I've often returned to this comment of hers, to remind myself that there is still a glimmer of hope that she can deconstruct images .... and that perhaps she will gain new insight into post-colonial social identities once she changes her last name to a Samoan one. However, this is probably not a memory to mention in the upcoming maid-of-honor speech I need to draft for her wedding....
At any rate, I was reminded of her comment recently as I was listening to the Aladdin soundtrack. Never mind why I was recently listening to it. Suffice to say, I was. (As a tween I was big into singalongs and musicals, and the parents were okay with Disney. Disney combined with church choir set the stage for the recently-discovered, out-and-proud karaoke diva.)So since I had all the Disney cartoon songs memorized as a kid, I noticed the lyrics to the opening song "Arabian Nights" was different on a later version of the soundtrack than they are in the original.
I remember the original being: Oh, I come from a land / From a faraway place / Where the caravan camels roam / Where they cut off your ear / If they don't like your face / It's barbaric but hey, it's home.
In the mysteriously-changed lyrics, the ear and face bit is changed to: Where it's flat and immense / And the heat is intense. . . .
A quick google search reveals that the lyrics were changed in 1993 on both the audio and video releases due to protests from the ADC and others. Interesting, the stuff that goes on around you when you're an adolescent, stuff that you'll care about later (even organizations you'll work with...) but aren't on your radar at the time.
5 comments:
I remember the original lyrics and was surprised when I watched the movie later and found they had been excised (thankfully, I might add). Still, while I don't want my son listening to "where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face," I hope that copies of the song stick around for years to come so that we may always trot out Edward Said and say "look how we, Euro-centric people that we are, construct the other."
Wait, hang on. There are people in Africa? I was reading www.joshreads.com this morning -- look at the Mark Trail cartoon from yesterday. I thought Africa was just made up of precocious tigers and killer elephants.
Wow, I haven't read Said in a very long time. When he died a few years ago, I re-read some of his stuff. Bedtime brain food for the little one?
That Mark Trail cartoon is hilarious. In a sad, sad way...
Yeah, I haven't read Said in a long time either. But the comics, I keep up with the comics...
Dude, I know that this post is way late, but I just had to mention: the REAL REAL original lyrics to Arabian nights were, "Where they cut off your hand if you steal from the stand." They were then changed to ear/face and and apparently to whatever it is now.
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