Video premiere: Cherry Poppin' Daddies' 'The Babooch'

• %22The Babooch%22 is the lead track from the Cherry Poppin%27 Daddies %22White Teeth Black Thoughts%22 album
• %22White Teeth Black Thoughts%22 comes out July 16
• The album marks a return to the swing sound of the group%27s early records

What's a Babooch?

For Cherry Poppin' Daddies frontman Steve Perry, it's a bit of a number of things. It's a little bit of a baboon, as well as a play on jazz singer Cab Calloway's 1930s swing hit Minnie the Moocher. It's also a name Perry used to call himself as a child.

"It was kind of my rapper's brag to my family," Perry says. "I lived in an Italian neighborhood, so I would say, 'I'm the Babooch! The Babooch is here!' I would walk into the room, and the spotlight would have to go on me. People laughed, so I kept doing it."

But in the song from the Cherry Poppin' Daddies new White Teeth Black Thoughts album, out July 16, The Babooch also is a one-percenter self-importantly celebrating his success, despite whatever's going on in the rest of the world. And that's the meaning that comes through clearly in the song's music video, premiering at USA TODAY.

"I wrote lyrics that were veiled, so it was a little difficult to discern who this person was and what his world was like," Perry says. "When we made the video, I thought maybe I should clear this up and help people understand what the song's about.

The video for The Babooch shows footage of the Daddies super-imposed over postcards, news footage, public-domain clips and other sources. It also features Perry and several friends and family members doing their best imitations of a New England upper-crust crowd on the beach (with the Oregon coastline substituting for Cape Cod). The result is a surreal montage inspired equally by Luis Bunuel films and collage-style punk-rock posters.

White Teeth Black Thoughts marks a return to the swing sound of the group's early records.

"We're inspired but the music of the past a lot, but we try to write lyrics about serious issues," Perry says. "We're trying to be a modern band, and this record is very much about the years 2008 to the present.

"It had been a while since we had done an all-swing record. We started thinking about it right at the beginning of the financial crisis and the housing market going down. In my town and a lot of towns, the street population got bigger, and then there was the Occupy movement. I thought it seemed like a Depression-era situation and that Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? feeling. I thought, 'This really feels like the style we should do the next record in. Everything kind of pointed in the same direction."

But if all that seems a little too high-concept, it's okay to just feel the beat in your feet.

"You can also swing dance to it and enjoy it without all the meanings," Perry says. "That's what the Daddies are about: We have a lot of concepts and symbols and ideas, but you can just show up and dance to our music and enjoy it for what it is."