Michael J. Fox, Kevin Bacon, and Abercrombie & Fitch) and Blessid Union Of Souls’ “Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me For Me)” (Jim Carrey, Cindy Crawford, “that guy who played in Fargo, I think his name is Steve”). Even New Radicals’ brilliant “You Get What You Give” seemed to shoehorn in mentions of Beck, Hanson, and Courtney Love for no reason. All these acts could now be considered pop history footnotes, but Barenaked Ladies didn’t exactly meet that fate.
STEREOGUM: How and when did “One Week” come into play. Had it been percolating for awhile?
ROBERTSON: Well, I had the basic structure of the song, the choruses, which is kind of this silly deconstruction of an argument between two people who actually really like each other. The kind of stubborn argument that drags out over a week. I had that, and I wanted to do some kind of rappy verses but they always sucked every time I tried to write them. It was finally Steve who said, “Why don’t you just freestyle it, like you do in every show? The freestyles you do off the top of your head are better than the stuff you’re trying to write.” I wasn’t very sophisticated at that time in terms of the whole home studio or recording equipment. So I set up a video camera and I freestyled like four verses and I edited those down into the two verses that became “One Week.” So our biggest single ever, our #1 single, was written in three-and-a-half minutes.
STEREOGUM: I’ve seen some of those cut lyrics — “Luke Skywalker gotta big hunch/Hey that’s my lunch/Yoda’s a really really old guy” — but is it fair to say the final recording is pretty close to what you laid out on that videotape?
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
STEREOGUM: And I take it you didn’t recognize it as a hit.
ROBERTSON: Well it’s such a weird song, right? I thought it would be a bonus track or a b-side. It was one of the last songs I submitted to the record company and when Sue Drew, who was our A&R person at the time, said, “We wanna lead with ‘One Week'” I actually thought she was joking. I thought she was making a dig at me, like this is the stupidest fucking song I ever heard. Which I would’ve agreed with. I labored over so many songs on that record, and tried to make them, you know, super deep and meaningful and soulful and tried to nail them emotionally, and then this totally ridiculous song that I improvised, that makes no sense at all, goes to #1.
STEREOGUM: You say it makes no sense at all. The chorus makes sense to me, but there’s debate online as to whether the verses relate to the narrative.
ROBERTSON: Absolutely not. It is a hodgepodge of pop culture references and inside jokes. I can tell you where every single line comes from and what it means, but they don’t relate to each other, and they don’t relate to the chorus.
IN THIS PHOTO: David Duchovny and Gilliam Anderson in a publicity shot for The X-Files
STEREOGUM: Perhaps this is related: why when you’re watching X-Files are you “dans la maison”?
ROBERTSON: So The X-Files theme goes [hums X-Files theme]. We were X-Files maniacs and this was back in the day when there was no streaming, stuff wasn’t available, but we met someone at Fox and they gave us like a 3’x2’x2′ crate of VHS copies of The X-Files so as of ’98 we had every episode on VHS on the bus. So after the show we would get on the bus and we wouldn’t say, “Hey do you want to watch some X-Files?,” we wouldn’t say, “Hey ya wanna put something on the TV?” We’d go [to the tune of X-Files theme] “dans la maison la maison la maison…” Which was just singing The X-Files theme with the French for “are you in the house?” like, “are you ready to do this?”.
I have a lot of affection for One Week, yet there are some that dismiss the song as nonsensical/a mere novelty hit. Not only is One Week uplifting and silly enough to produce a smile; one can lose themselves in the lyrics and all the images and possibilities they project! It is a classic cut from the 1990s that is still on my playlist. If you have been a little cold towards the song or have not really given it a chance, then have a listen now and I know that it will put you in a better mood. The fact that we are still talking about One Week over thirty years since its release proves that…
IT is much more than a mere guilty pleasure!