OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth article and the interesting thing about this old chestnut from my memories is that the refrain (there are some other lyrics, mind you) consists of two words and those two words reached meme status to seemingly express a comically orgiastic bass-voiced reaction to something or someone. Indeed, it's been used in commercials such as the one above and TV shows such as "The Simpsons". And of course, the reaction to the reaction has been something like "Get that cold shower now!".
To be honest, I don't quite remember when I did first hear Yello's "Oh Yeah" but apparently the song got its big boost when it was used in a key scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), and that was actually for a Ferrari...not for any gorgeous man or woman. It kinda reminds me of Rodgers and Hart's "Lover" which had me thinking that it had always been used for a romance when it was actually first used as a comical song of affinity for a horse in an old movie musical.
Regardless of the target of love, "Oh Yeah" became a Hollywood go-to musical cue for falling hard for that particular noun in the 1980s. And yet, I didn't find out much about this Swiss electronic music band for several years after the release of this July 1985 (US) single and its video. For one thing, I hadn't realized that there were more lyrics aside from the drawn-out OH YEAHs which illustrated that the love being shown here was actually for natural phenomena. Plus, I didn't think that the two fellows could look any more goofier and any more cooler at the same time in the video.
Pretty interesting background for these Yello fellows once I looked them up. Dieter Meier is the industrialist millionaire and lyricist while Boris Blank is the instrumentalist and sound smith. The above goes into how "Oh Yeah" had its origins. And Yello is still at it.
So, what was being released in July 1985 in Japan? Well, the three that I have here are on the Showa Pops list although according to what I've written about them in their individual articles, all three of them came out in April, so perhaps there were re-releases? Anyhow, "Oh Yeah" isn't the first song of its titular nature to come onto the blog although there are differences in terms of the number of exclamation marks. Ask Princess Princess and Kazumasa Oda（小田和正）.
Minako Honda -- Satsui no Vacance (殺意のバカンス)
Hiroshi Itsuki -- Soshite....Meguri Ai （そして。。。めぐり逢い）
Koji Kikkawa -- Nikumaresouna NEW Face（にくまれそうなNEWフェイス）
Hello, Brian.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I remember that "Oh Yeah" was also used on that Fox movie, and that time, it was actually used to show something a little more salacious. I remember "Parker Lewis Can't Lose"; it's been a while.
That's the strange thing about my experience with "Oh Yeah". I never heard it on the radio. It has always been on television so it's been as much of a visual experience as it has been an audio one.
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