SOUNDTRACK: DAÐI FREYR OG GAGNAMAGNIÐ-“10 Years” (Iceland, Eurovision Entry 2021).
I first learned about Daði og Gagnamagnið last year when Eurovison didn’t happen. I have no idea how they came on my radar (something in Instagram, I assume).
Daði og Gagnamagnið is the creation of Daði Freyr Pétursson. Much like The ROOP, the visuals from Daði and his band are what really sells the song(s).
Daði is the composer/musician and in performances, he is supported by his sister Sigrún Birna Pétursdóttir (backing vocalist), wife Árný Fjóla Ásmundsdóttir (dancer), and friends Hulda Kristín Kolbrúnardóttir (backing vocalist), Stefán Hannesson (dancer), and Jóhann Sigurður Jóhannsson (dancer)—known as “Gagnamagnið”. Gagnamagnið, means “the amount of data”, and is the Icelandic word for “data plan”.
And the real selling point? Teal green sweaters with pixelized portraits of themselves on them. Last year’s “Think About Things” was pretty awesome (the video is incredible). A blast of disco fun.
This year’s “10 Years” opens with a string quartet playing a sad sounding melody and then Daði appears singing in his deep clipped style. Then a huge disco bass line comes in and before you know it, the song is in full dance mode–a swinging disco confection with the remarkable hook
Everything about you [pause} I like.
Add in some disco wah wah guitars and some irresistibly dopey dance moves and its impossible to look away.
And what on earth are the weird keytars? Presumably homemade and non-functioning except that now they shoot sparks from the bottom.
Just when you think its all over, up pops a fairly large choir of little girls to sing along before the disco resumes.
And then it’s over but they are not done because after an awkward pause of them standing there, one of the guys shoots a confetti cannon at the camera.
Novelty? Sure. Funny? Absolutely. Catchy? Definitely.
UPDATE: This song came in fourth.
[READ: May 10, 2021] “Girl Crazy”
Back in the mid to late 1990s, David Sedaris wrote a few Shouts & Murmurs for the New Yorker. It’s interesting to see a writer whom you know for a certain style of writing crafting jokes in a very different manner. Shouts & Murmurs are rarely actually funny, and that’s true of most of these.
Obviously the topical nature of most of these means there’s a component of “wait, what was going on?”, but the set up usually explains everything pretty well. Now we are more likely to say, “Aw, remember when that’s all we cared about?”
This piece is about when Ellen DeGeneris’s character Ellen was about to come out on Ellen. (Wow, remember when that was a big deal?). And like several of these pieces, these are written as letters to the person in charge.
There are five letters here.
The first suggests that a six year old boy from North Carolina wouldn’t have gotten in trouble for sexual harassments for kissing a girl in his class if only he had kissed a boy. The network best not mess with Regis and Kathie Lee.
The second is pretty psyched about the change in Ellen. What he wants to know is, how soon after she comes out will she start making out with college women.
The third is from a lesbian who complains that not all lesbians own bookstores and drink coffee. There are hundreds of us who have never read a book. Don’t pigeonhole all your minority characters into small boxes. No doubt your network is run by the Japanese who want to make extra money via controversy. Well, forget it, Emperor Mitsubishi.
This fourth letter is from a man who requests that ABC turn Hugh Downs into a homosexual. The man is a committed heterosexual in a loving marriage but Hugh Downs is such a fox and he would love to watch him cuddle a guest.
Finally the last person says that if ABC plans to make her a slutty lesbian, they should model her after his ex-wife who is now living the slutty high life.
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