U Can't Touch This

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"U Can't Touch This"
"U Can't Touch This" cover
Single by MC Hammer
from the album Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em
Released June 1990
Format CD single
Vinyl record
Cassette
Recorded 1990
Genre Pop Rap
Length 4:17
Label Capitol Records (US)
Writer MC Hammer, Rick James
Producer MC Hammer
MC Hammer singles chronology
"They Put Me in the Mix"
(1989)
"U Can't Touch This"
(1990)
"Have You Seen Her"
(1990)

"U Can't Touch This" was MC Hammer's most widely-known single, propelling sales of its album, Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, which for a time was the best-selling rap album of all time, selling over ten million copies.[1] The song heavily samples Rick James's "Super Freak"; James is accordingly credited as a co-author. The lyrics, written entirely by Hammer, are in the boastful self-promotional style common in old school hip hop. They describe the rapper as having "toured around the world, from London to the Bay" and as being "magic on the mic," which Hammer says combines with Rick James' "beat that you can't touch" to create the perfect rap song. While some critics, especially in the gangsta rap community, disliked the song, enough people approved of it to secure the Grammys for Best R&B Song and Best Rap Solo Performance, a brand new category at the time, for MC Hammer. The song also did well on the charts, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the chart in Australia. It also reached #3 on the UK singles chart.

This song was parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic as "I Can't Watch This," and can be found on his album Off the Deep End. It was also parodied in the Family Guy episode called "E. Peterbus Unum" where Peter sings a parody called "Can't Touch Me". Hammer also appeared in the episode when Peter sings how he can't sue him for singing it.

Contents

  • Anti-bacterial hand cream Purell.
  • Insurance firm Nationwide in a commercial. Hammer himself also starred in the commercial, which spoofs his bankruptcy.
  • Connecticut Light and Power's television and radio ads, where "U can't touch this!" is used whenever power lines are mentioned (visually or verbally).
  • Diet Pepsi/Pepsi One commercial, "I wanna kick it old school."
  • Toyota commercial.
  • Target Corporation commercials in the late '90's. "Target Time" was used in place of "Hammer Time".
  • Hand sanitizer commercial for Lysol (U Can't Touch Germs!)
  • Lay's chips
  • Acura 3.2 TL commercial
  • Citibank TV commercial for credit account. Aired in Norway 2006
  • Renault French TV commercial for Renault engines
  • Hallmark Father's Day card commercial. Hammer was voiced by a father.
  • Nissan TV Commercial for Nissan Serena, Presage, Elgrand and Lafesta Highway Star Minivans. Aired in Japan 2007

  • The Cosby Show
  • The King of Queens In a flashback episode, Spence sings "Na, na na na, Doug and Car-rie! Can't touch them!", quieting down when he sees the disgust on his friend's faces.
  • Amen as a preacher (like he was in his own movie "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em")
  • Martin guest stared on Martin interested in a business venture (restaurant)
  • The Simpsons, as "I Didn't Do It". When Bart is in the studio recording this single (in the episode "Bart Gets Famous"), Hammer is outside the booth. In the Treehouse of Horror IX segment "Hell Toupee", Homer (with executed criminal Snake's hair transplanted to his scalp) says "It's hammer time" when getting ready to bludgeon Bart. In the Behind the Laughter episode, Homer buys MC Hammer's house, knocks off an M and beats the A into a O on the gates creating "Homer Time". Bart then comments he found some of Hammer's pants and while wearing them dances Hammer's famous moves. In "A Star Is Burns", the Rappin' Rabbi's sing: "Don't eat pork, not even with a fork. Can't touch this!"
  • Sesame Street, parody You Shouldn't Touch This was used to warn children about touching things like electric fences and raw sewage.
  • Family Matters, At the beginning of the episode "I should have done something" Steve Urkel is seen listening to this song on a walkman. Before the opening credits, he holds a pair of Johnny gil concert tickets and flashes them at Laura(who he schemed to date with the tickets), and pulls away saying "You can't touch this"
  • Scrubs
  • Fresh Prince of Bel Air
  • Perfect Strangers, performed by the main characters
  • Greg the Bunny, the song is heard throughout the episode "The Singing Mailman", Dottie claimed that in college she made a tape of her stripping to "U Can't Touch This" for a dental school student she was dating, who was an M.C. Hammer fan.
  • In Living Color, Tommy Davidson portrays M.C. Hammer in a parody titled "Can't Touch This"
  • Bo' Selecta!, Avid Merrion performs a dance routine in front of Atomic Kitten
  • Dancing With The Stars; Emmitt Smith and Cheryl Burke danced to this song in the Finale of the Third Season.
  • Family Guy: "E. Peterbus Unum"; Peter Griffin becomes president of "Petoria", and sings "Can't Touch Me!"; a song talking about how he has diplomatic immunity and abuses it to his own ends. He also mentions MC Hammer when he sings "I got diplomatic immunity/so Hammer, you can't sue".
  • South Park: "Simpsons Already Did It"; When Cartman, Stan Marsh, and Kyle Broflovski are searching the morgue, they tell Tweek to say "Hammer Time!" if someone is coming. When Tweek tells them he does not think he can remember that, they tell him to sing the song "U Can't Touch This," which he ends up doing when two morticians are coming.
  • My Wife And Kids
  • Beavis and Butt-head: The pair watch Rick James' "Superfreak", the song that "U Can't Touch This" is sampled from, and they start quoting from the song. Butt-head changes the channel stating that he "can't watch this".

  • Video game of the movie Shark Tale
  • Performed live at the MTV Video Music Awards 2005
  • In the video game Gears of War on Xbox360, there is an achievement called 'Don't Hurt 'Em', a reference to MC Hammer's record. The weapon used for this achievement is the Hammer of Dawn.
  • Rewritten version used in the Tumble Time Tigger plush toy
  • In World of Warcraft as Orc Dance (male).
  • In Guild Wars Nightfall as a Paragon skill.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic made a parody of the song called "I Can't Watch This".
  • A Whac-A-Mole arcade game released in Japan.[citation needed]
  • Some Cambridge United fans sign the tune and then replace 'U Can't Touch This' with star striker's name: 'Lee Boylan'.
  • A skill in the PC MMORPG Video Game Guild Wars.
  • Gröûp X Made a parody of the song called "Down't Touch That (I Demand)".

The word "hammertime" from the song ("Stop! (one-beat pause) Hammertime!") has appeared in numerous other contexts:

  • In the Half-Life mod, The Specialists there is a level called "Hammertime". The song plays from a radio in the level.
  • In the MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing, one of the adventures involves a man coming up to the player carrying a hammer and saying, "Hey, man, it's hammer time!"
  • In the video game Super Mario RPG, the Hammer Bros. boss uses an attack called Hammer Time.
  • In the video game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion The Frozen Throne, Dwarf Griffon Riders, an Alliance unit, speak the phrase "It's hammer time!" upon completion of their training at the Gryphon Aviary building. The Paladin will also say this if clicked on repeatedly, or when summoned. Muradin Bronzebeard will occasionally say this when given an order to attack.
  • In the video game Beyond Good and Evil, attacking a foe may prompt your partner to cry "Hammertime!"
  • In the MMORPG "Guild Wars", there is an NPC called "Mac Snowhammer" who says "Snowhammer, don't hurt 'em!", "You can't dodge this!", and "Stop! Snowhammer time!" And there is a skill called "Can't touch this!"
  • In the 1990 arcade game "Hammering Harry", a sample of MC Hammer saying "Hammertime!" proceeds each level.
  • In the Shark Tale video game you have to dance in a dance-mat style to 'U cant touch this' to complete one of the levels.

  • "Hammertime" often appears as a humorous caption to magazine articles.

  • In the 3D animation Shark Tale, when at a meeting with the sharks, the main character, Oscar, sings a line of U Can't Touch This, and finishes by saying "Stop! Oscar-time!".
  • Eurotrip

  • "It's Hammer Time" is the title of a Power Rangers: Operation Overdrive episode.
  • In the New Zealand Film "Sione's Wedding" the line "Stop!...Bolo Time" was used, followed by a little dance.
  • In an episode of Kenan and Kel, Kenan says to Kel "C'mon, It's Hammer time!" and Kel replies "Kenan? Kenan? It hasn't been Hammertime for five years!"
  • In the Seinfeld episode "The Baby Shower", Kramer convinces Jerry to steal cable TV by saying "Man, it's the nineties... It's Hammer time!"
  • In the South Park episode "Simpsons Already Did It", while the boys search the lab for their "sea-men", Tweek guards the door with the code word being "Hammertime". However he forgets this, and starts singing the song to remember before screaming "Hammertime!"
  • The phrase "And now, it's Hammer time!" was used by the title character in the satirical police sitcom Sledge Hammer! a full three years before "U Can't Touch This" was released (in the episode "State of Sledge," which aired January 10, 1987).
  • In an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Carlton attempts to gain Will's acceptance by offering a high-five and saying "When the going gets tough, the tough get going. It's hammer time.".
  • In a David Letterman show, "It's hammer time !" is depicted as a possible thought of the president George W. Bush while a picture, showing him unable to correctly hang a hammer, was taken.[citation needed]
  • In The Simpsons, the episode "Behind the Laughter" shows Homer purchasing M.C. Hammer's house, with "Hammertime" on the front gate. Homer then removes an "m" and bends the "a" so it spells "Homertime". Episode 381, the 3rd episode of the 18th season, is called "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em..." which is a reference to the album title.
  • In the episode of Family Guy where Peter creates Petoria, He sings "U Can't Touch Me", a very similar musical outline to "U Can't Touch This". Peter says "Peter-Time".
  • In the Scrubs episode "My Tormented Mentor" (Season 3), Doctor Miller turns off Turk's hip-hop music, saying "There's no music in my OR Hammer." To which Turk responds "First of all, Hammer dances like this...", proceeds to dance in a similar style to MC Hammer, and ends by pointing to his wrist-watch and stating "Hammer Time!"
  • On MythBusters, on the myth of the Exploding Trousers, Robert Lee, the American narrator said, "It's hammer time." This was when the Build Time were testing impact as an ignition source via a robotic hammer.

  • Comedian Jimmy Fallon's The Bathroom Wall album features a song called "Hammertime" that cobbles together lyrics from several unrelated songs.
  • In the Eminem song "Just Lose It" the line "Stop!... Pajama time!" is used (Eminem also parodies MC Hammer's dancing style in the song's music video).

  • Ben Dodson released an extension for the Firefox web browser that causes the computer to respond "Stop, Hammertime!" whenever a custom "Stop" button is pressed. This was originally hosted on the Angry Rooster website [2] before being updated to version 1.0a which worked on all versions of Firefox above version 1.5. The extension has had more than 60,000 downloads from the official Mozilla Add-ons page[3] and was featured in the top 50 Firefox extensions in the February 2007 edition of .Net Magazine. More information is available via Ben Dodson's Extensions website.
  • "Stop... Hammertime!" is referenced in question 18 of the Impossible Quiz.
  • Stop... Hammertime has also been translated into numerous languages for humorous effect such as German, resulting in the literal phrase: Halt... Hammerzeit! [1]
  • In Resident Cactuar, a Crazy Boris Production, Cactuar dances and sings to this song with Mario.

  • On AMD K8-based microprocessors such as Athlon64 and Opteron, CPUID function 0x8FFFFFFF returns the string "IT'S HAMMER TIME" in registers EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX[4]. The K8 project was codenamed "Hammer" when in development at AMD.

  • You can get various HAMMERTIME stickers in stop-sign red, with the disclaimer that they are "Not Intended To Be Used On Stop Signs". [2] illustrates a HAMMERTIME sticker seen in the wild.

  • Parodied by Camo J's track 'Can't Code This'.

Preceded by
"Tomorrow (A Better You, A Better Me)" by Quincy Jones featuring Tevin Campbell
Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs number one single
June 23, 1990
Succeeded by
"All I Do Is Think of You" by Troop
Preceded by
"It Must Have Been Love" by Roxette
Australian ARIA Singles Chart number-one single
July 21, 1990 - August 25, 1990
Succeeded by
"Epic" by Faith No More
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