The Dirt Field

I was particularly stressed after coming home late from work yesterday, and decided to unwind by spending an hour or so browsing iTunes for new music. I branched out from my usual artists by exploring several international bands, and found this great song on the German version of iTunes called “Boten Anna” that had a heavy dance sound to it. After a moment of urging from my roommate, I impulsively bought this song and spent the next hour dancing dramatically around the upstairs of my house with him. It felt like a wild night at a Eurotrash disco, complete with beer, breakdancing, and jumping on the bed, and I mentally congratulated myself for experimenting with some badass German music.

That was until this morning, when my roommate casually mentioned that he’d Googled our new favorite song and found, not only that it was actually Swedish, but that the lyrics were not nearly as sophisticated as we’d expected.

“The Swedish lyrics of Boten Anna tell the story of a female Internet Relay Chat (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.” –Wikipedia

Which means that we had an impromptu dance party to a song about an Internet snafu. I think this makes me a tremendous dork, but if you think about it, it can’t be any worse than being the guy who actually penned these lyrics. How do you even begin to pitch that to your record company? “You’ll never believe what happened! I was online and I, like, accidentally talked to this girl like she was the site administrator. It was so crazy; so crazy in fact that I’ve written this great song about it!” The kicker is that this pitch must have actually worked, which is how I came to spend an hour last night dancing to this poor soul’s computer conundrum. I might as have been doing a ballet to Ctrl+Alt+Del.

I am not even going to name the other song we downloaded for our dance marathon. Suffice to say that this song was popular for about fifteen seconds when I was a junior in high school, and that if the band that recorded the song were to be notified that somebody purchased their song yesterday, that somebody actually shelled out $1.00 to listen to their song now, the only question on all of their minds would be, “Good lord, WHY?”