Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Don't believe the bubble

Back in high school I found myself in a three-hour car ride from Nebraska to Kansas with a group of teenagers from my church.  I'd recently purchased the album Europop by Eiffel 65 (containing such hits as Blue (Da Ba Dee) and... well... that was really their only hit), and being the only person with the foresight to bring a cassette tape adapter and probably the only person who brought music with lyrics describing topics other than homicide and fornication, I was put in charge of providing music to all of the denizens of our fifteen-passenger van.

Overall Europop is about as G-rated and inoffensive as it gets, at least as long as you don't have something against cheesy electronic pop or vocoders.  Perhaps the catchiest song on the album is Living in a Bubble, a song that teaches about the dangers of becoming rich and famous and finding that everything seems way better than it really is.  About halfway through the song, the driver-slash-chaperone of the van became very audibly concerned when he noticed the lyrics.  For example:

Don't believe the bubble cause it's nothing but a dream
And when it blows you'll be alone 

The problem is that the singer is Italian (not French as the name might indicate) and the vocals are very distorted, and it sounds an awful lot like he's saying "don't believe the Bible," "the Bible's not reality," "it's a place of lies and hate," "famous all over from this shit to Mars," and so on.  He wasn't the only one who thought I was corrupting the other poor teenagers in the van; a couple others were also pretty skeptical of me.  But the song's called Living in a Bubble.  Bubbles are something that you live in, metaphorically speaking, not bibles.

It took a bit of explaining but I eventually convinced him that I was indeed not the spawn of Satan trying to tempt his daughters into a world of blasphemy.  And then on the trip home he requested "that bubble song" about half a dozen times.