Sometimes, when you hear a specific piece of music, the words fail to register in your head. Usually, this is background stuff; you hear it on hold, or it’s in an radio ad you hear a lot, or it’s just so damn catchy that, years later, you’re remembering that damn “Garfield-1-2-3-2-3″ jingle that haunted Cleveland for about ten years and wondering how the hell that’s even a phone number.
The Champions League Anthem is like that. It’s a Tony Britten (the guy who did the music for…um…”Robocop”) adaptation of an old Handel piece (“Zadok the Priest”), and it’s musically a really nice piece that lends a solemn air to the competition. It’s only when you get to the actual words being sung that you start to wonder how much time UEFA really put into it.
The words for the anthem were written in English, French, and German, the three official languages of UEFA. The lyrics that the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chorus is singing, untranslated and unabashedly stolen from Wikipedia, are as follows:
Ce sont les meilleures équipes
Sie sind die allerbesten Mannschaften
The main event
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les Grandes Équipes
The Champions
Une grande réunion
Eine große sportliche Veranstaltung
The main event
Ils sont les meilleurs
Sie sind die Besten
These are the champions
Now, by itself, those aren’t really that bad. It sure sounds pretty when they’re signing it, and you can definitely pick out the English parts when you’re listening (especially if you like that Heineken ad, where the chorus reminds you that you can be a champion, too, if you just drink a lot of Heineken. Because, hey, that worked for Marlon King, right?). It’s only after running the words through a translator (or having Wikipedia do it for you, which is really just as effective) that you notice that there are a couple of, ah, recurring themes:
Those are the best teams
They are the very best teams
The main event
The Champions
The Best
The Big Teams
The Champions
A big event
A big sports event
The main event
They are the best
They are the best
These are the Champions
So basically, whoever wrote the words (and I’m guessing it’s the “Robocop” guy, because it fits) just came up with two or three sentence fragments, ran them through Babelfish, and called it a day. And since he didn’t write the music, either (that was Handel), it’s possible that this theme took about three hours to put together (a half hour for the Babelfish translation, two and a half hours getting a three year old to come up with the English versions).
So there you have it: the Champions League anthem is like a musical version of Real Madrid: all style, no substance.
There are only three languages in Europe: English, French, and German.
I am sure the Spaniards, Italians, and Portugese will be glad to hear of this and rectify the travesty that counts as a “language” in their homelands.
Oh, jesus christ. I STILL sing that stupid ass commercial. And it’s not an Indians game unless I hear that other retarded commercial whisper “CONRAD’S”.
And now I’m going to giggle every time I hear/see that UEFA commercial.
\completely irrelevant
\\thanks ever so much for getting that fucking jingle stuck in my head.
HA! I knew I’d get someone!
Aw-AW-AWWWWWWWWWWW…
/starts humming
All I know is that every time I hear it on the tv I get goosebumps.
I experimented with it as a ringtone, but it lost some of it’s cache, so I switched back to Lucky Dube’s; Dizzy, Herb Smoker.
[...] UEFA Needs a Lyricist “Sometimes, when you hear a specific piece of music, the words fail to register in your head. Usually, this is background stuff; you hear it on hold, or it’s in an radio ad you hear a lot, or it’s just so damn catchy that, years later, you’re remembering that damn ‘Garfield-1-2-3-2-3′ jingle that haunted Cleveland for about ten years and wondering how the hell that’s even a phone number.” (Avoiding the Drop) [...]