“First I did the music and then I invited Dieter to sing along, and he came up with some lines which I thought, ‘no Dieter, it’s too complicated, we don’t need that many lyrics’. I had the idea of just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says, “Oh yeah, oh yeah”. So I told him, ‘Why don’t you try just to sing on and on ‘oh yeah’?… Dieter was very angry when I told him this and he said, ‘are you crazy, all the time “Oh yeah”? Are you crazy?! I can’t do this, no no, come on, come on.’ And then he said, ‘some lyrics, like “the moon… beautiful”, is this too much?!’ and I said, ‘no, it’s OK’, and then he did this ‘oh yeah’ and at the end he thought, ‘yeah it’s nice’, he loved it himself also. And also I wanted to install lots of human noises, all kind of phonetic rhythms with my mouth; you hear lots of noises in the background which are done with my mouth.”

— Yello’s Boris Blank on Oh Yeah

This is it.  This is the Ferris Bueller song.  Or maybe it’s the Secret of My Success song.  Or the She’s Out of Control song or the Opportunity Knocks song.  Or the Gran Turismo song.  Or perhaps you know it as the song that plays whenever Duffman makes an appearance on The Simpsons.

The point is, Oh Yeah has been featured in a lot of movies and TV shows.  For a while, whenever a hapless schmoe first spotted an sexy woman in a movie, you knew that the first thing you would hear would be “Oh yeah…”  Despite not being a huge hit when it was first released, it has since been used in so many films that Dieter Meier, the Yello vocalist who initially balked at doing the song, has reportedly made over $175,000,000 just by investing the royalties.  Think about that the next time you’re having to stay late at work for a conference call or you’re told to cut your hours so you don’t get overtime.

The video is just as strange as you would expect it to be.

Enjoy!