Yakety Yak CD Single (Complete CD Download)
Pop music is transient and fleeting. For every timeless supersmash that stands the test of time forever, there are dozens or even hundreds of other songs that completely vanish from the face of the earth.
But the pop music of 1991 seemed to be exceptionally fleeting. While the number one song of 1991, Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” has stuck around, and it will stick around for as long as adult contemporary playlists and radio stations exist (and sadly they still do exist), many others fell into the abyss.
Just look at the number two song of 1991: Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up.’ Color Me Badd were nominated for two Grammys that year! And that album sold 3 million copies, which is half as much as Taylor Swift’s latest album! But five years later they were forgotten. Their lasting contribution to society is serving as a major inspiration for “Dick In A Box” and I’m sure they’re all really proud of that.
Sadly, that’s a success story compared to a lot of other artists from 1991. Does anyone out there remember Timmy T? He had the fifth most popular song of the year. How about the hilariously similarly named Stevie B? His hit clocked it at number 12. Karyn White. Natural Selection. Tara Kemp. Tracie Spencer. Who the hell are these people? Where the hell did they go?
But even that charity single fared better than the song I’m sharing tonight: “Yakety Yak (Take It Back).” A rework of “Yakety Yak” that focuses on recycling. It didn’t chart, and from what I can tell it aired a handful of times on TV before it (ironically) was thrown in the trash bin.
The celebrity line-up on the track is impressive to an extent, but also screams “this is the best we could do in 1991.” Ozzy is here, and I suppose that’s a “get” as he was still a big name at the time (and maybe this song helped him fulfill some legally mandated community service requirements). Another pretty big name for the time is Bette Midler. This was released around the same time as “From A Distance,” so she was never bigger. Although Midler was a prominent environmentalist at the time, so I assume it was easy to finagle her into this. This was also the same year that she played Mother Earth in the Earth Day TV Special.
MC Skat Kat is here as well, because it’s 1991 and the world was still thinking “we need hip-hop’s answer to Roger Rabbit!”
As for the rest of the line-up, it’s a lot of legends past their prime (B. B. King, Stevie Wonder, Barry White), and former pop stars who are just on the cusp of irrelevance (Pat Benatar, Lita Ford, Kenny Loggins).
The song is terrible, by the way. Did I mention that? Like a lot of all-star charity singles, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. No one has any room to breathe. It’s flat and lifeless. To use some parlance of the time, the song has the personality and energy of Al Gore on quaaludes. It also doesn’t help that the original “Yakety Yak” is a terrible song. And it’s a terrible song about a shithead kid not wanting to do his chores. It’s an ode to apathy. Rewriting it to be a song about pro-active environmentalism is a stretch.
So why the hell am I sharing the entire CD single if the song is so bad?
Well firstly, it’s out-of-print and not even on Spotify. It’s truly rare. It’s getting really hard to find obscure songs these days! Finding something that fell through the cracks in the digital streaming era kind of felt special, even if it is really stupid.
Secondly, I think the single is an interesting object. This was a commercial product. It was sold in stores for regular people to buy and listen to. But it feels more like a promotional item for radio stations. It starts like a normal CD single. Track one is the radio version, while track two is a seven-minute(!!!) extended remix. But then there are four different versions that are just 30 second snippets, almost like commercial bumper music. And those are followed by literal commercials, 19 audio PSAs featuring the celebrities from the song, telling you to do things like write to your local city hall to help start a city recycling program, or to take your old newspapers to recycling centers. And each one ends with B.B. King saying “buy stuff that’s recycled, recycle the stuff that you buy, take it back!” And that little audio snippet sounds familiar, maybe it was used for TV PSAs too?
So there’s that. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Ozzy Osbourne talk about how much energy you save by recycling newspapers, I got you covered.
But I also wanted to write about this because it’s oddly connected to how I’ve been feeling lately. Which is bad, by the way. I’ve been feeling bad. Do you have to ask why? If you have to ask why, maybe turn on the news?
When I discovered the music video for this on YouTube, I shared it on a Discord channel that I’m a member of. I thought it would get a laugh, MC Skat Kat is there after all. But one of the first comments was along the lines of “ah yes, from before we knew recycling was a scam.”
Now, that’s not entirely true. Glass, paper, and aluminum recycling programs work. Be sure to separate those when you take out your trash. Recycling those things not only cuts down on pollution, but it reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions (ever so slightly).
But plastic recycling? Yeah, that’s a complete and total scam. Most of the plastic you that goes to recycling bins just ends up in landfills, or in the ocean. And more to the point, the entire idea that individual people have any power at all to impact the environment in any positive way at all? That’s was just a fucking lie.
And it was rammed down our collective throats in the early 90s, too! “You can make a difference! If we all work together, we can save the planet!” was the hot shit social cause for a bit. I mean, there wasn’t a lot else going on, I guess – and America wasn’t ready to talk about homophobia or racism in any real way, so we all just felt more comfortable talking about six pack rings killing fish. But it was a cause that went nowhere, because the reality is that there’s nothing that individuals can do that can “save” the environment. The amount of pollution created by individual people pales in comparison to the ways that corporations work to destroy the planet.
All the environmentalist entertainment of the 90s was a joke. Thanks for telling me how much energy I save by recycling my newspapers, Ozzy, but it didn’t matter. I know you meant well, Captain Planet, by telling me to cut up six packs rings before I threw them away, but it didn’t do a heck of a lot of good; the oceanic ecosystem is still on the verge of a complete and irreversible collapse. Bette, I really liked your performance as Mother Earth in the 1990s Earth Day Special, but I don’t think anyone learned anything from it that resulted in the air being cleaner. Ferngully, you weren’t only a box office failure, but you failed to stop the deforestation of the rain forest as well.
While celebrities and cartoon characters were trying to get suburban moms to take their plastic water bottles to the recycling center, the plastic industry was spending millions to lie about the effectiveness of recycling so they wouldn’t have to spend the billions that was needed to actually recycle said plastic water bottles. So now the oceans are full of plastic, our air is toxic, and the earth is warming up at an incredibly rapid rate. There’s not a goddamn thing any single person can do about it, either, because as long as *gesticulates wildly at everything wrong with the world and politics* is happening, the people who are truly responsible for the destruction of our planet are going to continue destroying it, because it helps their bottom line.
I just wish someone could be held accountable for any of this. I bet that he Warner Bros. executive who signed off on this disaster of a charity single suffered more consequences for that than any oil executive has ever suffered for destroying the planet. The people who created MC Skat Kat faced bigger repercussions for that than anyone did for pushing the lie of plastic recycling. And, yeah, MC Skat Kat sucks, but that’s really fucked up.
And it’s been the same shit ever since. No accountability for the Iraq War(s). No accountability for the subprime mortgage crisis. No accountability for AI frauds, crypto scams, racist fearmongering, police brutality, sexual assault, literal murder, the list goes on and on.
Sigh.
And yes, this was where my mind went when listening to this shitty cover of “Yakety Yak.”
No, I’m not doing very good at the moment.
Yes, I am in therapy.
No, I still won’t forgive the creators of MC Skat Kat for what they did. Just because oil companies haven’t been held accountable for their evils, doesn’t mean that those motherfuckers get a pass.