Kraut Boys Can't Jump

Everybody including my editors is going nuts about this band Erdmöbel's No. 1 Hits album full of translated pop covers. How to put this politely now? You'll get it righ away, when you listen to their cover of Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade Of Pale" (above(. It's even more evident, when you compare their version of "Can't get you out of my head" with Kylie Minogue's original (which is pretty shlocky Eurodisco to begin with). Well, if you wanted to prove the Sprockets nature of German pop culture, you sure could play some Erdmöbel in class. Reminded me a bit of those Burmese, who smuggled in pop CDs nobody wanted to hear, because Madonna and Michael Jackson were just too exotic sounding. So they recorded them a bit out of tune with local musiocians and wrote some native lyrics. Since "Papa Don't Preach" didn't really translate culturally, they called the song "The Fish That Got Caught In The Net" and told the story of a rural love affair. The main hit when we travelled Burma was quite a different song though. Went to a Karaoke Bar near the Chinese border, where some opium lords had their girls sing for them and so we were treated to about five versions of "Always Coca Cola".

Alright, enough pop cultural chauvinism. Well deserved as it may be.