1997 - ...but I get up again

Chumbawamba, ‘Tubthumping’ / Hanson, ‘MMMBop’

There’s a Denis Leary show from around the turn of the millennium (remember when he used to do stand-up?) where, among his usual sparkling observational comedy came a rant about his kids’ music tastes.

So there he goes, pacing up and down the stage, ranting and raving like a poor man’s Bill Hicks, and he starts saying the strange phrase ‘MMMBop’ menacingly, over and over again, possibly while blowing out cigarette smoke although I might be imagining that.

The gag is, he’s saying it over and over again because it’s very repetitive and that breeds annoyance, but he’s doing it so tunelessly that I can’t imagine he’s actually listened to the song even once. If he had just given it a chance…

I don’t know why, but there were these two songs from 1997 which really seemed to wind some people up.

You’ve got the fresh-faced Hanson boys singing about making the most of what you’ve got in ‘MMMBop’.

You’ve also got one of the most ‘northern’ songs ever to make a splash Stateside, in Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ – an ode to solidarity and living in the moment.

Both charming in their own way, both smashing successes – and both the butt of contemporary jokes. There’s a scene in Scrubs where Zach Braff’s internal monologue motivates him to do something by threatening to sing ‘Tubthumping’ in a weird, Cockney accent if he doesn’t do it. And we know how Denis Leary feels about Hanson.

But I ask myself even now, how either of these songs was a fraction as annoying as whatever else was riding high in the charts at the time.

Released in the same calendar year as these songs, you’ve got Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ (actually a banger but I can see it rubbing people the wrong way), Gina G’s ‘Ooh Aah...Just a Little Bit’ (ditto) and several selections from the Spice Girls. (And yes, these all come from the Billboard Hot 100, the USA’s biggest hits of the year). Maybe my definition of what’s annoying differs from others’.

‘MMMBop’ was written by three precocious sods all under the age of 16, and genuinely occurs to me to be a feel-good tune, while ‘Tubthumping’ has an all-time catchy chorus that belies the group’s previous and long history of anarchist punk, squats, squalor and supporting strikes. In fact, the band Chumbawamba got together at around the same time the oldest Hanson brother was born.

Maybe the reason it annoyed people was because the songs didn’t have any surface meaning to latch on to, just choruses of meaningless words or shouted slogans. But in the case of the latter, when you’re talking about a group of punks from northern England, they’re not exactly layering on the subtlety. The song is what it is; drinking, singing and getting back up again – or, in the words of Chumbawamba guitarist Boff Whalley: “[T]he song Tubthumping was written to celebrate the resilience and tenacity of working-class folk who keep fighting when the chips are down”.

Or perhaps the groups were seen as easy targets. On the one hand you’ve got literal children with talent and star appeal, and on the other you’ve got sheer Burnley-bred brute force. I wouldn’t normally have counted on the latter to make it big in the charts, but that’s what makes for such good subject material in pitching the two against each other. And hey, it fills up a few hundred words and gets me back on the writing track which Christmas, New Year and creative block combined to drive me off.

Sometimes in pop music you need the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and that’s what ‘Tubthumping’ provides for me in spades. As for Hanson, their message of positivity was apparently too much for some grumpy sods like Leary to handle, but all the same it is just that: positive. As the 1990s took hold and turbocharged pop culture through 24-hour cable TV, drastic shifts in music tastes and a little thing called the World Wide Web, maybe poor Denis was feeling a bit left behind.

Maybe I’m just being a contrarian here, but to this day I’ve still got time for either one of these songs. In the case of Hanson’s hit it’s indicative of the sliver of pop music that struck a chord with me in a sea of boy bands and boredom. With Chumbawamba it’s the sheer power of a shouty chorus that would always grab my attention during an otherwise uneventful episode of Top of the Pops or MTV countdown.

Consider the rest of their career with all its creative twists and turns – I remember seeing their name in the liner notes of the first Rancid album, released four years before, which absolutely blew my mind. It made it all the more refreshing to see Chumbawamba bothering the charts without drastically switching up their sound. Not that I’d got into my punk phase yet – that would come later and at the expense of just about any other genre of music – but I admired the northern grit among the glamour of the rest of the charts. I think that’s something my dad gave me.