Gary Numan for the 21st Century Student
One of my MySpace friends lives far away and all that junk, and the current song on this friend's MySpace page is a song called "Boten Anna." It was like foreign and stuff, so I had to search to figure out what the song was about:
"Boten Anna"...is a song by Swedish dance musician Basshunter. Due to the song, Basshunter became a noted artist in his native Sweden, as well as Denmark and Norway after the release of the single in 2006....
The Swedish lyrics of Boten Anna tell the story of a female IRC user mistaken for an IRC bot by the vocalist who later finds out the truth; subsequently, however, he states that she will always remain a bot in his eyes. Despite the esoteric subject of the lyrics, the song was well-received by mainstream media, albeit the word bot was frequently mistaken for boat (as many people don't know how to pronounce bot correctly), and the double meaning of channel (IRC channel mistaken for the water body with the same name - channel). The video to the song shows Basshunter riding a pedal boat down a canal, further adding to the confusion.
In the Dutch Top 40 in the Netherlands there is currently (end of august 2006, entering the chart at 27 and currently on #9) a spoof of the song. It is also called "Boten Anna" and it is by "De Gebroeders Ko"....Although they know the original song isn't about a boat, they translated it as if it is about a boat (a boat called Anna). "Boten" is the plural form of "boat" in Dutch.
Kinda like when the Chipmunks covered Devo's "Whip It" - the promotional pictures showed the Chipmunks playing with whipped cream.
And Gary Numan, back in his Tubeway Army days, mined this species confusion genre. He had an instrumental entitled "I Nearly Married a Human". (This same album had "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "Praying to the Aliens.")
And on that note, I'll repost something from "My So Called Gay Life":
The amazing story started after a night on the town, 6 hours later Jonas "Basshunter" Altberg (21) puts the song "Boten Anna" on his homepage. During few hours the song had been downloaded 30000 times and now the song is riding Scandinavian charts.
Basshunter's web site is here. The video is on YouTube.
[OE 9/18 - For a version of the video with English subtitles, visit this post in the Ontario Technoblog.]
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