This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
Few songs are as initially intriguing and perpetually annoying shortly after as “One Week”. The chart position says it all. It rose to #1 on the U.S. Billboard 100 – and it stayed there literally for one week. Still, do you remember the first time you heard the song? I do. Barenaked Ladies outdid REM’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It” and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” by taking a similar route, but doing it in hyperdrive.
The words. It’s all about the words. Lyrically, “One Week” is a magnum opus. A cultural encyclopedia spilling over the edges – and it rhymes (like LeAnn Rimes). If you need to get a pulse of the topics that made headlines in the nineties and you needed it quick, listening to “One Week” will probably do the trick. Makes me wonder how many takes it took to nail it down because every line is rhythmically connected to another – and at light speed.
“Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy.”