Geronimo

I wrote this a few months back but didn’t have the chance to finish it till now. It might be somewhat outdated but what the heck here it goes:

So… Today I’d like to shortly tackle another example of the new and aspiring hit songs from Europe. To be honest the European pop stage had always amazed me. Whether it is crap or hit or whatever, you never really know what they will throw at you. America on the other hand is easy.  A few hours alone with the TV and you pretty much know all trends and formulas that are going around at the time. It is predictable, simple and a bit too dependent on the shock effect. It is sad, however, that we’ve reached times when Europe is becoming more and more like America in that respect… and what I am presenting today is an example of that phenomenon. I am talking about no other song but Aura Dione’s Geronimo.

But let’s begin with a little bit of backstory. Aura Dione is a Danish song writer born in New York who debuted in 2007. So I made an actual effort, I found and listened to her songs, read their lyrics, then listened again for something I might have missed the first time, for what I heard on the radio definitely wasn’t like this. What I am saying is she’s not the best, no, but she is good. Her music is energetic; it has a charm to it, and even has lyrics that mostly make sense.

Example: Breathe, Something for Nothing, LullaGoodbye, etc.

So enter Geronimo, the song, Aura Dione released in fall 2011. It took a few months before it reached the Americas but thorough December and then back in March-April 2012 it circled some of the radio stations around here. At first I didn’t pay any attention, it was just one of those stupid songs with catchy tune that made me want to claw my brains out, and no actual contents. Still after a few times hearing it, as it usually happens, I actually stopped and listened to what it said. Thing is the music was pretty good for a radio song, but the lyrics were an obscure mystery. At first I thought she had some weird dialect or the song was in a weird language, or perhaps something had gone wrong in the studio, because no matter how many times I heard it the only thing I could make out was gibberish. So like any dedicated know-it-all I opened google and searched for the song. At that time I didn’t know name, nor singer, or anything about it at all so it took me a while to go through the radio stations listings (since I didn’t have many worlds to go with either) but eventually I found it…

http://www.cutebeerfloat.com

Aura Dione obviously has a voice, I don’t deny it. (Unless of course there’s some miraculous editing software I don’t know about.) So why I asked myself, why wasn’t she using her voice to actually sing… you know… words…

 

It was then that I took a look at her previous work which made me wonder how it came to this even more:

Lyrics? Phh too mainstream!

http://www.cutebeerfloat.com

I couldn’t help but notice a pattern here. Somewhere in 2009 she released I will Love you Monday and unlike most of her other singles it was accepted pretty well. Thing is in that song there was already certain decay of lyrics. Realizing the tastes of her audience, I suppose, she did the only logical thing, push it even further. If retarded lyrics was what the people wanted, then retarded lyrics was what they would get. As for grammar… Having good grammar in media? This is not the middle ages, for god sake, who needs grammar! But wait, says a cheeky producer in a neat costume, or worse the actual artist, I have even better idea, why not remove lyrics at all and substitute them with odd alien sounds. Gaga did it, everybody loved it, let’s give them more of that…

 

Then why have a vocal at all I ask?

Next I took a glimpse at the writers of the lyrics: Aura Dione, David Jost, Joachim Persson, Ian O'Brien-Docker, Thomas Troelsen. Really? They needed five people to create this? I wish to think that there was some sort of inner strife that led to mass sabotaging and the distortion of any possible lyrics, but who knows what really happened... Perhaps they actually made the conscious choice to do it, which makes me wonder what kind of alien language they were using.

 

So I ask, is there some new trend of inarticulate speech pattern that I do not know of? I mean Gaga does it, but she’s Gaga I don’t expect anything else from her. Besides she doesn’t make whole songs like this, she has you know, words in there somewhere, even phrases, stanzas, paragraphs if she feels in the mood. Shakira too, but then again I don’t speak Spanish so I can’t really tell which is incomprehensive speech and which Spanish words.

But let’s focus on Geronimo here. And of it, the part that actually makes sense, sort of.

“And I'm breaking, I'm breaking away
I'm aiming power power shots
And I'm giving all I got
I'm fearless, I'm fearless today”

Ok not so bad thus far…

But then…

“I paint my face with teardrip-drops, I'm kissing underdogs” –the hell is that supposed to mean?

Now as you might have noticed I am a huge fan of lyrics and stories and let’s just say writing. I really like, you know, to be able to make sense of what people are talking about in their spoken/written/sung art without going through google windows and dictionaries and long mental debates over “what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean/say?”

Yes I know what the words mean; I even know what the combination of them supposedly means. What I can’t get is why? Were those five writes, all five of them, out of ideas what to fit in there? Couldn’t they find one actual poet to consult?

“…and what is more she does not write your stereotypical pop-lyrics either.” Her official web site says.

I can see that, but I am not quite sure it is a good thing…

But let us move on. I shouldn’t comment too much on the clip itself or we’ll be here forever. Overall it's not bad. It's well composed, with movement and colour and all. Its more matching for personal freedom theme than a supposed love story but we can overlook that. Still i have a few remarks. First, Aura, girl, I don’t know you did to your face, or you just need to shoot your makeup artist, but honestly you look like one of those aliens in whose language you are singing. Also judging by the clothes she wears throughout most of the video she’s actually trying to dress like them. I guess Gaga’s home planet is becoming quite popular in the pop world these days. We are looking at a full scale invasion if this keeps on…

http://www.smosh.com                                                         

But back to the topic, I always thought and will continue thinking that pop stars sound and look better before they begin whoring out. For that is what I think happened here. Look at Avril Lavigne for example, begins ok, sort of simple and normal, not too flashy but decent, and then she starts whoring out and it all ends in a musical disaster… But I can’t really blame it all on the artist. The issue here isn't that someone released a bad song, it happens, it's not a big deal. The problem is when it's the bad song, in an album of pretty good songs, that becomes popular. And the artists, they just do what the public wants, what the industry seems interested in. If society wants crap, it will get crap… and what makes me sad is people actually wanting that crap.   

 

Really though, what’s wrong with us people? Have intelligence and common sense become too old fashion? Is stupidity the new trend? 

http://clipartfort.com

Thing is, I know there are many smart, intelligent people out there. Probably even more than the stupid ones. But if the media - the face of the world, promotes this vision of utter retardness, how am I supposed to consider the world “sane?” Or for that matter… smart? If I were an alien looking from beyond, searching for a good, highly moral planet with great potential to share my knowledge with, to help improve, if I were looking at a catalog of worlds based on what is generally shown in them, I’d go for the Slug Empire, forget this tasteless, noisy, senseless pile of garbage in the pits of the Solar System with the tag line humanity. Let them rot in their own filth.

But still if the alien was to actually take pity and chose Earth, how is it supposed to determine what language it should speak to us when our grammar and sentences and even words have become “too mainstream?” How is someone else to learn our language when we don’t seem to know it ourselves? Oh how I wished this applied only to the English on the internet…

Which brings me to a different topic – the world of modern writing, but I’ll leave that for another time….