Songfacts®:

• This is one heck of a kiss-off song, with Godsmack lead singer Sully Erna making his feelings quite clear:
  
  I'm doing the best I ever did
  Now go away!
  
  He wrote the song with the band's guitarist, Tony Rambola, who explained: "That's Sully's answer to his girlfriend when we were going through the whole struggle between rehearsing five nights a week, playing on the weekends and trying to keep a relationship going at the same time. We were really starting to take off, and it's hard to go through a relationship with a girl and have a band take all your time, plus we worked regular jobs, so there was probably 10 minutes of the day for them."
• "Whatever" was Godsmack's first single, released in 1998 soon after the band signed to Republic Records. They released it independently in 1997 though, and got a lot of exposure when a disc jockey at WAAF, a radio station in Massachusetts, started playing it on his show, leading to their record deal. Godsmack had a following from their club shows, but had never gotten airplay before.
• "Whatever" set a record for longest-running song on the US Active Rock Top 10 chart when it stayed there for 33 weeks. Over on the Hot 100, it reached #116 for a week in July 1999.
• The song is part of Godsmack's 1998 self-titled major-label debut album. Their record company didn't think the album needed an explicit content warning sticker, so it shipped without one. Since it didn't have the sticker, Walmart and K-Mart both carried it, but when word got out about the profanities in songs like this one, they pulled the album because some customers complained.
• Godsmack didn't record this song until their 1997 demo album, All Wound Up, was already finished, so it didn't make it on the original pressings. But the band came up with a creative solution to get the song on the streets. Erna explained in a Pandora Stories feature: "We printed the single onto a CD and then we elastic-banded it to the record and that's how we started to get a bigger buzz going."
• "Whatever" got a lot of airplay on rock radio, but the big song from the album was "Voodoo." This was a time before downloading when album sales were at a peak, so that Godsmack album sold a very impressive 5 million copies just in America.
• The song got its nondescript title (it's not mentioned in the lyrics) one night when the band included the then-untitled track on their setlist and had to come up with a name on the fly. Sully Erna scribbled down "Whatever" and they never changed it.
• The pierced and tattooed model on the album cover is Toni Tiller, who was shocked to see the image on display in a record store's window. "I didn't know anything about this until my face was on sale," she explained in a 2021 interview with the YouTube channel I Ask No One.
  
  The photo was taken in 1994 when the 19-year-old model posed for her photographer friend, Dale May, to show off the new tattoo on her arm. She had been out all night partying and went straight to the Brooklyn-based studio in the morning to sit for a quick snap. She was even still wearing the previous night's makeup.
  
  Before the image landed in Godsmack's hands, it was stolen and redrawn for a pornographic comic book, which resulted in a lawsuit. It was also used to promote a well-known piercing parlor. Tiller had forgotten all about the photo by the time May, who started working with bands, showed his portfolio to Godsmack.
  
  Since she signed a release on the photo years earlier, Tiller didn't receive any compensation for being the band's cover girl, but she doesn't mind. "It has more than paid for itself in entertainment. I have had a really good time having this be a part of my history," she said. Tiller re-created the look when she appeared in the band's video for "Greed" in 2000.
• The music video is footage from the band's performance at the WAAF festival Locobazooka on September 20, 1998. Kid Rock, Monster Magnet and Powerman 5000 were also on the bill.