The Curious Meaning of ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’

By Oliver Tearle

The 1990s witnessed a short-lived outbreak of bands going ‘mmm’ at us. In 1997, long-haired warblers Hanson gave us their gibberish classic ‘Mmmbop’, the same year that the American soul band Home Cookin’ released their debut album titled Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, complete with an album cover showing a woman in a rather revealing polka-dot dress bending over in front of an oven while giving the unassuming viewer a full-on shot of her backside. Their follow-up album (also their last) was called, fittingly, Pink in the Middle.

Home Cookin’s debut is not to be confused with the Crash Test Dummies’ song from 1993. ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ gives us 33% more Ms than the Las Vegas soulsters would four years later: four words, comprising one letter repeated twelve times. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm. The title seems to pre-empt the meditative noise many listeners are prompted to make when they first hear this strange song.

But what kind of song? One about abuse? About not fitting in? Or a dig at fundamentalist Christians? The very title of the Crash Test Dummies’ best-known song doesn’t give much away.

But all is not as mysterious as it first appears. The song is essentially three little vignettes involving three different children: a boy, a girl, and another boy. And the meaning of the song might be summarised (pithily) as: strict and slightly barmy parenting is probably worse than physical abnormality, and liable to make you even more of an outsider at school.

The first vignette (the boy whose hair went white from the shock of being in a car accident) establishes the idea that accidents are important here, but in a broader sense. The second vignette (the girl who didn’t want to get changed in front of the other girls at school because of the birthmarks on her body) reinforces this: birthmarks are an accident of nature, something the girl has always had, but they don’t mean anything in and of themselves.

Like the boy’s car accident, the girl’s birthmarks just happened. They couldn’t help them; and although the girl is obviously embarrassed about the marks, or worried about other people seeing them and bullying her for them, she herself has (presumably) learned to live with them (well, she literally has lived with them, since she was born).

Then we’re treated to the bridge whereby we’re told that both the boy and the girl are actually grateful for their respective problems, because at least they don’t have it as badly as the boy who is the protagonist of the third and final little vignette.

The parents of this boy are clearly nutcases: strict, controlling people who actively prohibit him from socialising with other children after school, insisting he come straight home instead. It emerges that they’re part of a Christian sect which involves shaking and lurching about in church as part of their religious worship, and this part of the song always reminds me of the sublime Reverend Melchisedech Howler from one of Dickens’s lesser novels, Dombey and Son.

Howler, Dickens tells us, ‘opened a front parlour for the reception of ladies and gentlemen of the Ranting persuasion’, but during their first meeting, the good reverend’s ‘admonitions’ had ‘produced so powerful an effect, that, in their rapturous performance of a sacred jig, which closed the service, the whole flock broke through into a kitchen below, and disabled a mangle belonging to one of the fold.’

So the parents of that hapless boy in the final verse of ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ are clearly movers and shakers, at least in church: the implication is that this boy is the unluckiest of the three children in the song because, whereas the first two children bear physical marks which render them different from their peers, this boy is having psychological and emotional scars inflicted on him by his over-zealous and over-controlling mater and pater.

Brad Roberts, the lead singer of the Crash Test Dummies, has said that the song was inspired by several genuine real-life stories he heard, though the birthmarks were autobiographical (he has just the one though, but that was enough to prompt kids to tease him about it when he was growing up). Specifically, that final verse was written in response to hearing about a girl (not a boy) whose parents were Pentecostal Christians, known for ‘speaking in tongues’ at church.

The song’s video reinforces this idea of a gulf between parents and their children, presenting us with a dumb show involving children acting out the various vignettes from the song (for the first one, they’re even acting on stage in some kind of school play) while the parents look on bemusedly, unsmiling, from the audience.

For the final verse, we leave the school behind for the church, but once again the parents are sitting stony-faced while their offspring reluctantly rises to his feet (at the bidding of the priest) and dutifully shakes while pretending (rather half-heartedly, it must be said) to be in the grip of religious mania.

Visually, this obviously underscores the meaning of the song (according to yours truly, anyway), which is concerned with pushy parents harming their children by indoctrinating them with their own dead-eyed fanaticism over the supernatural.