The five songs Andy Samberg couldn’t live without: “Hot killer track right there”
“It was 20 years ago today,” sang Paul McCartney in the opening line to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Is it hyperbole to equate that monumental, generation-defining 1967 album with the Saturday Night Live sketch ‘Lazy Sunday’ in which Andy Samberg raps about chomping cupcakes and The Chronicles of Narnia? Absolutely. Was it 20 years ago today that it was released? Absolutely not. Although it was in December of 2005, so it’s not that far off to be fair.
In order to appreciate that video properly, and to understand the SNL Digital Shorts that followed over the next five years or so, you have to cast your mind way, way back to a time on earth where although dinosaurs didn’t roam the terrain, viral videos weren’t even particularly a thing; YouTube had only been founded in February of that year and nobody had phones that could play videos anyway.
But nevertheless, someone at SNL (some people say future Step Brothers director Adam McKay) had the foresight to produce very funny, very shareable two-minute videos from the show, and the signing of The Lonely Island, three college friends from Los Angeles who happened to make exactly those kinds of videos proved a masterstroke.
Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer had been uploading comedy videos as far back as 2001, and after taking on a job writing for the 2005 MTV Awards, they were recommended by SNL cast member Jimmy Fallon and brought on as writers, with Samberg becoming a featured player.
Later that year, they began to pitch their videos separately from the usual writer’s room, producing them independently on borrowed cameras. ‘Lazy Sunday’ came about in exactly that way; Samberg and fellow cast member Chris Parnell took equipment and shot over two days around Manhattan, the film being edited by Schaffer at speed before going out on air the following day.
Despite their concerns it wouldn’t land, ‘Lazy Sunday’, a moody gangster rap parody, became an internet sensation, being emailed around the globe and becoming a major driving force behind the astronomic growth of YouTube over the following year. It even revived the fortunes of SNL itself, which many felt had been growing stale after some glory years featuring the likes of Will Ferrell.
Over the next few years, The Lonely Island produced songs and videos that completely took over the internet and made their way into day-to-day conversations around the world. ‘I’m on a Boat’, ‘Jizz in My Pants’, ‘Dick in a Box’ and ‘Like a Boss’ all had hundreds of millions of views and allowed the trio to move into mainstream movies, both individually and as a group.
Samberg turned his success at SNL first into an incredibly underrated stuntman comedy, Hot Rod (which you have to see), and then into a lead role in the network comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine in 2013, which eventually ran for eight seasons and earned him a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor’.
The majority of his work has involved music in some capacity; however, he starred in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping in 2016, and he is married to the American singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom. Lonely Island released their own album Incredibad back in 2009, and Samberg revealed some of his favourite songs to radio station KCRW.
A huge hip-hop fan, as evidenced by many Lonely Island parody songs, he picked the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killa with ‘The Champ’ from 2006, saying, “Hot killer track right there”, plus Jamaican musician Capleton’s reggae hit ‘Jah Jah City’.
Samberg also went with ‘Do What You Gotta Do’ from songstress Roberta Flack’s 1970 album Chapter Two, and mid-2000s indie folk outfit Beirut’s piece ‘My Night With the Prostitute from Marseille’. Rounding things off, the actor chose ‘Ask Me Anything’ by The Strokes from their third album First Impressions of Earth, released in 2005. A varied palate to say the least, which shows up in the variety of genre-blending tracks his outfit has produced over the decades.
Samberg is currently concentrating on producing a few different projects, including comedy follow-up MacGruber 2 and a pet rescue comedy titled Sheltered.
