Fitting in

A couple of weeks ago, during the "Megye napok" (county days), Csikszereda was visited by some vaguely famous musical acts. (For more or less the first time in my memory of the place) One of these was Morandi, who are (at least by Romanian standards) just about as big as they come. Another was a band I'd never heard of called Sarmalele Reci, who, at least on the the basis of a couple of youtube videos I watched, look pretty good. (Good name too - it means "Cold Stuffed Cabbage" but sounds much better in Romanian than in English). We were going to go, but an inability to find a baby sitter put the kybosh on that plan. However, I think almost nobody went and the concert got called off, in the end - at least someone I know showed up 45 minutes after it was supposed to start and nothing was happening.

We did manage it to make it to one concert in the week, though, seeing aged Hungarian Shakin' Stevens impersonator, Fenyő Miklós. (For Romanian readers who have never heard of him, just imagine a 65 year old Stefan Banica Jr - a horrific thought, no?) Also it is a bit unfair of me to call him a Shakin' Stevens impersonater since he must hav been cranking out the rock n roll when Shaky was still in blue suede nappies. A better British comparison would probably be Cliff, but without the later career move into schmaltzy ballads and vomit inducing "smooth god" or whatever he calls his particular genre. Anyway, Fenyő was not as bad as I had feared, and was actually very enjoyable (apart from the venue- the sports hall, which was a rubbish place for a concert). You can't really go wrong with straight up rock n roll though, at least for dancing and the like. The crowd was interesting - mostly people of between 35 and 55 with a few kids (like ours, for example - still no babysitter). This reflects I think the fact that (a) he brings up a lot of fond memories for the Transylvanian Hungarians of a certain age, because as with all Hungarian musicians of the time the act of listening to him was somehow illicit; and (b) that among the young he is tragically unhip (indeed I asked some teenage students about him and they'd never even heard of him).

So there you go. I get more Hungarian with every day. Next week I'll be wearing a big felt hat riding a horse and having a bizarrely extravagant moustache.

In other fitting in news, we now own two chickens. They don't actually live with us, since we don't really have the space to allow them to enjoy their natural wander aimlessly and peck existence, and anyway, it would get tiring to constantly be stepping on eggshells, but they are ours all the same. They live in a friend's garden with 15 others who all look exactly the same, so we don't actually know which ones are ours, but these are just details.

Speak, the (unspeakable) Hungarian Rapper

The worst song ever written? You decide.

"Sometimes people start a war, don't know what it's for"

In the Kingdom of the Bland

I got a very nice email from a Danish bloke called Hans-Christian (his last name isn't Andersen, you'll be saddened to learn), complimenting me on my blog. His wife is Romanian and he'd happened across it in his webwanderings. Anyway, he linked to me here (as well as a very interesting blog from another Danish based Transylvanian), and mentioned how much he'd enjoyed seeing some music videos. Just to add to his collection then I thought I'd mention last week's (MTV) European Music Awards which were held, coincidentally, in Copenhagen. I didn't watch it, or pay it much attention, but I do know that DJ Project won the "Best Romanian Act" award, which just goes to show what a bad year it's been for Romanian pop. Last year, there were seemingly lots of catchy, fun, hummable ditties out there, whereas this year... well, let's just say there were fewer. (To be fair, it's obviously not just a Romanian thing - after all Justin Timberlake and the endlessly tiresome Red Hot Chilli Pepers seemed to carry off a number of the bigger awards).

Anyway, DJ Project, while inoffensive and fairly good at what they do, are also pretty bland and insipid. Maybe they'e great live or something, because whatever catapulted them to glory is not apparent from their big hit of this year, Inca O Noapte.

The competition was not up to much though, with the other nominees being:
(a) The dirgelike Morandi (the only good thing about this video for "Falling Asleep", their hit of this year, is a cool little effect they do (on the video, not the song) with iron filings half way through. One you've seen that, you can switch off.
(b) Parazitii, a rap band, who are kind of OK, but of whom I have heard nothing for over a year so I have no idea what they did to get nominated this time round
(c) Blondy, your basic lowest-comon-denominator-bimbo-pop-blonde-with-deep-cleavage. Still, this one is not as terrible as most of what she has done. It's at least catchy.
and finally...
(d) Simplu, whose song Imi merge bine, was easily the best piece of Romanian pop produced this year (or at least the best that I got to hear). No idea why it didn't walk away with the award.

Music videos and Csik from above

An aerial view of Csikszereda (taken in winter obviously)

I wanted to share a couple of videos from YouTube with you, so I went along and attempted to blog them (this is a new verb meaning to stick them up here) but apparently I can't becase I recently moved this blog over to "beta.blogger" which means that it's more fully integrated into Google (or some such bullshit). This is, of course, in the week in which Google actually bought YouTube. It baffles me, frankly. (Plus my gmail account seems to be not functioning well at the moment). All in all I am significantly less well-disposed towards google than I was about a week ago.

Anyway, I can't embed the videos here, but I can give you some links:

Here is Iubire by 3 Sud Est, which you may recall me dissing last week. Now you can see for yourself the boys and their hard-as-nails image contrasted with their not-quite-so-hard falsettos.

Here is Erika's current favourite. Ghiţa by Cleopatra Stratan. Now I'm usually of the opinion that any record made by a child (or children in the plural) ought to be avoided like the plague. But somehow this one is kind of infectious and nowhere near as obnoxious as it should be.

And finally, Mahala Rai Banda, a gypsy band who are really excellent. This song is impossible to not start tapping your feet to. Mind you, they'll never make it on to MTV Romania, where I have seen the other two. It's a shame.

Further adventures in Wikipedia

I have once more been drawn to Wikipedia – this time because I have discovered that something I wrote is referenced there in an article. I know that probably says quite a lot more about the authenticity of Wikipedia rather than the learned and academic nature of my blogged ramblings, but there you go.

Long term readers (you poor, poor, bastards) may remember a post I made last year regarding music in Romania, in which I mentioned, among other things, the band 3 Sud Est and their very camp video. [At the bottom of the wiki-page about 3 Sud Est, footnote 1]. Well, at this juncture, I am extremely non-committal to announce that 3 Sud Est have a new single out, featuring a significantly more macho video that last year’s effort. [I’d like to kid myself that I am responsible for this image change, because of my mocking of the one for Cu capu-n nori - and let's face it, since they could have found out about that cruel taunt by simply reading it on Wikipedia, it may just have been so]. So, the new video (the song is called “Iubire”) involves our favourite threesome dressed in sharp suits and wearing wraparound sunglasses, like a group of bouncers in a provincial nightclub*, standing at the back of this hi-tech studio, while a dancing woman cavorts around in the foreground. They (3 Sud Est) never smile throughout the video, thus emphasizing how fucking rock hard they are. The problem of course is that this new image is shattered every time they open their mouths to start singing, as they (all three of them) appear to be castrati.

Frankly, this post is just a pathetic attempt to be the third English language source on the existence of 3 Sud Est, such that I get another Wiki-footnote.

(* By nightclub here, I mean that in the English sense of “discotheque and bar which is open after the pubs have closed” rather than in the Romanian sense: outsiders ought to know that the English word “nightclub” in Romania actually means knocking shop or strip club. I have no idea what bouncers at a provincial Romanian nightclub would look like, or indeed even if there are any, since I have never been to such a place. I swear. It’s just a vicious rumour.)

Eurovision

Lithuanians are really, really into the Eurovision Song Contest. On Saturday night I went out into the old city with Richard, an English bloke who lives here. The first bar we went to, which made its own very good beer, was dead. I think there was one other group of people in there. The second bar, a very cool and trendy place in a cellar, was completely empty. We asked the barman and he said it was because everyone was home watching the Eurovision Song Contest. I thought he was joking, but Richard assured me it probably was the case.

Eventually we spied a bar which seemed to be buzzing, went inside, and discovered that the reason for its busy-ness was that it had a big screen showing the Eurovision. People were cheering, whooping and going crazy, particularly when the Lithuanian number started up.

For any readers not from Europe, I may need to supply a bit of background here. The Eurovision song contest has been going on annually for years and years (I think I heard last night it was the 51st year). It involves every European country selecting a song to be performed in competition with every other country. When I was young this wasn’t too many countries, since the Warsaw Pact didn’t enter, since it was all too decadent or something, and anyway, there weren’t that many countries in Europe back then. Now there are bloody loads and there appears to be one more every year (as I type this Montenegrins are going to the polls to decide whether to start another one). It has always been a fairly rubbish event, that us world-weary and cynical Brits have tended to look down upon, and I honestly can’t remember ever thinking it was a worthwhile competition which one should cheer on ones favourites in. (And it certainly wouldn’t empty the pubs on a Saturday night). But since the collapse of Eastern bloc, the new entrants have certainly taken it to their hearts and really see it as a way to put themselves on the map.

The other big change is in the nature of the songs and the voting system (which may be related). At some point (possibly with advent of mobile phones) the voting went from being some kind of national juries charged with awarding the points from each nation, to being a public voting thing (I’ll leave you to decide whether this is a valuable progressive step towards democracy in everyday life or an opportunity for mobile phone companies to make money from each SMS-ed vote). In tandem with this change, the songs have more and more tended to be all sung in English (so as to appeal to a greater proportion of the pan-European voting public), and the songs themselves have become less and less important as it has become more vital to catch the eye and be memorable (especially since the audience now has to sit through so many songs). Last year, for example, the Moldovan entry (which despite the gimmick was easily the best one) incorporated an old woman wandering round banging a big drum while this mad group of nutters sang about grandma banging the drum. Last nights featured “Lordi” a group of heavy-metallers from Finland in mock horror masks. The most common eye-catcher used by many nations is to try and push the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of having scantily clad attractive women singing or dancing around the singer in some way.

The Lithuanian entry, which had everyone so excited last night, was 6 blokes in suits doing a number about how they were the Eurovision winners and urging people to vote for them. It wasn’t a song as such, but more of a football chant. I learned later that it was kind of a jokey but deliberate attempt to subvert the format – the blokes are all TV personalities here, and they deliberately didn’t have any women on stage with them. The ended up coming 6th, Lithuania’s best ever performance, which probably says something, though I don’t know what.

The most comical part is the voting. Each country votes separately and then gives points to the top ten vote receivers there. Plus you can’t vote for your own country’s song. What this in effect means (it certainly seems from last night) is that immigrant populations sway the votes considerably. Germany, for example, gave maximum points to Turkey’s entry last night. While Russia finished second largely based on the fact that they got maximum points from lots of the nations of the former USSR which still have large Russian minorities, plus Israel. Also there is a lot of neighbourliness, with Scandinavian countries giving their top points to their neighbours, and even the former Yugoslavia putting aside the past to vote for each other in a touching gesture of post-civil war fraternity. Lithuania got maximum points from Ireland, in what I thought was testament to the Irish love of a good joke, but was told today that it’s because there are loads of Lithuanians in Ireland.

Romania, whose song I didn’t see, pipped Lithuania for 5th place. (Lot of votes from Moldova, surprisingly). Hungary didn’t take part for some reason. Perhaps a sudden rush of good taste, or a feeling of being above it all. Or maybe they just forgot to send in their entry forms this year. They were in it last year; I remember their song, which was quite a good one, though sung badly – in direct counterpoint to the Romanian one which was a bad song sung well.

Oh, and the Finnish horror rockers won by a country mile, despite not having a widely spread diaspora. Obviously the mask thing worked. Or perhaps because Finland produced most of the voting equipment that will have been used by the electors of Europe.

The Wisdom of the Ages

It is a well known fact that Norman Wisdom is incredibly famous in Albania. Norman Wisdom, in case you are not Albanian, is a British “slapstick comedy actor” and music hall style comedian. He was popular (though I’m not sure how popular) in the UK in the 50s and possibly early 60s. To people of my generation, though, he is actually more famous for being famous in Albania than he is for his body of work – of which, as far as I’m aware, I have seen precisely none. Apparently, Enver Hoxha was a big fan and thus the legend of Pitkin was born. (Pitkin is, I think, a character he played in one of his films). Ask any Albanian over 30 about Pitkin and they’ll wax lyrical for hours. (I have never actually tested this, but I am reliably informed that it is the case. In some kind of hands-across-the-Balkans gesture of friendship/publicity stunt a few years ago when the England football team came to Tirana for a match, they brought Wisdom with them, and the stadium rose as one to salute the octogenarian star.)

Recently I have discovered that Wisdom, here known simply as “Norman”, is very popular in Romania too. Perhaps Ceausescu was introduced to him by Hoxha at a dinner party or at a conference of slightly maverick communist dictators. I think his popularity may be slightly less than in Albania (I have never seen a Norman film on Romanian TV, and in Tirana, if the slightly mocking media reports filed by British journalists are anything to go by, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an entire channel devoted to his oeuvre.)

This places Norman firmly in the category of strange and somewhat obscure things that Romanians get slightly wistful about. Another is Bollywood movies. As far as I can ascertain, western films were to all intents and purposes banned during the Communist years, but when the cinemas had no propaganda films or reworkings of Tolstoy to show, films were imported from India to fill in the gaps. In fact, they still seem to be relatively popular, possibly for nostalgia reasons, and one or two of the TV channels regularly show them – though they have been shunted out of the cinemas by endless violent Hollywood action films.

Another very odd one is Smokie. I would have imagined (if I’d ever bothered to think abut it) that Smokie were only known and barely remembered by British people of between about 35 and 45. For those that don’t know, they were a 70s group of long haired blokes who sang poorly written ballads in a kind of sub-Rod Stewart gravelly voice (I was going to refer to them as a proto boy band, but even at the height of the popularity I seem to remember they looked at least 30 – at least when the young me saw them on Top of the Pops). I had, of course, entirely forgotten about them, and would have been quite happy had it stayed that way. But then, a few months ago I was at a party, and suddenly one of their tunes came on. “Good God,” I thought, “this takes me back. I wonder who put this on and why”. And then I noticed that the whole room was singing along to it. More or less everyone – old, young and in between. I also need to mention here that over half of the people at this party didn’t speak any English at all. Yet here they were singing along to the frankly rubbish mid 70s soppy ode to personal tragedy “Living Next Door to Alice”.

But remarkably that was not to be the end of my moments of jaw dropping amazement that night. Far from it. The turgid drone reached its chorus, and as the last line of said chorus drained away “And for 24 years I’ve been living next door to Alice”, the room, as one, punctuated the line with (in English) a group shout of “Who the fuck is Alice?” That moment, I’m quite sure, will live with me for ever. This was a party in a village to celebrate a baptism, not some group of post-modern irony obsessed lovers of retro-chic. The guests were of all ages, and many walks of life. If you’ve never seen an old Transylvanian villager with few teeth and no English whatsoever, jump to his feet and shout “Who the fuck is Alice?”, well, frankly, you haven’t lived.

I have since found out that actually this version of the song was actually a recorded one, and was released by Smokie themselves, some years after their initial fame – in the 90s sometime I think- with the extra shouty bit added in by fat and rubbish racist comedian Roy “Chubby” Brown. I missed it by virtue of being out of the reach of English novelty records at the time, but clearly much of Europe was infected. Asking around I have discovered sightings (soundings?) of this oh-so-hilarious update being sung by the general public from Hamburg to Istanbul and beyond.

But, Smokie’s insidious reach extends beyond even this reworking of their most famous hit. They are known for other of their songs which don’t even have added sweary bits. I am, frankly, baffled by their appeal. It’s a rum do, and no mistake.

Oh, and in case you don't believe me about Albania,
here's a BBC piece from the time of that football match I mentioned.

Romanian music

An entirely subjective and limited view based more or less entirely on what I’ve seen on TV, since I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio.

Popular Romanian music can be divided into two categories – Romanianised western pop music and manele. Manele is this musical style which is apparently insanely popular, for no good reason. It’s the music of the barrio (or whatever the Romanian word for barrio is) and it is based (very obviously) on Turkish music. I feel I should like it just because it is a musical style beloved of the urban and rural proletariat and sneered upon by the middle classes, and being British and therefore class-obsessed, manele should trip all my right-on buttons. But, like Country and Western, I can’t get into it at all. It’s not half as good as the Turkish music it’s based on, it’s not really what anyone with any options would choose to listen to or dance to, and it has this really weird chav-ish subculture in which all the singers (it seems) are named like wrestlers – there’s “Adrian The Wonder Child” and “Sorinel the Kid” for example - and drive Mercs or BMWs.

(The middle class hatred of manele and desire to sweep it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn’t really exist led to a movement to ban it on TV for a while, which sounds incredible. Not quite sure why it provokes such a strong reaction since it’s basically just rubbish and you could quite easily ignore it by the simple expedient of not listening to it, which is the way I manage. I’ve never been seized by a compulsion to outlaw it and boycott TV channels that dare show it.)

Romanian pop music (of the Western pop music Romanianised form) I hear a lot more of because Bogi has recently discovered the delights of MTV and has been spending almost as much time watching it as she does Minimax. Most major streams of music are covered by the top bands of the moment. There are Romanian rappers, for example, and Romanian rockers (the rockers don’t tend to make it on to MTV though, just play music festivals, like felsziget, around the country). There is also a growing number of those X feat. Y type acts, reflecting this trend elsewhere.

Then there is a strand of groups that play Romanian versions of Latin American music (I think it’s part of the “remember we’re Latin” thing that is quite big in Romania, and an obvious bulwark against the “let’s try not to think of ourselves as Balkan” thing which is possibly behind the anti-manele campaigners). One of the most popular is this bloke called Pepe, who is like a much much uglier version of Enrique Iglesias. His videos always feature him being fawned over by large numbers of beautiful women, and in so doing clearly provide a public service in upping the self-esteem of the terminally ugly. “Look, if Pepe can get women, anyone can!”. One of the others going around at the moment is quite a catchy little number called Soarele Meu by a band called Mandinga, which I’ve heard often enough now to pretty much know the words to.

But the largest proportion of MTV Romania’s airtime is given over to boy bands. This is, I’m sure, as a result of the vast pan-global popularity of O-Zone and “that numa numa song” from last year. But this, to me, presents an interesting paradox. Romania is a pretty macho country and male stars tend to be pretty Male with a capital M. But boy bands, by their very nature, are made up of androgynous a-sexual post-teenage-boys, so as not to freak out the pre-pubescent girls (and the pre-pubescent girls’ parents) who are their principal target market. To give an example, one of Bogi’s current favourites is a band called 3 Sud-Est who have this current hit with “Cu capu-n nori”. It’s a bland piece of pop pap as you might expect, but the video is as camp as a row of tents. There are women in it, but it definitely looks like they’re there because videos have to have women in them. You wonder how these blokes deal with everyday life. Do they affect gruff voices and stand on the terraces at Steaua chewing sunflower seeds as a proof of their masculinity?

This brief overview has obviously left out vast swathes of musical diversity, such as some really really great gypsy music, and I really need to one day write about the baffling affinity for a band called Modern Talking who no-one else in the world seems to have heard of, but this will have to do for now.

Felsziget

Every summer, Budapest hosts a music festival on an island in the Danube. It’s called the Sziget (island) Festival, and is clearly a fairly big deal. This year’s luminaries include Sean Paul, Natalia Imbruglia, and I dunno, a bunch of other internationally famous stars. A couple of weeks ago it also came to my attention that Targu Mures also hosts a music festival – called the Felsziget festival. Now, my Hungarian is well up to the task of deciphering “Felsziget” as “half-island”, which I thought was quite a good name for a festival in the circumstances. Knowingly referencing another more famous festival while making it clear that this one would not be quite as good. Something akin to “Chipboardstock”, or “The Isle of Off-White”, or perhaps “Clingfilmtonbury”. (I’ve battered that gag to death haven’t I? I should have stopped at the first one. Or possibly earlier).

Anyway, I’ve since discovered that felsziget actually means something in Hungarian other than half-island. It means, go on have a guess, what could half an island be? Yep, peninsula. So, anyway, this festival was the peninsula festival of Targu Mures/Marosvasarhely. And it just so happened that we would be in town for this festival (which was this weekend just gone) and so could attend. Unlike the full sziget, this one featured basically bands from two countries only – Hungary and Romania. And, as far as I can tell, they were divided generationally too. I think because of the circumstances that people found themselves in during the 80s, the bands that have survived from that time are almost revered (and I mean revered in a non-knowing-post-modern-ironic kind of way). Hungarian blues singers and other old men front bands that seem to survive despite themselves (blues seems to be a very popular genre among Hungarians – or at least Transylvanian Hungarians – the 70s white version of the blues though rather than the 20s deep south lonely old black man version).

The Saturday night was the time we would be able to make it, and Bogi insisted on joining us, party girl that she is. So, after spending the day sweltering by and in the pool (the previously mentioned “Weekend” which is where all Marosvasarhelyiek* go when they’re not working), we wandered next door into the festival at around about 9.30. (I bet the real Sziget festival costs more than the 190,000 (Old) Lei per ticket that this one does (about €5)).

[*I’ve invented this word as an attempt to help myself follow the Hungarian suffix-ing system. –i means from that place, and ek/ok etc is a plural, so what I’m trying to say is the people from Marosvasarhely, but there’s a good chance that there’s no need for the plural bit at all since I had implied it in the context of the sentence and in Hungarian if it’s implied (such as with a number) you don’t need to add in the plural form. /end nerdy language bit]

We’d heard the turgid Quo Vadis from the pool (a Romanian band who seemed to do nothing but Deep Purple covers), and when we got in the first stage (which was obviously set aside for Hungarians on this day) was occupied by TankCsabda (Tank Trap), who seemed to be a rubbish (but youngish) heavy metal band of no great interest. Wandering through the people to the other stage down by the river we came across the Romanian stage featuring Holograf. A bunch of old men, but a million times more listenable than Tankcsabda. Bogi was a bit taken aback by the volume and we had to sit fairly far back for her to feel comfortable. I couldn’t work out whether the crowd were dividing themselves along linguistic lines or generational ones. Certainly the section we were in around Holograf seemed to feature most of the oldies (like us), singing along to old remembered tracks from the times that music were music and songs were real songs. There were very few of the yut dem (as I believe young people self refer).

After Holograf, the stage started getting filled up with yellow oil drums, which heralded the arrival of Sistem, the band who backed the Romanian entrant to this year’s Eurovision song contest. Basically their shtick seemed to be playing a house-y backing track with female vocals and overlaying it with lots of loud and energetic percussion. They were OK, but it gets a bit tiring after a while. They were also all hip young lads with wet-look haircuts who insisted on shouting the words “Targu Mures” after every song. You know the kind of thing “Thank you TARGU MURES!”, “It’s great to be here in TARGU MURES”, “Now, TARGU MURES, this next one is called…”. You’d think people would see through this ploy after a while and stop cheering, but nobody really did.

Back on the Hungarian stage, as we left Sistem to their geography lessons and gel-fest, it was time for Deak Bill Blues Band. Deak Bill is yet another old Hungarian man doing blues, thought this time with the added twist of being an amputee. He has only one leg and stands at the mike belting out the songs leaning on his crutch while resting his stump on the lower strut of the crutch. I was sceptical but won over by his energy and the singalong nature of the crowd. One of his songs (Rossz Ver - bad blood) was very familiar to me, which makes me realise I have been taking things in even if I do get bothered by my weak level of Hungarian. I wanted to stay for the last band, Romanian rappers Parasitii (mostly to see if they would take a chance of doing their most famous song “Fuck You Romania” in front of the semi-Hungarian crowd that this festival would throw up), but by this time Bogi was tired and noised-out. So to the strains of Deak Bill singing Hendrix’s Hey Joe in Hungarian (though it’s probably spelt Hely Gyó in Magyar), we wended our way out through the long haired crowd and home. I realised afterwards that in the two hours-ish that we wandered through the festival crowds I didn’t once smell anyone smoking marijuana. Which must say something, though I’m not sure what.

Final observation - The girls handing out free condoms had www.secs.ro splashed over their T-shirt, which made me laugh partly because of the cunning way of spelling sex, but also because Erika's school is at www.sec.ro, so I imagine lots of people sending emails to Erika's office asking for free johnnies. Little things please little minds.

Numa numa yay

There is a song which you hear everywhere here. It’s by a Romanian boy band called O-Zone and its title escapes me, but its main lyric goes “Numa Numa Yay. Numa Numa Numa Yay”. Romanians told me that it was a huge hit all over Europe, but I suspected they were exaggerating or being misled by an excitably patriotic media “A Belgian bought that Romanian record! We are finally recognized in the west of the continent! First Adrian Mutu and now this! Romania is on the European map!”

But it’s true. In Spain on a train I heard a father singing it to his young pissed off looking son after a day on the beach. Then in a record store in Barcelona, at the bank of listening posts next to new albums by The Cure, Prodigy, and Beyonce, was the O-Zone album. It really IS big all over Europe. It is, I’m led to believe, this year’s big Euro summer hit. It makes sense – it obeys all the rules of Euro summer hits, which are of course:

1. Your record’s hook line shall either make no sense (eg that Spanish bipididibipi thing from last year), or be in some kind of grammatically correct but not normal English (eg “All that she wants is another baby”, or “I’m serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer”) [Of course my Romanian is not good enough yet to know whether "Numa Numa Yay" is in fact a searing critique of Kant or Wittgenstein, but I think it probably isn't]
2. Each year’s hit shall come from a different country (eg all of the above) in a kind of rotating pan-euro equality scheme. Possibly it’s a Socrates project.
3. The bands that make the songs shall commit to only have one summer of success before vanishing into the unknown. Whatever happened to Aqua? TaTu? Snap? Ace of Base? Does anyone know? And does anyone care?
4. The songs must be catchy but, ultimately, rubbish.
   
   So, from this we can conclude that O-zone are already heading into the sunset, and that next year’s big hit will be a Byelorussian number entitled “lobynobysoby” or “I am crestfallen in sincerity”
   
   Until then, once you get numa numa yay into your brain it’s absolutely impossible to get it out.