Hasa Diga, Eebowai: Because Misery Loves To Laugh

A warning: If you live in a conservative place, please do yourself a favour by either turning the volume of your speakers down or wearing headphones instead. The lyrics of this song are rather controversial, and your religious friends might find it offensive. So yeah. Your call.

In order to take a break from all my depressing posts, I shall present to you a song from a play recommended to me by Persephone. This song is called 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' and it is from the musical entitled The Book of Mormon. This musical is by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone. If the names sound familiar to you, that's probably because Parker and Stone created the show South Park whilst Lopez co-wrote and co-composed Avenue Q. With this combination, I'm sure you'd know what to expect from this musical by now.

To be honest with you, dear reader, I have yet to watch the play and listen to the other songs, but putting this song on repeat got me inspired to 'close read' the song in relation to human instinct regarding survival. Please do note that I have never written such a post before seeing as how I'm too self-centred for intellectual shit, but since writing is supposed to be my university life then I might as well do this. Another disclaimer of mine is that I critique music the informal way for the lack of knowledge regarding music theory jargon. So please forgive me if I sound so un-scholarly or whatever.We cool? We cool.

I'd like to start with the music—its beat, the genres that influenced it, and more importantly the tone of the music. Upon  hearing the song for the first time, I was struck by how it sounded much like a Disney musical song. Think 'Hakuna Matata' meets 'Under The Sea'. In fact, the more you listen to it the more it begins to sound like a parody of 'Hakuna Matata' (And it is perhaps no coincidence that the latter is mentioned in the song). Like the famous song from The Lion King, 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' incorporates element of African folk dance with Broadway-style big band complete with a chorus of girls chanting 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' in the chorus. From this combination of musical styles along with a beat you can dance to, 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' without the lyrics could present itself as a very optimistic song about life in the wild.

The interesting part comes when you consider the song lyrics as juxtaposed with its music. Without lyrics, 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' would most likely sound like a mere rip-off of 'Hakuna Matata'. Needless to say, it probably wouldn't be as interesting. The fun part starts when the actor starts to sing, for this is when your eyes perhaps widen a bit and then you nod slightly whilst mouthing, 'Oh, it's a satire.' And that's when you realise how effective the song is, and how the writer(s) and/or composer(s) managed to create a fun and yet sad song to listen to by maximising on how huge 'Hakuna Matata' is as a symbol amongst our generation. And given how easy people can relate with both the angst of the lyrics and the nostalgia brought upon by a 'Hakuna Matata'-sounding like song, the song becomes even more memorable for us.

So what exactly makes the lyrics memorable?

Let us first look upon the structure of the lyrics. If you haven't listened to the song yet, please do so now because I am a lazy ass and I do not fucking want to cite lines for you. Good? Good. Okay, so with the Youtube video buffered, please skip to the time given to you in the text.

At 0:44, that is where you will see the 'Hakuna Matata' reference in the lyrics. That's pretty neat. (See what I did there?) The good thing about this song is that it unfolds like a story. When the character asks the main singer in the song about the song's meaning, the main singer only says 'Kind of'.' He doesn't give us a clue regarding what it actually means. From this point on, we're led to believe that the phrase 'Hasa Diga Eebowai' is an optimistic phrase, and the way it is sung by the chorus only adds to the 'This sounds like an optimistic song' fuel. The pitch and beat of the song immediately plants the idea in the listener's mind that the song is supposed to be celebratory. However, one can note that despite the optimistic sound of the song it is actually extremely sad due to the lyrics (starting from 0:53).

{to be continued}

{too tired}