If ever you asked me which band I would like never to hear again, ever in my whole life, it would be Boney M. This isn’t a new thing; I’ve hated their music ever since they first appeared on Top of the Pops in the 70s. It struck me as representing all the worst aspects of pop music – manufactured, meaningless, nonsensical. They were a band that seemed to have been artificially created purely for the purpose of making money. This opinion is of course based on almost no research whatsoever. Perhaps the members of Boney M are lovely, talented people who trained as classical musicians but had to resort to commercial music in order to raise money for life-saving surgery for their younger siblings. Perhaps they gave all their money to third world countries. Perhaps not.
As evidence that they are the worst band in the history of pop, I present some lyrics from their hit single “Brown Girl in the Ring”:
Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
Come on show me your motion
Tra la la la la la
Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
She looks like a sugar in a plum
Plum plum
I can only assume the girl in the song is a night nurse doing bed pan rounds. Amazingly, according to Wikipedia: “With more than 150 million records sold, they are one of the best-selling artists of all time“.
Boney M’s music tends to generate “ear worms” – those annoying snippets of a song that you involuntarily hear in your head on an endless repeat loop when you are off-guard. My late father used to keep singing a line from “Brown Girl in the Ring”; I have a clear image of him in his later, stooped years, walking around the house, singing it to himself.
I was in an Indian restaurant recently in Đà Nẵng, and they played Boney M all night, on repeat. I finished my curry as fast as I could and now refuse to go back in there without checking what’s on their sound system first. I was telling my young American friends about Boney M recently. They had never heard of them. We met in a large beer hall type place which has an upstairs bar reputedly playing hard rock. The large-scale projector was playing videos of ….. Boney M, and the sound system was blasting out “Brown Girl in the Ring”. The band members were wearing bizarre, incongruous gold-glam outfits. My friends thought it was hilarious. I was in hell. Whenever I go to the Korean owned LotteMart to do my weekly shop, there’s a 50-50 chance that Boney M will be serenading me through the aisles.
Why then is the music of a bad pop band from the 1970s following me around in Vietnam? I have no idea. But maybe that mindless, meaningless pop of the 70s is the inspiration for Vietnamese V-Pop and Korean K-Pop. Make your own mind up. Below are some examples of V-Pop and K-Pop. I don’t understand the lyrics, but I suspect they are probably on a level with “show me your motion”. The first, has over 300 million views on YouTube and has the inspiring title of “bống bống bang bang”. Google translate tells me this is “bubbly bang bang” in English. The K-Pop example, Blackpink’s “As if it’s your last”, also has over 300 million views. Poor old Boney M’s night nurse motion song has a paltry 9 million views.
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Copyright Mike Hopkins 2018
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