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Some records are odd because of a single factor, but the Crash Test Dummies’ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, a worldwide hit in 1994, is peculiar for all sorts of reasons.
That hummed chorus and title for starters. Of course, many many songs in human history have had banal onomatopoeic names – La La La, Ooh Wee, Um Um Um Um Um, for example. There have been five separate UK hits with the title Ooh La La alone. But the Crash Test Dummies' song was unusual in that the odd title was juxtaposed with lyrics about unspoken pain and the silence that envelops small communities. The effect was striking, and haunting.
Crash Test Dummies were formed off the beaten track, in Winnipeg, Canada in the mid-1980s, with frontman Brad Roberts emerging as the main songwriter. Roberts’ baritone-verging-on-bass voice was another unusual element.
“I never even intended to be a singer-songwriter,” Roberts told Songfacts in a 2018 interview. “I'm very happy to write songs, but I didn't hear myself singing them because I thought my voice was c*. I sounded like some guy who would be better off in a choir, singing the bass parts in a church somewhere. But I just couldn't get any of the people that I tried to get to be singers for our band to sing the songs the way I heard them in my head, so I ended up becoming the singer myself.”
The Dummies slowly built up a following and signed to BMG in 1991. Their debut album, The Ghosts That Haunt Me, was a significant success in their home country, producing a Top Five single in Superman’s Song, with the band scooping Group Of The Year at the 1992 Juno Awards.
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was released as the lead single for the follow up, 1993’s God Shuffled His Feet. For the song, Roberts dug deep into his own childhood memories.
“It was a composite of stories,” he told the Dutch TV documentary series Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “There’s a story about a guy who was in a boat and he was sailing near Niagara Falls and he got too close and he thought he was going to die and his hair turned from black to white as snow. And I just thought it was really intriguing that something that physical could manifest in that brief a period of time. And so I put it into the song.”
The second verse alights on a girl who didn’t want to change with her school friends because she was embarrassed about her birthmarks. “I have a birthmark at the base of my spine called a ‘giant hairy nevis’ – I looked it up later. I was extremely self-conscious about it as a child and when I went to swimming lessons I was teased for it. And anyway, it always stuck with me that I was this marked man. Once again - this physical manifestation.”
For the final verse, Roberts decided to describe the situation of a child whose strict religious upbringing marked them out as different. “This girl that I knew, her parents were Pentecostal Christians, and they used to take her to church every week and do what they call ‘speaking in tongues,’” Roberts told Songfacts.
“When Pentecostal Christians get together every Sunday, some of them are moved to speak spontaneously. They claim that the spirit has entered their body and what they are saying is simply a transmission of that spirit. It's not themselves speaking anymore, it is the holy word of God speaking through them. And the language that comes out, sometimes it's an ordinary language, but quite often it sounds like gibberish. For my friend, as a little child going to school, she found this terrifying, needless to say, because her parents were the people that ran her life. They seemed to just become different people. It made a big mark on her, emotionally. It was a scarring experience, I would say.”
And, most enigmatically, Roberts as narrator adds nothing to these stories. There is no chorus reflecting on these characters other than ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ hummed twice. The listener is simply left to fill in the gaps… and wonder.
“For many years many people would ask me (dumb voice): ‘So, er what’s the matter? Couldn’t you think of any words for the chorus’,” Roberts said in 2021. “And I’d say ‘oh no no no. Less is more. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm is a way of reflecting on what has been said. So even though the chorus has no words it's a kind of commentary on the verses, which is what a good chorus should do.”
“But having said all that,” he added. “When I wrote the song I couldn’t think of any words for the chorus! And I handed the demo around to the band and said ‘listen the lyrics are all there for the verses, but I don’t know what I’m going to do about the chorus yet. We’ll just have to see. But let’s go with this for now.”
“And they all came back to me and said ‘What – are you crazy? It’s perfect as it is! You don’t want to add words!’ I was like ‘Oh, thank God!’”
So Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm went out as it is, with that gnomic humming as its chorus. Strangely, although they had already broken through in Canada, the single wasn’t a huge hit in their homeland, stalling at Number 14. Instead it started gaining attention south of the border, with its video - which featured a school theatrical production depicting the lyrics - becoming an MTV hit.
“It got big in America, starting from Atlanta, Georgia,” Roberts told Boom 97.3’s Behind The Vinyl podcast in 2020. “Clive Davis, once he saw it was doing well in Georgia, he committed to putting in money and people and time into us and all of a sudden at every gig we were at someone at the record label would show up and be interested and report back to the president. They really put us through the wringer, but it was a good wringer to be put through. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’m very grateful for that.”
Aside from its obvious novelty factor, the song had two other things going for it. The music, with acoustic guitars, piano and in particular those creamy dreamy harmonies after the second and third refrains, was intoxicating, with many making comparisons to REM’s then most-recent album Automatic For The People.
But Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was also adjacent to the then dominant alt-rock sound. Roberts’ voice was a similar shade to Chris Cornell’s or Eddie Vedder’s and the Dummies themselves looked like a scrubbed up grunge band. They looked and sounded familiar, but the single was utterly unique: usually a recipe for success.
The critics certainly seemed to think so. Billboard said that it “marries a worldwise vocal with a textured arrangement that is chock full of aural goodies. Given justice (and promotional tender loving care), this one will soon blossom into the across-the-board smash it should be.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times described it as “a deceptively original work about how kids are often tormented for falling outside the norm.”
The UK was in the early throes of Britpop, but Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was original enough to break through the lowering blinds of musical chauvinism. Terry Staunton in NME described it as “very good indeed… a melodic saunter through the weird Americana of John Irving or Garrison Keillor.” For then-Melody Maker scribe Caitlin Moran it was “delicate... like hope, and half broken like Nick Cave. I had forgotten things could be quite so beautiful”. The only dissenting voice was in Smash Hits for whom it was a “joke record for old people.”
Their loss. When daytime BBC Radio One jumped on it, it was a guaranteed hit and Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm reached Number Two in Spring 1994, stuck behind Prince’s The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. In the US it stalled at Number Four, though it went all the way in Australia, Germany and Belgium, keeping the band busy throughout 1994. They were also recipients of the dubious honour of a Weird Al Jankovic parody later that year when he released his own ‘take’ on the track, Headline News.
With its heavy novelty factor, it was always unlikely that Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm would lead to a glittering career for the Dummies and, indeed, the chart positions dropped away soon afterwards. The follow up single, the TS Eliot-referencing Afternoons And Coffeespoons was only a minor hit in both the US and UK and, after their 1995 cover of XTC’s The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead – which was recorded for the film Dumb And Dumber – their chart record ceased in many territories.
The band, though, continued to make albums, and in the years since have had the usual hiatuses, solo projects and reunions that groups of their standing enjoy. Their most recent resurrection came in 2024/25 when they toured internationally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of God Shuffled His Feet.
To most of the world outside Canada they are regarded as one hit wonders, but few wearers of that musical albatross have produced something as thoughtful, other-worldly and unusual as Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.
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