Barenaked Ladies Reflect on 'One Week' 20 Years Later
It feels like a different universe. In fact it was the summer of 1998: Bill Clinton was testifying in front of a grand jury about an affair with a White House intern, "The Boy Is Mine" by Brandy and Monica was the biggest song in the country and Armageddon was earning millions at the box office.
Up north, a bunch of quirky Canadians who called themselves Barenaked Ladies were plotting their world takeover. Led by co-lead singers Ed Robertson and Steven Page, the band's 1992 debut Gordon, with signature singalong "If I Had $1000000," had transformed them into local heroes. Then 1998's Stunt dialed up the hooks and condensed the group's spirited, humor-heavy live shows into 50 minutes of not-too-jokey pop. Perhaps more significantly, the album led off with the freakishly catchy "One Week," a rap-rock beast of a single that has become so unavoidably entrenched in the pop consciousness that simply singing the first two words of the song ("It's been!) can cause strangers to burst into song.
By the fall of '98, "One Week" was a No. 1 hit and was moving millions of units stateside. (That was the age when people happily," Robertson says now. "We're a band that has always seen ourselves as underdogs." In retrospect, "One Week" feels like an artifact of an era when anything could be a hit, however offbeat or goofy, and the record business was rolling in pre-Napster cash.
