The greatest SNL music sketch is 'Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater'

"Back in 1978, the Clintons bought some land to build vacation homes"

There is a lot to enjoy about Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music, the Questlove documentary on the musical legacy of Saturday Night Live, which is streaming on the Peacock platform as part of a suite of content commemorating the venerable sketch show’s 50th anniversary.

“A lot” is understating the case: Quest, who won an Oscar for his 2022 film Summer of Soul, has more than enough raw material at his disposal for a full documentary streaming series — a half-century of weekly live-music performances telling a proxy contemporary cultural history of America, many of which are famous and difficult to find online. (The sprawling opening montage, which edits decades of eclectic musical guest performances into a brilliant mash-up, is probably the most pleasurable six minutes of non-pornographic video content you’ll see all year.)

The subject already feels too unwieldy for the conventional two-hour, talking-head/archive-footage container into which it is shoehorned. So it is a curious choice to tackle not only the music performances but also SNL’s in-house music sketches, a subject with its own separate body of lore and constellation of influential figures and moments. It does mean, however, that anybody who somehow needs to be reminded of “Dick in a Box,” “Lazy Sunday,” or several other clips that are already unavoidable in the viral-video age, is in luck.

It also means a TON of great stuff remains unmentioned, including the single best music sketch the show has ever produced. I’m referring to a little-remembered song parody that was performed as a cold-open in the mid-1990s: “Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater.” Behold:

I wasn’t yet allowed to watch SNL at the time, and I only caught the “Whitewater” sketch because it aired in 1995 on a prime-time 20th-anniversary broadcast of highlights on a night my parents weren’t around. It’s a spoof of a classic, low-hanging pop-music staple: the tone-deaf all-star charity single. And in that narrow line of comedy-ensemble send-ups, “Whitewater” is right up there with “We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well” and, eventually, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck.”

The SNL cast performs while arranged in front of microphones in a manner recognizable from videos for “We Are the World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Their task, as introduced by guest host Cindy Crawford(!), is to help America understand the Byzantine details of the then-unfolding Whitewater political scandal. This was a huge story in the 1990s whose specifics are still convoluted, but which nonetheless became a proof of concept for an emerging genre of political conspiracy-theorizing that caricatured Bill and Hillary Clinton as murderous, devil-worshipping pedophiles. In reality it was an unsuccessful real-estate deal involving land in Arkansas that the Clintons and some associates were hoping to develop into vacation properties, and there might have been some dodgy accounting. Absolutely riveting stuff.

The 15 assembled cast members trade lines explaining the wrinkles of the controversy. Each performer is impersonating a well-known music figure — Mike Myers as Garth Brooks, Chris Farley as Jerry Garcia, Adam Sandler as Axl Rose, and several other early-’90s SNL mainstays as rock and pop icons spanning multiple eras. Crucially, each performer is recognizable as both themselves and the star they’re imitating, so the reveal of each impression is often the joke. They each get about three seconds to accomplish this, and it works more often than it doesn’t: Note the emergence of Kevin Nealon as Michael Bolton or the favorite by crowd reaction, David Spade as Kurt Cobain.

With a few exceptions, each rocker is iconic enough that decades later, it’s still obvious who the target of the parody is. (A grim historical note: This aired March 19, 1994, only a couple of weeks before Cobain’s death by suicide.) The rockers deliver word-salad explanations of Whitewater minutiae, and their subtitled but often unintelligible summaries of the infamously complicated scandal’s plot points are just as funny as the physical impersonations themselves.

The extreme era-specificity of its subject makes “Whitewater” a premium “look how simple the times were” ‘90s comfort-watch. But this sketch also feels oddly timeless, if only for the sheer bravado of its execution. For instance, compare everything happening in “Whitewater” to a later version of the same premise — a 2010 cold-open presenting an updated version of “We Are the World”:

That was a pretty good cast, and most of the impressions are solid, but the need to identify each pop star with a title card is a clear sign SNL wasn’t cooking with the same gas, or perhaps some larger signal of the waning monoculture. And the song is just “We Are the World” with different lyrics (about how an earlier remake of “We Are the World” was a flop, apparently?).

By contrast, the “Whitewater” sketch features a wholly original song that is an effective parody of the format, legitimately informative and just straightforwardly good. The opening lines will still pop into my head sometimes: “Back in 1978, the Clintons bought some land to build vacation homes, 230 acres to be exact.” Its chorus has a generic, empty gravitas that expertly mimics the format. If there was room for another verse and chorus, there would sure as hell be a power-ballad key change.

There are fewer online listicles ranking SNL’s music-specific sketches than I would have guessed, but the ones that do exist contain no mention of “Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater.” It lives on SNL’s official YouTube channel, but otherwise the song and the skit are basically lost to history — along with the idea that an administration could be nearly taken down by some dubiously sourced bank loans, while the Trump family at this very moment is probably paying millions in self-branded cryptocurrency to have a sex worker dismembered in the executive suite of their newest Azerbaijani hotel.

So let’s correct this historical wrong by turning the all-time greatest SNL music sketch into the hotly debated, nostalgic Xennial **content** it has always deserved to be. The pop-culture internet needs less cowbell, more Whitewater. So below I have ranked all of the “Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater” pop-star impressions from worst to best. May the raging arguments begin and then also cease.

13. Rob Schneider as K.D. Lang

Not a bad impersonation at all, but this is one of the few I couldn’t immediately identify 30 years later. My first guess was Boy George.

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12. Jay Mohr & Norm Macdonald as Anthony Kiedis & Flea

Mohr capably captures the doofus charisma of the Chili Peppers’ frontman, but Madconald, who was famously averse to any non-Weekend Update sketch work, is phoning it in even by his standards.

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11. Michael McKean as Elvis Costello

Poor Michael McKean — he puts together a solid Elvis Costello impression, only for it to die painfully in the room. Just crickets. Costello clearly is an important presence in SNL’s music mythology, which might be why he gets more bars than most of the others, but the ‘90s weren’t really his decade, profile-wise.

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10. Sarah Silverman as Cher

Oh, right, Sarah Silverman was on SNL.

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9. Tim Meadows as Aaron Neville

In the ‘90s I would have only known singer and face-tattoo pioneer Aaron Neville as the jingle performer whose buttery tones lulled consumers who might otherwise be curious about why cotton would need to advertise itself. Anyway, good impresh.

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8. Melanie Hutsel & Julia Sweeney as Naomi & Winona Judd

I could never remember which ‘90s SNL white lady was Melanie Hutsel and which was Julia Sweeney, so this is good casting, because I could also never remember which Judd was Naomi and which was Winona.

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7. Phil Hartman as Elton John

A lesser impersonator might have leaned hard into the the outsized flamboyance of Elton John’s public persona and tried to steal the show, but Hartman’s low-key work here is just another reminder of how reliably great he always was.

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6. Mike Myers as Garth Brooks

All he had to do was nail the always-funny visual combination of giant hat and wireless headset microphone, which he did.

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5. Elen Cleghorn as Tina Turner

Cleghorn, always an underrated contributor, maybe overdoes it here, but I laugh every time I see her doing one of Tina’s huge kicks, especially during the wider shots.

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4. Chris Farley as Jerry Garcia

The only thing wrong with Farley as Jerry Garcia in this sketch is that it meant we didn’t get Mama Cass.

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3. David Spade as Kurt Cobain

Spade’s mumble-scream-mumble got the best reaction in the room, and the physical bearing is spot-on, but everything else about it is too sad to contemplate. The airdate, March 19, would have been between Cobain’s suicide attempt via a rohypnol overdose and his actual death on April 5. Hard not to watch this and wonder if he saw it.

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2. Kevin Nealon as Michael Bolton

Easily the funniest reveal of the entire sketch.

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1. Adam Sandler as Axl Rose

Another trade-off — Axl Rose instead of Sandler’s equally hilarious Eddie Vedder — but this is just bananas the whole way through. Halfway into his part of the verse, he gives up even trying to make sense, and closes with another line I sing to myself way too often, for no reason whatsoever: “And Vince Fosterrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!”