Put Barenaked Ladies in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, you cowards

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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........

© The Age