Tribute (song)

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"Tribute"

Single by Tenacious D
from the album Tenacious D
Released	July 16, 2002
Format	CD
Genre	Hard Rock
Length	4:08
Label	Epic Records
Producer(s)	The Dust Brothers
Tenacious D singles chronology
	Tribute (2002)	Wonderboy (2002)

"Tribute", or unofficially, "A Tribute to the Best Song in the World" is the first single of Tenacious D's self-titled debut album. It was released July 16, 2002.

"Tribute" (#4 Australia) was the most requested video on Kerrang! TV in 2002. A cross between "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" and "Stairway to Heaven", the song is a tribute to the "greatest song in the world," which Tenacious D themselves came up with, but have since forgotten.

"This is not the greatest song in the world.

This is just a tribute.

Couldn't remember the greatest song in the world.

This is a tribute."

The song chronicles the band members' encounter in the desert with a demon who demands the duo play "the best song in the world" or have their souls devoured. Having nothing to lose from trying, they "play the first thing that came into [their] heads" and it "Just so happened to be / The best song in the world."

On original versions of the song (including the version played on the Tenacious D (TV series) in the episode The Greatest Song in the World) one can hear Kyle Gass play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven", and, commonly, during live performances after the song is completed, harmoniously sing, "And they're playing the best song in the world," in a manner identical to the ending lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven", where "And she's buying a stairway to heaven" is sung, implying in a way that "Stairway to Heaven" is the "best song in the world" (this is corroborated by the two songs' shared key: a minor). However, it is now thought that Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown) is the greatest song, as learnt in the Tenacious D Movie, where on playing the song, they promptly forget it. In an interview with Stance in 2001, the band claimed that the inspiration from the song came after Jack Black played Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" for Kyle Gass, describing it as "the best song in the world", leading to a failed attempt to themselves write an even better song, and a discussion of the meaninglessness of labeling any song that way. "Tribute" was written to make the claim that the greatest song in the world had, in fact, been briefly theirs but they had forgotten it, as a paean to the impossibility of reaching musical perfection.

Dave Grohl (Lead singer of Foo Fighters) plays the drums in the live music video, and Ben Stiller makes a brief cameo as a passer-by entering from the right hand side of the screen as they sing "just a matter of opinion". Liam Lynch, the director of the video, also makes a cameo as a passer-by from the left hand side of the screen as they sing "I'm found! Rich motherfucker". Tenacious D's friend Lee is the policeman in the video.

Although the video had huge success on UK television (Kerrang TV mostly), the song was never actually released there as a single. To date, the only song released as a single in the UK by Tenacious D is Wonderboy that made the Top 40.

The song is also referenced at the end of The Pick Of Destiny, when Tenacious D sit in their apartment and are unable to recall the song they used to defeat Satan in the Rock-Off.