The dweebs took over.īeck wasn’t a dweeb in the early ’90s, but he felt like a dweeb when he tried to rap. Somewhere along the line, cool stopped being necessary to this process. It had been happening since the early Beastie Boys, or maybe even since Blondie made “ Rapture.” But Blondie and the Beastie Boys were cool. By the late ’90s, white people self-consciously dorking around with rap music was already a tired trope. It can go fuck itself.Ī whole lot of things had to fall into place culturally for the Barenaked Ladies, a longtime cult act who were stars in Canada but only just starting to make headway in the US, to turn their cat-piss quasi-rap smugness bomb into an actual no-shit #1 Billboard pop hit. It’s Elon Musk in a Wario costume on Saturday Night Live. I fucking hate it with all the power of my soul.
It’s a stupid song that knows it’s a stupid song, and I’m supposed to think its whole self-reflexive smarty-pants goofball nonsense schtick is silly and charming and sly. To me, “One Week” represents the shallowest and most bankrupt kind of fun. “One Week” was a plague on humanity in 1998, and it’s still a plague on humanity today. Maybe you just read that paragraph and thought I was being facetious. It’s a travesty of justice, and I’m still mad. And then American consumers, in their infinite wisdom, took this ostentatiously clever birthday-party routine and sent it all the way to the top of the Hot 100, briefly interrupting the reign of Monica’s “ The First Night.” In the ’90s, the decade when “alternative rock” became a thing that people said out loud, the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” became the first #1 hit that was even vaguely alt-rock since Lisa Loeb’s “ Stay (I Missed You),” more than four years earlier. These fucking dorks had the balls to record this song of bouncy-bounce bubble-crunch and rapid-fire pop-cult non-sequiturs and to present it to the world as a viable pop product. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
0 kommentar(er)
