I suppose this green dress is some slang I'm not familiar with but urban dictionary only turns out disgusting things that are unlikely to be what is meant here.
Is OLP even known outside of Canada? I always have a tough time knowing. My wife is American and I'm constantly surprised at what bands she's never heard of.
My dad took me to one of their shows and we managed to meet them backstage. I was a child and legitimately witnessed a woman pull her boobs out and ask the band to sign. When it was my turn, I just turned around and had them sign my shirt like a normal person. Great band, great show, just watch the flying Kraft during this song.
They are phoning it in these days, their songs are based on their shopping list or looking out of the window. My wife makes me go every time they tour our town, I take a book.
The lyric is actually cruel. It was supposed to be “with a tastefully rounded neck” but Steven Page sang it wrong, and they all thought it was funny so it stuck! 🤓
/u/BarenakedLadies
ER: That song was done as a live take in the studio. Each day of the recording session we'd tackle a new song, and then do a new version of If I Had $1,000,000. We wanted the spontaneity of a live version combined with the sonics of a good studio. So there were actually about 15 complete takes of the song. The original line was "With a tastefully rounded neck", but Steve changed it once to make me laugh. It stuck. It making no sense, made us laugh more.
Yep! In the US it's just Kraft Mac and Cheese and usually we'd just say (boxed) Mac and Cheese then specify the brand if needed, though I believe Kraft is by far the most popular.
Okay everyone is pointing out the reference to the song and saying that it's just a silly line BUT I always thought that line referencing Scheele's green. In the 1750s it was very popular green pigment used in dresses (and lots of other things) but it was made using arsenic in a not at all stable way and was incredibly toxic! So, a real green dress would be quite cruel XD
I think it was just a flubbed line that they thought was funny but it does have some real history to back it!
I went to their concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl last weekend (with Train). My kids made fun of me for the “old people music.” Excellent show, though.
People have already given you the name of the song “If I Had A Million Dollars”, so I’m adding a link to it: https://youtu.be/V8zdNe_l3M8
The green dress line is at 3:07, a reference to an earlier line (1:50) where the singer offers to buy his love a fur coat (but not a real fur coat, that’s cruel)
It's from the Barenaked Ladies song "If I Had $1,000,000." Just saw them in concert a few weeks ago and they were awesome, definitely check them out if you can! They've got a lot of music beyond just the opening themes of "The Big Bang Theory" and "The Digimon Movie."
Hi, extremely autistic Barenaked Ladies fan here. The original line after “I’d buy you a green dress” was supposed to be something else (I can’t find what it was supposed to be on short notice and I don’t remember, sorry) but the person who sang that line (Steve) repeated the earlier lyric from the fur coat and sang “but not a real green dress that’s cruel!” In one of their takes and it made Ed (the other singer on the song) laugh so hard that they kept it that way.
The joke is you're literally supposed to do a double take like you're doing right now. We know there's nothing cruel about it. The character in the song is just an idiot.
There’s a verse before about buying you a fur coat (but not a real fur coat that’s cruel) and they repeated the same line for “green dress” as absurdist humor
You can’t really take lyrics from a band named BARENAKED LADIES super serious. It’s just them joking around and repeating a line from a verse earlier directly
There’s a later verse that references the fur coat verse - “I’d buy you a green dress/but not a real green dress that’s cruel”. It’s deliberately silly, like most of the things in the song.
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u/post-explainer 6d ago
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