Apathy Sketchpad

It has long been a pet peeve of mine that not one thing about Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” is even slightly ironic, except that it is called Ironic and contains nothing ironic at all. But recently I have found a new song to mock, for much the same reasons.

Anyone who has been to a club lately — even a crap one — will have heard Scooter’s “The Logical Song”, and, if they were listening to the lyrics, have been rather puzzled as to how it got its name. I was. It doesn’t mention logic, and therefore it isn’t very logical to call it “The Logical Song”. A quick internet search, though, threw up a file that answered all my questions (Question one: Why is it called The Logical Song? Question two: Why is it so good?). This file was the original Logical Song.

I have no information about Scooter’s influences, motives or intentions when they covered Supertramp’s song, but I do have both songs, random speculation, and nineteen years of accumulated cynicism. For these reasons, large parts of the following paragraph may have little or no basis in reality.

I have long been extremely cynical about dance music. I found that most good songs have more than one lyric. I like a song you can perform live. I’m not impressed by just repeating smaller and smaller sections of a sample until your computer crashes. And anyway it always seems to me that all known dance tracks use only three instruments:
1. That heavy chords one — The Logical Song is full of it (Scooter’s version, anyway).
2. That high pitches whiney one that slides between notes (’Till I Come is a good example).
3. Samba whistle. How I hate the samba whistle.

Getting back to the point, though, I figure Scooter looked at Supertamp’s song, liked it a bit, and applied the Dance Cover Instructions to it.
1. Take out all but the first verse. Repeat said verse as many times as you feel you need to.
2. Get a female vocalist.
3. Speed it up.
4. Use some combination of the three instruments above.
5. Shout over it.

This explains why it’s so good. The answer to question one simply requires a glance through the original lyrics. The song is about how much better a child’s outlook is than an adults. It is not a very happy song. It almost seems like Scooter missed the point.

But they didn’t miss the point by nearly so much as the nice people who teach English as a second language by using songs as learning aids, who invite students to put the words into columns marked with happy or sad faces, but, having missed said point so completely, put their examples (sensible and fanatical) in entirely the wrong columns.

This made me begin to question whether they were in fact qualified to teach English as even a second language, so I looked at a few of their other songsheets. One invited people to “translate the sentences in red”, which was followed by a paragraph of text entirely in black.

I’m so glad English is my first language.