YMMV / Barenaked Ladies

• Broken Base: Whether or not Steven Page's departure from the band was a detriment to the rest of the band. They're still filling venues and selling albums, but hardcore fans feel that without Steve, they're just not the same.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The band fired Steven Page due to his drug issues. Page was not fired; he left due to tensions within the band, his own declining mental health and the culmination of it all making it "not fun anymore" to remain. While Page and Ed Robertson hadn't seen eye to eye for a while, he didn't want Page to leave and wrote "You Run Away" to mourn Page's departure.
  • The idea that the band belonged to Steven Page and that Ed Robertson "took over", either as owner, frontman, lead singer, what-have-you. The fact is that he was already all of those things, sharing those roles with Page. In fact, the band exists because Robertson invited Page to perform with him at a competition, so if either was "more" of the group's owner, it was Robertson. It is also not true that Page was the primary lead singer. He did tend to do more lead vocals than Robertson, but many of their singles from the beginning all the way up to Page's departure heavily featured Robertson (Grade Nine, Be My Yoko Ono, If I Had $1000000000, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, One Week, Get in Line, Pinch Me, Falling for the First Time, Another Postcard, Maybe Katie, For You, Testing, 1, 2, 3, Easy) and many of them even downplayed Page, not to mention that in the last three albums recorded during Page's time with them, Robertson did a slim majority of the lead vocals (balanced out with more stepping up to the microphone from Jim Creeggan and Kevin Hearn, the latter of whom has essentially become the new co-frontman in the post-Page era). On top of that, nearly all the albums (with the exception of Maroon) featured Robertson on at least half the songs, but even where Maroon was concerned, he only did lead vocals on two songs, but both were released as singles.
  • Some have attributed Steven Page openly referring to Ed Robertson simply as "my guitar player" during banter on their children's album Snacktime! as evidence that Page's frustrations included seeing the band as "his" and Robertson simply as the guitarist who worked for him. The actual line from Page is "Ancient Chinese city, huh? My guitar player, some hotshot." This is a riff on an old commercial for water softener, in which a the wife of a Chinese laundreymat owner snickers at his invoking an "ancient Chinese secret" with "my husband, some hotshot."
• Covered Up: Their cover of Bruce Cockburn's "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" was the band's first Top 40 hit in Canada and is regarded by many listeners (and Cockburn himself) to be better than the original.
• Fan Nickname: Their 1990 independent demo tape Barenaked Lunch is commonly referred to as The Pink Tape, while their self-titled 1991 tape is referred to as The Yellow Tape.
• First Installment Wins: Gordon tends to be the band's highest-scoring album amongst critics and is also considered by the majority of fans to be their strongest work.
• Genius Bonus: Among many Ed sprinkles around his lyrics, one of the lines in When I Fall is "it's 9.8 straight down".^note 9.8 meters per second per second is the rate of acceleration on a object due to gravity on Earth.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Quite a few songs become awkward after Steven Page's departure after being arrested for drug possession, including "Alcohol" (about substance abuse), "Bank Job" (about getting arrested for a bank robbery), "War on Drugs" (about mental illness) and "Call and Answer," the last of which was actually the last song he ever performed live as a member of the band.
  • "Sell, Sell, Sell", an already politically charged song, seemed to predict The War on Terror a year before 9/11, especially with the line about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
  • From the same album, the first few lines of "Helicopters" sound like they're describing the September 11th attacks. If that weren't eerie enough, Maroon was released on September 12th 2000.
    "This is only half a mile away from the attack
    This is where my life changed in a day, and then it changed back"
    [...]
    "This is where the allies bombed the school, they say by mistake"
  • The line "Try to behave" in "Celebrity".
  • "Pinch Me," which is about feeling of being depressed even when things are going fine, carries a lot more weight once you learn that Steven Page actually suffers from depression.
  • The first thing the singer of "If I Had $1000000" says he would buy is a house. Canada is currently experiencing a housing crisis.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Box Set" has a lyric about the first disc being a greatest hits album, and that "If you are a fan then you know that you've already got 'em." Three years later, Michael Jackson would release his HIStory: Past, Present, and Future -- Book I double album, the first disc of which was a Greatest Hits Album, which many fans complained about because it meant buying songs they already owned just to hear his new studio album.
  • Their debut album Gordon features the songs "Brian Wilson" (a heartfelt tribute to the long-suffering Beach Boy) and "Box Set" (about a washed up pop star making tacky creative moves to both stay relevant and appease dyed-in-the-wool boomer fans and their children). One month later came The Beach Boys' Summer In Paradise, their only album in which Brian Wilson wasn't involved and which was panned for making tacky creative moves to both stay relevant and appease dyed-in-the-wool boomer fans and their children, such as dance-pop production ("Disc six, a dance remix/So I can catch the latest trends!") and piss take raps, both of which had long since gone out of style by the time the actual musical trends of the time were catching on. Not only would this cause the elder band to peter out while the new, younger band would go on to a long and prosperous career, but their biggest hit would be a (much more warmly received) dorky rap song! It's both eerie and kind of meta.
  • "Go Home" ends with a group shout of "Fuck yeah!"
• Memetic Mutation: Neil Cicierega has turned "One Week" into this by featuring it prominently on one of his mash-up albums.
  • ITS BEEN^note The Lyrical Cold Open that starts "One Week", which is known for among other things being a Running Gag on Comedy Bang! Bang!
  • Chickity China, the Chinese chicken.^note One of many memorable lines from said song. It's a parody of a line from "Scenario" by A Tribe Called Quest, specifically from Busta Rhymes's verse.
  • Harrison Ford, Harrison Ford, Harrison Ford, Harrison Ford, Harrison Ford...
• Nightmare Fuel: The collage character on the cover of Stunt has been known to creep out a few kids.
• Paranoia Fuel: "Get in Line," the music video of which features the outrageously paranoid Dale Gribble from King of the Hill.
• Signature Song: In Canada, it's "If I Had $1000000". Internationally, it's "One Week".