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"One Week" is a 1998 hit single by Barenaked Ladies. It is often regarded as the song that propelled the band to superstar status outside Canada. One reason for the song's popularity was the large number of pop culture references worked into the lyrics. It remains the band's biggest hit to date.
The song gained renewed popularity when it was featured in an ad for the Mitsubishi Lancer, with groups of young people in the car seeming to sing along until they could not keep up with the rapid-fire lyrics. It was featured in the third installment of Big Shiny Tunes.
Ed Robertson wrote the ideas for the non-rap 'choruses' with the concept being the structure of a fight where the protagonist knows they are wrong and is just trying to save face. He wanted to come up with a rapping verse for the song but all attempts failed. Bandmate Steven Page suggested he simply improvise the rap as the two commonly did onstage every night. Robertson heeded the advice and set up a video camera. He improvised the song at a slower pace to make rhyming easier and arrived at about four minutes of rap. He sent it to Page who told him not to change a word. Two minutes of the improvising was almost directly compiled (with very little, if any, tweaking) into the verses of the song. As it is improvised, it is not intended to directly have any relation to the plot of the chorus sections. The liner notes from Stunt contain some of the additional lyrics that did not make it into the recorded version.
In recent performances, the band has developed an acoustic, bluegrass version of the song. It is used in a new performance setting they developed in 2003, in which they play acoustically while they stand around and sing into one omni-directional microphone.
Although the song reached the Top 3 of the Billboard Hot 100 on September 22, 1998 and reached #1 on October 6, it peaked at number nine on the Canadian Singles Chart partly because of limited promotion. It also topped the Modern Rock Tracks for five non-consecutive weeks.
Lyrical references
Verse 1
* Aquaman - a DC Comics superhero
* Chalet Suisse - the French name of Swiss Chalet, a Canadian restaurant chain
* Wasabi - a sushi condiment
* LeAnn Rimes - a country music singer
* Bert Kaempfert - a songwriter, one of the top music producers in Germany
* Vanilla - Referring to the milkshake flavor
* Vertigo - the sensation of spinning or whirling that occurs as a result of a disturbance in balance (equilibrium), also the name of the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock classic film
Verse 2
* "Chickity China the Chinese Chicken - Have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'" - A reference to Busta Rhymes' lyrics in A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario". It also refers to a strain of bird flu (H5N1) that saw its first human cases, in Hong Kong, at the time the song was being written.
* The X-Files - a TV series
* dans la maison - the French phrase for "in the house"
* Smoking Man - a character from The X-Files
* Harrison Ford - an actor best known for his roles in the Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies.
* Frantic - 1988 movie starring Harrison Ford
* Sting - a solo musician and current member of the '70s-'80s band The Police
* Tantric - a form of yoga, famously joked about by Sting
* Snickers - a type of chocolate bar whose slogan was "Snickers really satisfies"
* Akira Kurosawa - Japanese movie director, best known for The Seven Samurai
* Sailor Moon - an anime cartoon series
* Anime - A popular style of Japanese cartoons.
Outro
* Birchmount Stadium, home of The Robbie - a stadium in Scarborough, Ontario, that serves as the primary stadium for the Robbie International Soccer Tournament, an annual youth soccer tournament that bills itself as "the world's largest annual charitable youth soccer tournament."
The music video was directed by McG and begins with them singing in a royal court, featuring a singing girl on a wind-up pedestal, similar to a scene from the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. During the interlude they make an escape and sing while driving a lookalike of The General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard (using the numbers 07 instead of 01) and Starsky & Hutch's Ford Gran Torino. The band drives into a suburb, where they perform a concert in front of a trailer, with a female motorcyclist, dressed like Evel Knievel, performing stunts. The video ends with a shot of the cyclist stuck on a tree. The video features Carmit Bachar from the Pussycat Dolls, playing an angel.
"One Week" is in the video game "KR: American Idol Encore" as downloadable content. It is also on the game Karaoke Revolution as a playable song.
"One Week" is on the North American soundtrack of Digimon: The Movie, and appears in the first American Pie and Cruel Intentions films. Remix versions appear in the films 10 Things I Hate About You and Love, Sex and Eating the Bones.
On television, the song appears in episode 3.10 of the television series Veronica Mars, entitled "Show Me The Monkey", and Barenaked Ladies performs the song during a "Rock the Vote" for President Bartlet on an episode of The West Wing.
"Weird Al" Yankovic has parodied "One Week". His version, called "Jerry Springer", features lyrics about The Jerry Springer Show. ApologetiX has also parodied this song on their Biblical Graffiti album. Their version is called "One Way", and claims that Jesus Christ is the one way to Heaven. In January 2009, collegehumor released their own parody of the song.
In a specially-themed week on Kids' WB! in which the Barenaked Ladies appeared, the song was performed with themed lyrics in a promotional spot advertising it.
The lyrics were used in a November 4, 2008 Showcase on The Price Is Right, when they were quickly read by announcer Rich Fields in presenting prizes.
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