It's the song that accompanies a cartoon grinning face and the hot, flushed feeling of having been lured into clicking on something that turns out not to be there. However, to most web-friendly ears, it's the Troll Song, best known as the accompaniment to a million fake links and online tricks. This is presumably why Ant and Dec use it to psych themselves up before every audition day on Britain's Got Talent, a fact they revealed when selecting the song for their appearance on Desert Island Discs from 2014 (listen from 29:52 in). It's a relentlessly upbeat and happy song, and to Western ears sounds not a little silly, which makes it an even more uplifting listen. Eduard Khil was a Russian baritone singer, and this song is part of a tradition of wordless (but still sung) music calld vokaliz.
The internet is responsible for a great many strange things, and this is no exception. Then when the chorus arrives it's with a slightly altered version of that opening refrain, as if we're now in a grand opera, the gnome West Side Story, where the surly drama of the verses is amplified by the spiralling insanity of those gangs of mocking voices into something quite disturbing. Everything the song has to say is best said by that nagging opening refrain, which is so lively and chipper - but slightly cross and unsettling with it - that it sounds like you're being mugged by overexcited garden gnomes.Īfter just 20 seconds of this verbal assault, the quickfire lyrical braindump of the verse acts as a moment of relative calm, where sanity is restored by Gerard Way describing the life of a nihilistic gang member with low morals. ' As long as I am not cursing you out, I am going in the right direction."įor a band that liked to hang extensive meaning and dramatic development onto their lyrics, My Chemical Romance also knew the value of a killer hook, especially one that required no extensive homework on the part of their audience when singing along at concerts. This had the unexpected side-effect of making that section of the song appear to mean different things in different cultures: "Somewhere in that made-up language, I am actually saying something, because even to this day, we'll play India, and someone will tell me, 'Yes, you've touched on certain words in. So he just made up his own dialect, with sounds that suited the melody. But, as he told the New York Post, he'd given his friend too broad a brief - "Lionel, there's 101 African dialects."
Inspired by the chant in Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Starting Something - which was itself derived from Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa - Lionel called up a friend at the United Nations for the right language to help him create a great African incantation. While it's been interpreted in all sorts of ways, largely from the effect it had on listeners, that cry is actually a vocal approximation of a drum break, making Little Richard not just a rock 'n' roll pioneer, but one of the earliest beatboxers on record too.Īlthough this song contains a great many words with actual meanings, most of which concern a terrific shindig with Lionel Richie and his pals, it's the breakdown section in the middle which deserves special attention.
Cleaned up for recording purposes with the jive slang "aw rooty" (which means "how lovely"), the song manages to sound just as racy as ever, thanks in no small part to the explosive holler "A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" which Richard would throw in at key moments. The original lyric contained a fairly ripe, but relatively coded description of sex with a chorus beginning "Tutti frutti, good booty" that had been going down a storm in live performances. Arguably no other song encapsulates this better than Tutti Frutti - a track that Little Richard can rightly claim as a set text for 20th century pop. It has always hidden its most lascivious impulses in knowing winks and coded language (the term "rock 'n' roll" itself is, of course, a euphemism for sex). Rock 'n' roll is the music of late nights, bad behaviour, wildness and ribald shenanigans.
0 kommentar(er)
