The Alternative Number Ones: Crash Test Dummies’ “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

OK: What the fuck was this? The band name sounded like a joke. The song title sounded like a joke, too. The song itself didn't sound like a joke, but it was funnier than the two things that did sound like jokes. Here, we had this guy singing weird little stories about kids who feel different and rejected, and he delivered those stories like he was a damn Tuvan throat-singer -- just rumbling those little anecdotes out as if he was actively trying to cause an earthquake. I have a deep voice, too, but I couldn't get this guy's tone right even when I exaggerated it to the most extreme degree. I tried, believe me. I did that shit all the time. I'd be out on the playground like "Thaaiiiy! Frreeouund! Barthmarks awl owver huh bud-dayyyyy!"

This song was weird as fuck, and it was huge. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" -- I am about to get so sick of typing that title -- wasn't just an alt-rock radio staple. It was big everywhere. You couldn't escape it. The top-40 station would transition straight from Ace Of Base into "Whhhaaaaance thar was this kyiiiiid..." like it was the most natural thing that every happened. I made fun of "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" constantly, and so did every other kid I knew. But I didn't give the song that much thought because lots of strange, inexplicable songs blew up in that early-'90s moment. Over time, I learned the context behind most of those weird, inexplicable songs, to the point where they didn't seem so weird and inexplicable anymore. Not this one, though.

The Crash Test Dummies, unlike most of the other acts that we're covering in this column these days, have never been canonized as alt-rock trailblazers, and they disappeared from American radio about as quickly as they arrived. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" never became a nostalgic touchpoint -- not for me, anyway -- so I never really had cause to reconsider it. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" was simply a thing that happened. Until getting into the research for this column, I never even thought about the context required to make a song like "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" into a mini-cultural phenomenon. Now, that context can be revealed. The context is: They're Canadian. That somehow explains a lot, doesn't it?

The Crash Test Dummies aren't just Canadian. They're from Winnipeg, which somehow feels more Canadian than most other Canadian cities. I've never been there, and I don't really have any particular reason for feeling that way. It's just a vibe I get. Winnipeg, like Calgary or Edmonton, seems so quintessentially Canadian that it's almost exotic. Does this make any sense? Do people in Canada feel the same way about, say, Colorado Springs? But the "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" phenomenon makes more sense when you learn that the Crash Test Dummies were huge in Canada before that song came out.

They have so many bands like that up there. They also have Canadian acts that are huge everywhere, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I really like Reacher, the show about the big motherfucker who goes from town to town and solves mysteries while beating people up. That's some great dad TV, and part of the charm is that it's shot entirely in places that feel slightly cheaper and more uncanny than the American locales where the story is supposed to take place. It's clearly shot in Canada; you can practically smell the maple syrup emanating from your TV. Canada has bands like that, too -- the ones who feel like cheaper home-grown versions of things that we already have in the US. The comparisons never quite line up neatly, but you can tell what they were going for. The Barenaked Ladies are like that, too. We'll have to get to them in this column eventually, unless I get ahold of a time machine and go back to prevent that from happening.

Wow, I'm talking a lot of shit here. I don't even mean to do it. Canada is great! I've been there a handful of times, and I fucking love it! It's way behind socialized medicine and poutine on the list of things I like about Canada, but one of the cool things about the country is the slight cultural disconnect -- the sense that things up there are just a couple of degrees off in ways that are hard to quantify. Canadian broadcasters, for instance, legally have to devote a certain percentage of airtime to stuff that was actually made in Canada, so that demand has led to some things getting chances to succeed that they might've never found otherwise. I have to imagine that those laws played some role in the rise of the Crash Test Dummies.

Lead Dummy Brad Roberts is a Winnipeg native who started making music while he was studying English lit and philosophy at the University Of Winnipeg in the mid-'80s. As a student, he started up a cover band that he called Bad Brad Roberts And The St. James Rhythm Pigs, which is a pretty funny name. They eventually changed the name to the Crash Test Dummies, which is also a funny name. In the '80s and '90s, people were fascinated with the jointed-mannequin things that car companies would use to test safety features. There were public service announcements where talking dummies would remind you to wear a seatbelt, and those dummies eventually became a line of toys and a Nintendo game. Those lovable knockaround guys were just part of popular culture. Someone was always going to name a band after them.

The Crash Test Dummies' band name is one of those things that started out as a joke and then stuck, even when the music became serious, or at least when it started to sound serious. If you were to tell me that the Crash Test Dummies were a high-concept joke that kept going for years, I would believe you. That's something I could imagine Canadians doing. But maybe that whole jokey thing was just armor. Brad Roberts has said that he never thought of himself as a singer because his ultra-low voice is so strange and singular. But that singular quality was what made the band stand out, and Roberts eventually embraced it.

When Roberts first started the St. James Rhythm Pigs, one of the other members was Curtis Riddell, owner of a local club called the Blue Note Café. For a while, the band had no set lineup; it was mostly just a revolving group of people who worked at the club. Roberts' brother Dan would play bass for them, too. The Crash Test Dummies didn't have a firm lineup until after their first album was already out. They recorded a demo, and Margo Timmins, fellow Canadian and Cowboy Junkies leader, heard it and loved it. Timmins told Rolling Stone that the Crash Test Dummies' demo was one of her favorite albums of 1989. I don't know if that helped the Dummies get a record deal, but it couldn't have hurt. (The Cowboy Junkies' highest-charting Modern Rock hit, their version of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," peaked at #5 in 1989. It's a 9.)

The Crash Test Dummies signed to BMG, and they recorded their 1991 debut album The Ghosts That Haunt Me with Los Lobos' Steve Berlin on production. (Los Lobos' highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1990's "Down On The Riverbed," peaked at #16.) So the Crash Test Dummies were really racking up co-signs from all the circa-1990 college-rock all-stars. The band's debut single is a truly curious number called "Superman's Song." On that one, Brad Roberts sings about Superman as if he's a real guy: "Superman never made any money/ Savin' the world from Solomon Grundy/ And sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him." I get what Roberts is doing on that song -- depicting Superman as a force for pure altruistic good who deserves to be valorized as a left-wing role model -- but the whole thing is so silly. The silliness probably helped the song catch on.

Some of that silliness is in the "Superman's Song" video, in which a bunch of aging DC Comics superheroes stoically attend Superman's funeral. (This was a year before DC ran its big Death Of Superman storyline.) But some of the silliness is Roberts' voice, too. When a singer's voice is deep enough, some of us might project weary authority and gravity on it. That's part of the magic of Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen -- that leathery voice-of-god shit. When you hear a voice like that over soft strings and weepy pianos, you expect poetry. Brad Roberts might've been a literal philosophy student, but he's out here singing about cartoons. Did the song sell itself on that contrast? Or did people actually hear hard-earned perspective in "Superman's Song"? I would love to know. In any case, "Superman's Song" was a fucking smash in Canada, going all the way to #4 on the pop charts. It also reached #56 on the Hot 100, even though I never heard it. My best guess is that "Superman's Song" charted in the US because of airplay in almost-Canada places like Minneapolis and Buffalo.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me reached #2 on the Canadian album charts and sold 400,000 copies -- good enough for quadruple platinum up there. The Crash Test Dummies won the Juno for Group Of The Year, breaking Blue Rodeo's three-year streak while also beating the Tragically Hip, Rush, and Glass Tiger. (It's so tempting to just waste my afternoon in a Juno Awards Wikipedia hole.) They might not have had much profile in America, but the Crash Test Dummies were instant Canadian sensations. For their second album, 1993's God Shuffled His Feet, the band went to work with producer Jerry Harrison, a legendary figure who's already been in this column as a member of Talking Heads. (Harrison's only Modern Rock hit as a solo artist, 1990's surprisingly beer-commercial-ready "Flying Under Radar," peaked at #13.)

Allow me to confess something: I don't know whether every Crash Test Dummies song is an allegory or a parable of some sort. I've never done the deep dive, and I can't imagine that I ever will. Before researching this column, I'd never heard God Shuffled His Feet in full. I have now listened once, and I found the whole thing to be pretty boring and irritating, so I wasn't going to start analyzing lyrics. In any case, Brad Roberts has explanations for all the stories he tells in "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" -- those kids who feel ostracized for one reason or another -- and he lays them all out in great detail in a 2018 Songfacts interview.

The first kid in Roberts' lyrics gets into a car crash and then comes back to school with hair that's gone all bright white; Roberts was fascinated with car crashes and with the way people's hair sometimes changes colors after traumatic events. The second kid has birthmarks all over her body; Roberts has a birthmark on his back that other kids made fun of. The third kid has weird Pentecostal parents, and Roberts knew a kid with weird Pentecostal parents. Don't most kids have at least one friend with weird Pentecostal parents? I feel like that's a pretty common thing. Maybe it's different in Winnipeg.

In any case, these kids all feel weird about being different. Maybe Brad Roberts sings their stories with a sense of tragic weight, or maybe I'm just projecting that quality on him because of the way his voice sounds. Over thin acoustic guitar strums and tinkly pianos, Roberts growl-moans about these sympathy-object children, and all of his stories come to weird little shrugging conclusions. The girl with the birthmarks, for instance, "couldn't quite explain it, they'd always just beeeen thaaaarrrr." The point, I guess, is that kids are cruel. There's no solidarity among the outcasts; the boy with the white hair and the girl with the birthmarks take comfort in the fact that the kid with the Pentecostal parents is worse-off than them. As the title implies, the chorus has no words, it's just Roberts humming in a way that might cause ripples in puddles like the T-Rex footsteps in Jurassic Park.

The music is pretty. Honestly, I'd probably like the Crash Test Dummies a lot better if they were an instrumental post-rock outfit or something. The best part of "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" is the big crescendo, where the strings surge up and the drums come booming in and Roberts switches from humming to going "ahhhh ahhhh ahhhh." But all that fussy dramatic grandeur is there to support stories that don't really go anywhere. You'd hear "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" on the radio, and Roberts' voice would suck you in, and then the limp story endings would hit like punchlines. It sounded like someone going for profundity and coming up with something ridiculous, or maybe like someone making fun of the idea of profundity. To this day, I'm honestly not sure which one it was. I'm not sure Roberts knows, either. It doesn't really matter. Whatever the intentions, "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" is history's most painfully sincere novelty hit.

The video didn't help. Dale Heslip, who also directed the "Superman's Song" clip, shoots the whole thing in the mythic soft-focus style so common in '90s rock videos, and he has a bunch of little kids acting out the lyrical stories in school-play fashion. Again, it's hard to tell whether this is a dramatic flourish or another sign that this whole thing is a sly joke. The band is in there, too, and Brad Roberts looks way prettier and more angelic than someone with that voice should be expected to look. When he does the title-humming thing, he duckfaces really hard. It's bad. I don't like looking at it. For a little while, it was all over MTV -- not right away, but eventually.

"Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" was never a smash in Canada. As the lead single from God Shuffled His Feet the song never got any higher than #14 on the Canadian charts. In his Songfacts interview, Brad Roberts blames the whole thing on a national crabs-in-a-bucket mentality: "Canada, being the country that loves to eat its own, decided we weren't going to have any success at all." The Winnipeg Free Press ran a negative review of God Shuffled His Feet, and Roberts thinks it caused Canadian radio to stop playing the band and MuchMusic to keep the "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" video in low rotation. Can that possibly be true? Do Canadian institutions really work to shut down their success stories? From the outside, it sure doesn't look that way. In any case, one Atlanta radio station started playing the song, and people thought it was unusual and intriguing. The albums started to move some copies in the area, so the label got behind the single and started pushing it everywhere.

The song took off in a huge way. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" made a certain kind of sense on alt-rock radio, a format that prized weird novelty. The swells and tinkles fit in with what you'd hear from a lot of R.E.M.-inspired bands, and the booming-baritone thing was cool because of Eddie Vedder. But "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" ultimately transcended modern rock radio and became a full-on pop hit. On the Hot 100, the song climbed to #4 -- higher than any of the singles that Jerry Harrison ever made with the Talking Heads. "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" wasn't just big in America, either. It reached #2 in the UK and #1 in Germany, Australia, and all through Scandinavia. In the US, "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" went gold, and God Shuffled His Feet went double platinum. The Crash Test Dummies followed their breakout smash with the uptempo jangle-gargle "Afternoons & Coffeespoons," which made it to #13 on the Modern Rock chart and #66 on the Hot 100. It was the band's last time on either chart.

As far as America was concerned, that was pretty much it for the Crash Test Dummies. They go down in history as definitive one-hit wonders. Things are different in Canada, which remained in love with the Crash Test Dummies for a long time. Other God Shuffled His Feet singles charted way higher than "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" up there. In 1994, the band covered XTC's "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead," a song that's already been in this column, for the Dumb & Dumber soundtrack. Keyboardist Ellen Reid sang lead on that one. The band got Jeff Daniels to be in the video. Nobody else paid any attention, but that was a #4 pop hit in Canada.

For a while, the Crash Test Dummies kept racking up Canadian hits. In 1996, their song "He Liked To Feel It" reached #2, making it their biggest hit in their homeland. In 1999, they made it to #5 with "Keep A Lid On Things," a song so silly that I truly can't believe it's real. Seriously, listen to this. What is happening there? I love it. I mean, I don't really love it. I mostly think it sucks. But I love the idea that there's a place in the world -- a place next to where I live -- where this song could be a smash.

In 2000, Brad Roberts got into a bad car accident, and his hair did not turn bright white. Soon afterward, the Crash Test Dummies parted ways with BMG, and Roberts started releasing their music on his own label. They made a few more albums, but those albums weren't hits, even in Canada. Various Dummies made solo records. The band went inactive and then reunited in a few times. In 2018, the classic lineup got back together for a God Shuffled His Feet 25th-anniversary tour. They're still out there, still playing occasional shows. Good for them. Someone, somewhere, still wants to hear "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm." I can't relate, but I'm glad those people can get what they want.

GRADE: 4/10

BONUS BEATS: "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" with his 1994 song "Headline News." Instead of singing about those misfit kids, Yankovic sang about the people whose stories were inescapable in that moment: Tonya Harding, John Wayne Bobbitt, the kid who got caned after doing graffiti in Singapore. The video is a shot-for-shot take on the one for "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," with wigs and everything. It's beautiful. Nobody does it like this guy. I must insist that you watch the video, which is right here:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: For some reason, the 2018 film Tag ends with star Jeremy Renner covering "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" during the end credits, with his castmates singing backup. I haven't seen that movie, so maybe it's a reference to something that happens in there? Here it is, anyway:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: These days, Kid Cudi is probably pop music's most reliable source of deep-baritone hums. He's also a huge Crash Test Dummies fan, and he got the band to perform, alongside Busta Rhymes and Clipse, at his 40th-birthday part. Last year, Cudi rapped over a sample of "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," on a song that I regret to report is called "Crash Test Cudi." Here it is:

(Kid Cudi doesn't have any Modern Rock hits as a lead artist, but he guested on Dan Black's "Symphonies," which peaked at #34 in 2010.)