"Barbie Girl" by Aqua: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We are your anatomically incorrect dolls of details, your Danish pop machines at Minutia. You're Barbie Boys a bizarre trivia. Yes, there is truly nothing beyond our ken See what I did there? Shut the fuck up? My name? God, Oh my god, Oh, You've made me so angry.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: Gotta hate this song, Gotta hate everything that this song represents.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: Continue, what's your name? Oh? I'm Alex Heigel? Sorry, and today, folks, the time has come. We knew it had to happen at some point this summer. Thanks for Greta Gerwig's film, we cannot avoid the Barbie buzz any longer, try as though Heigel might. We are taking a look at a song that, to my surprise, isn't actually in the movie, which we'll get to over the course of this episode, but it's gotten swept along in the great pink tsunami of media hype. We are talking about Barbie Girl by Aqua, one of the most distinctive, memorable songs of the nineties. I don't know how to phrase it. I'll be honest. Maybe this is just my own bias, but I am hard pressed to name a song that did so well commercially that is so undeniably annoying. Does anyone genuinely like this song? I tweeted us using the hashtag Barbie Blitz don't. I don't think so. I mean, just to me, it's what's a better hashtag? I can't think of one. No, that's good. It's good because I was trying to think of a weird Nazi thing. Yeah, no, I know, the Blitz was as close as I was willing to get. Yeah, I mean to me, Barbie Girls firmly in the novelty camp alongside Chipmunk songs in the Monster mash. Even during my years as a wedding DJ, I would rarely or ever turn to this song. But I feel like it's unique in that it's a song that almost everybody seems to agree is bad. Or put another way, I think very few people listen to it for pleasure, Yet people still seem to have a tremendous amount of affection for it and for my particular mid millennial age group which notice how I'm very tactfully avoiding saying middle age. It evokes an innocent, relatively care free time, but it was also a simpler time in the world, this pre nine to eleven, pre social media, pre pseudo civil war that we're living through right now. So maybe people have good feelings for it just for the time that it came out in nineteen ninety seven. Heigel, I cannot imagine you have anything nice to say about this song, But because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'll ask anyway, what do you think of Barbie Girl?

00:02:51
Speaker 2: Oh my god, what a tremendous piece of sh my god. You know, I don't advocate for international nuclear war much, but we should bomb Deadmark for thea on the anniversary of Oppenheimer whatever they did not put them.

00:03:15
Speaker 1: Oh my god.

00:03:16
Speaker 2: I hadn't listened to this song for so long, and then I finally heard it today. Because you maybe do this and it is as bad as I remembered it.

00:03:27
Speaker 1: That's impressive to me.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: There's things that I like about eurodance. There's things that I like about dance music. I like a lot of like Detroit techno. I like a lot of stuff that's like abrasive and unpleasant Baltimore club music.

00:03:40
Speaker 1: Stuff that's like.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Charitably described as difficult for the ears.

00:03:44
Speaker 1: This though, holy sh okay. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man, I detest europop.

00:03:56
Speaker 2: I just don't. I don't get it.

00:03:57
Speaker 1: That actually surprises me. I could see you appreciating the song craft.

00:04:03
Speaker 2: No, I like their I like the weird period of euro disco where they were all into really being.

00:04:10
Speaker 1: Evil Italo disco. Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, precisely.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, just drum machines and echo and like minor key synths and Italian uh translated vocals that don't make any sense.

00:04:32
Speaker 1: I do love that, yeah, which is also what I like about europop in general.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, but when you make it, it's something as lame and uh triumphant as Barbie, Like, you know, here's my thing. Why do you need to celebrate Barbie. It's like making a pro Coca Cola song.

00:04:51
Speaker 1: It's a satire. It's not.

00:04:55
Speaker 2: I guarantee you the message was lost, and I speak as one of the receivers.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: I guarantee you that message was lost on people.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: It's not. It didn't translate. People just got the catchiness of it.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I prefer the sinisterness of tallow disco and uh yeah, I don't know. I got I this song and I just don't respect.

00:05:21
Speaker 2: The Danish there. They've they peaked with Hamlet, and.

00:05:26
Speaker 1: Hamlet didn't write that, you know. Yeah, what are they gonna do to me? Though?

00:05:29
Speaker 2: Are they gonna cancel me? What are they gonna do? Cut off my supply of tinned fish?

00:05:34
Speaker 1: Don't they make those cookies in those like blue tins that everybody's grandma would put. Yeah, materials, what do we do with that? Yeah?

00:05:40
Speaker 2: Exactly what do we do with them? We keep in sewing materials in them? What do I do with this song?

00:05:46
Speaker 1: You know?

00:05:46
Speaker 2: American techno like Frankie Knuckles, like the Chicago techno, like all there's this rich history of like American dance music that's really born of disenfranchisement, like of being like, oh, well, we don't have the resources for like a live band, so we're just gonna loop the really danceable part of a drum track, or you know, we're gonna take like we have a drum machine, but it's kind of so we're just gonna loop that and blow it out. And like that's where American techno and American dance music comes from it, and then twenty years later you have this just lame perversion of it. That's just like, yeah, we got those same samples, uh, Barbie. That's our commentary on it, Like, how would you feel if I created Hamlet Girl? How would you feel if I brought in I don't know, Max Martin and I made a novelty hit that was called Hamlet Boy.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: I think in order for that to work, it would have to be an Americana song produced by like Rick Rubin, and then you would have kind of rules.

00:06:47
Speaker 2: Okay, so what if we get Rick Rubin and we get who's the preeminent America Jason Jason Isbelle and Jack White? Yes, exactly. Now we're onto a formula. We get Jason isbel we get Jack White, who's a drummer today? Who would really it doesn't matter. Drummers are replaceable, and we'd write a periodic version of Hamlet and that's our novelty hit.

00:07:16
Speaker 1: And it's called in our own cultural milieu. Yeah, we take their icon and put it in our cultural milieu. That's how you do. It's called Hamlet Boy. All right, great, cancel a show. Jordan take us in well, from Barbie's surprisingly scandalous backstory in the German red light district to Aqua's surprising fixation on Rick Astley, to the lengthy lawsuit between the band and the toy makers behind the doll and Hell, we also got a lengthy segment on pop music used for torture. Appropriately enough, Here's everything you didn't know about Barbie Girl. The story of Barbie Girl begins in the land We're all pop ears originate Scandinavia, or at least Denmark, which I'm told technically counts as Scandinavia, so please hold your angry letters. It begins with a collective of musicians and DJs who originally formed under the name Joyspeed like sounds vaguely obscene. The core of this group were Soren Rasted, which is kind of a very metal name, and Klaus Noreen, which is less metal, who got together in the late eighties when they were pop upsessed teens bonding over de pesche modes simple minds You two and David Bowie, And much like the two lead writers for Abba, Bjorn and Benny, these two future Aquaco founders got their start in music by making the soundtrack for a Danish movie which sounds like a soft core porn nineteen ninety four is Naughty Frieda and the Fearless Spies. Shockingly, that is not a soft core porn. I have checked it out. It's actually a children's movie. In the Venn diagram of softcore porn or children's movies, very small overlap. But I guess they Naughty Frita and the Fearless Spies. How does one get that, Gig Jordan? They want a contest, which I just Scandinavia with their arts grants and their social safety nets and their competitions for scoring children's movies. I guess yeah. I never would have guessed. But around the time when they were working on the soundtrack project, these two Soren and Klaus, began working with a local DJ named Renee Diff It's probably not how you pronounce it, but that's how it's spelled, who was a regular on the Danish club circuit. And this is interesting to me because this guy, Rena Diff, the DJ, told Rolling Stone for their epic oral history on Barbie Girl last year in twenty twenty two that his all time favorite artist will always be Rick Astley. I really really love Rick Astley, and you know, I've interviewed Rick Astley on several occasions and I can confirm he's quite lovely. I've actually pitched and Never Going to Give You Up episode of TMI to Heigel on many occasions when we first conceived the show, and he steadfastly refused, even after it would have been a great April fools Day thing. We publish it under a different name and people listen. Then all of a sudden we come on talking about Rick Astley and Never Gonna Give You Up. It's a podcast version of Rick Rowling. It's great for years. He's been doing this people. I'm telling you, if enough people comment on the Apple podcast, refuse, if we get five people to ask for Rick Astley, we still won't do it. I'm sorry, I won't do it. So I'm gonna take this little opportunity to shoe horn in some of my favorite little known facts about Rick Astley because I'll never get another chance again. Did you know, Heigel, whose head is literally in his hands right now, that Rick Astley sang backup on can You Feel the Love Tonight? On the Lion King soundtrack? He was uncredited. It's my understanding that Rick Astley went into the studio to visit his friend Elton John, and Elton invited him to sing on it at the last minute, alongside British pop star Gary Barlow of the band Take That I Believe and so Kiki d Elton John's seventies duet partner on the hit Don't Go Break in My Heart. There's an internet rumor here here, this will interest you. There's an internet rumor that Freddy Krueger actor Robert England was also one of the backing singers on Can You Feel the Love Tonight? But he debunked that. Yeah, he debunked that recently. He said some interview it was like the Daily Mail or something. I was like, yeah, I did a lot of voice over work. I honestly can't remember all the things I've done, but I'm pretty sure I didn't do that.

00:11:27
Speaker 2: That'd be amazing if they called him in. If they called him and they were like, do the Freddy voice and he's like, don't.

00:11:30
Speaker 1: Go break in my heart to night, bitch. I think In the same interview, like the headline of it was something like I look in the mirror and I scare myself or something like bitch. Yeah, he's, he's, He's.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: The eighties, Freddy Renn is famous for introducing bitch into the slasher movie parlance.

00:11:51
Speaker 1: I didn't do that.

00:11:52
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it starts with it. It starts within Dream Warriors. I think the third installment. There's a woman who wants to become an actress and Freddy comes out of a TV and grabs her, and he shoves her into the TV's head.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: And he goes, Welcome to prime Time.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: Bitch, and that began the grand tradition of Freddy calling people bitch.

00:12:14
Speaker 1: So, Aaron Paul, I'm breaking bad. Probably owes some residuals.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Yeah exactly, and so yeah, you would have a can you feel the love to night? Bitch?

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Well back to Rick Astley before we returned to Barbie Girl. Another fun fact about Rick Astley that I really love in a welcome return to our It belongs in a museum segment. Rick has revealed that his iconic trench coat from the Never Gonna Give You Up video was swiped, literally taken off his back by a bunch of teens as he was performing at an outdoor gig in Northern Ireland in the late eighties. So somewhere out there is a vital piece of terrible music history which brings us back to Barbie Girl. That's why I gotta love the Irish Man figure this. They don't care who you are, off your back and the apparently mid song he was doing like some kind of BBC recording.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: Did you ever see The Commitments? No, oh, man, dude, you would love The Commitments. That movie's great.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: It's about a bunch of dubliners who form a soul band. It's a great movie.

00:13:21
Speaker 2: You would love it because they do like they they're doing, like motown covers and stuff.

00:13:25
Speaker 1: It's a great film. Commitments command check out. I gotta see that. That sounds incredible. I love how much people in the United Kingdom know their soul so much. Americans like Northern Soul, that whole movement. Yeah, so fascinating to me, and like the whole second career that those people have. What is it?

00:13:45
Speaker 2: I think I saw Eric Burton at one point say something that was incredibly condescending but also kind of true, which was that the British rescued black American music from the dust spin of American history, which is not true when you actually look at the record sales of like soul and blues records and what they call race records in the States. But as far as pop music like it, he is actually kind of true like they did.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: The British loved soul and blues in a way that American white people didn't. And that's kind of how the quiet part loud about that is that that's how you kind of get the latter half of twentieth century American pop music is British people who loved black American music. Really fascinating to me and also really kind of grim. Well, it's about to get even grimmer because we're going back to the europop of Barbie Girl, because we're talking about the Danish. Yes, this future aqua DJ Renee Diff. He made something of a name for himself in Denmark by rapping during his DJ seys, and you know, I can't conzure up what Danish rapping sounds like. I'm sure it's fantastic. This fall helped this guy get a job on a This is great help us DJ get a job and a Norway to Denmark ferry. They had a DJ hired to play on the Norway to Denmark Ferry, which fulfills our large boat quotient. For this episode, which is wonderful. We love that. We do love that for you for me. While aboard this fairy, Renee diffed. The DJ was in the audience while a shipboard game was being played, kind of like Wheel of Fortune, And while he was in the audience, he was struck by the Vana White style hostess of this game. And her name was Lenae Nystrom, better known to us for our purposes as the future lead singer of Barbie Girl. And according to Renee, Renee sent several months quote flirting my pants off, and they dated for a few years before they ultimately split, and then she would go on and date fell little Aqua member sore and rasted so off the bat you get a kind of a Fleetwood max situation, which would have no apparent impact on Aqua's artistic output. But I just think it's I just think it's worth noting you go to do the flight of the concourse impression.

00:16:15
Speaker 2: Oh Fleetwood MA made some of the best albums in the seventies.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: Realms. No it's not true, nicely done.

00:16:25
Speaker 2: No, no Danish person who's ever spent any amount of time flirting their pants off.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: I feel like they probably have a lot of sex in Denmark. Well, you know, I'm not. I don't have firm stances on many things. Well, maybe to keep warm the name one Danish person with sexual magnetism. Name one Danish person the villain from Casino Royale Mas. What's his name? Max Migelson from It's a great question. I I don't know a famous I think he might be Daish. Great, Wow, tremendous. He's a great actor. I love he's a great actors Blood on command.

00:17:11
Speaker 2: At Dude, have you ever seen Another Round? He's tremendous in that movie. He was a professional dancer before becoming an actor. He does like a full dance routine at the end of that movie. That's incredible. He was also he's also Hannibal. He's like the NBC show Hannibal is incredible.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, you love that show. I love Hannibal.

00:17:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, Brian Fuller anyway, Yeah, but I can't take them seriously sexually. Uh.

00:17:40
Speaker 1: That surprises me. They're very good looking.

00:17:42
Speaker 2: They are good looking, but they seem like like large statues that you'd approach like there's no art of seduction involved, Like you just kind of.

00:17:55
Speaker 1: Like there's a forum you fill out a part of the social social service.

00:17:59
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, some and very formally meets you in a lobby and you kind of fill out several forms in triplic kit and then you use some hand sanitizer yep.

00:18:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh. Anyway, so you have Renee the DJ, working with Soren and Klaus, these two film soundtrack guys. Renee brings his new girlfriend linee I'm gonna have a really hard time keeping those tea names apart, and together they form a foursome that they call joy Speed, and they were different in that they were a completely self contained group. Klaus and Soren would do the production for the group and Renee diff would do the rapping and Renee would perform the main vocals. And in ninety ninety five they released their debut single, Itsy Bitsy Spider, which was a minor hit in Sweden but not big enough, and they were dropped by their label and management, so that led them to start all over and change their name to Aqua, choosing the name from a poster scene in their dressing room, and the new songs were recorded with the very techno friendly instrument known as the Roland JV two eight zero, which synthesized oganic instruments, and I helped give their music a new sound, and this eventually earned them a record deal with Universal Music Denmark. All of which leads us, of course, to really the only reason you want to hear about Aqua if you live in North America. Barbie Girl.

00:19:16
Speaker 3: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment, tell us about how they wrote Barbie Girl.

00:19:34
Speaker 2: The idea for Barbie Girl came after the band tended an art exhibit on kitsch culture, which tracks speaking to Rolling Stone for the oral history the magazine did it the song, Soren said, I went to an art exhibition at a store in Copenhagen. They'd taken a bunch of Barbie dolls and we had a planet out of them. It looked like a big round ball. It made me think of life in plastic. It's fantastastic. End quotes, begin quotes. I thought that was a great line. Then I wrote, come on, Barbie, let's go party.

00:20:08
Speaker 1: End quote. It's not bridge over troubled water, but you know it'll do serve the Americans their slop anyway, Barbie.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: We can't repeat that word without paying royalties. To Mattel, She's a whole episode in and of herself, but we have to do a quick sidebar She was produced by Mattel Toy Manufacturers, co founded nineteen forty five by Ruth Handler and her husband Elliott, along with a family friend.

00:20:39
Speaker 1: According to p.

00:20:41
Speaker 2: R Approved aka hindly sanitized corporate legend, Ruth Handler came up with the idea for the Barbie doll after watching her daughter Barbara, cut paper dolls out of paper magazines and carefully choose clothing and accessories for them.

00:20:58
Speaker 1: Do you buy that? No good?

00:21:03
Speaker 2: All the other dolls in the market at the time were baby dolls, but Ruth realized that there was potential in a doll with adult features that would allow children to act out their dreams, and Ruth Handler felt like the only thing that these baby dolls prepared kids to be was a caregiver or mother. Barbie supposedly was created as a way to teach girls about the different careers they could have. Named after Ruth and Elliott's own daughter, Barbie debuted at the New York Toy Fair in March nineteen fifty nine and quickly caught on selling over three hundred and fifty one thousand dollars that year. At three dollars a pop. Today, Barbie is the best selling toy in the world. More than one billion dolls have been sold since nineteen fifty nine in one hundred and fifty different countries. Barbie has obviously made with her fair share of criticism over the years, especially as far as body positive it is be concerned. She's faced scorn over her unrealistic proportions. It has been said that if Barbie were a real human, she would be forced to stand on all fours and.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: Wouldn't be able to lift her head well. All four members of the Danish garbage collective known as Opera wrote Barbie Girl together, presumably on break from brainstorming different ways to make Hamlet relevant in the twenty first century. Soren and Klow's produced it with their friends Johnny jam and Delgado, both of which sound like parody characters if SNL were dedicating an episode to europop Roland JV twenty eighty. Synth, the instrument that figures so highly in the distinctive sound of the song, helped make Barbie Girls so memorable. Interestingly, for a pop song, Barbie Girl contains a lot of minor keys.

00:22:59
Speaker 2: The minor chords in this song were a last minute change, As Soren told Rolling Stone, it was in major chords at first. He really wanted to change it to minor chords, and we started on a minor chord instead. I don't mean it to be too technical, but the change means a lot. Another distinctive element of the song is the high pitch of the song, which Lenne had hit for real. This was before auto tune had caught on or was commercially reliable, so she just had to bang it out at that irl high tone, and reportedly she was not happy about this, thinking she sounded ridiculous. She told Rolling Stone, I don't know how many headsets I smashed. I was furious for months, and eventually she warmed to the great of choice. It made the whole track magical, but it took me a long time to admit it. Barbie Girl was the third track on Aqua's debut album, Aquarium, released in April nineteen ninety seven. It was their first single released in the US. From the jump, the band knew they had something special in their hands, but the band had no idea how big it would be. Lene told Variety in twenty twenty two. Something magical happened when Barbie Girl came out. The whole world exploded overnight. Our label sent it to Z one hundred New York and the phones just lit up. This is where we smash. Cut to the cigar chomping executive, a beloved figure in TMI lord going get me.

00:24:29
Speaker 4: The Danish Barbie Girl. People, Is it actually Barbie? Is it actually Ken?

00:24:37
Speaker 1: I don't give a shit.

00:24:38
Speaker 4: Get him into the Z one hundred studios. Have him talk to Charlemagne the Kid, have him talk to the Rizza and swap production techniques on the Roland drum machine.

00:24:56
Speaker 2: Barbie Girl sold over one point four million cops in the US and topped the UK charts for a month. Became England's second best seller of the year, behind only Kandle in the Wind.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety seven. That's right. It took the death of a royal to much like Hamlet. Whooa great Wark, Jordan.

00:25:26
Speaker 2: You really earned your miniscal pachack with that one. That's right, folks. Barbiego came in second to the death of Princess Diana.

00:25:35
Speaker 1: That's the worst thing to happen that year.

00:25:40
Speaker 2: Barbaregol peaked at number seven in the US point of Pride to Aqua. As Lene noted to Rolling Stone, most of the Scandinavian groups that broke in America were from Sweden, though Aha were from Norova, not many came from Denmark. As you may notice, I'm doing a caricatured accent to make fun of them. A reviewer from People magazine at the time called it the year's best novelty record, a cartoonish anthem you'll need surgery to remove from your head. The song was certainly helped by the influx of teen centric bubblegum pop that had begun to return to the charts, and the former Backstreet Boys and Sink, the Spice Girls and shortly afterward Britney Spears, But there was also a downside.

00:26:31
Speaker 1: That's right, because despite its success, people really.

00:26:35
Speaker 2: Really, really, really really hated this song.

00:26:41
Speaker 1: That's right, Jordan. This brings us to a new feature on TMI that I hope will be a recurring segment, musical torture sidebar Yeah, it was headed to such a degree that I mistakenly believed that Barber Girl was blasted during hostage situations as a form of psychological combat. I was wrong, but my research uncovered some interesting, slash horrifying things about this phenomenon that I'd like to share with you.

00:27:06
Speaker 2: Now, was that not true? Where did that come from? Because I remember, I.

00:27:08
Speaker 1: Just it just seems like the kind of song that would have been, But to my knowledge, it wasn't. But there is a fairly long list of songs that have been blurred to torture people. The US has a long, not especially proud history of musical torture. In December nineteen eighty nine, when the United States invaded Panama, American soldiers tried to drive to pose dictator Manuel Noriega, who is an avowed opera fan, out of his hiding place and another embassy by blasting, among other things, Van Halen's Panama Pretty Good there, as well as tracks by Styx, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA, and reportedly just full episodes of the Howard Stern Show. So I don't really get the plug was pulled on this psychological warfare with music after the Vatican complain. And then of course we got to talk about the nineteen ninety three Waco standoff, when the ATF blasted songs that included Nancy Sinatras, these boots are made for walking, Alice Cooper tracks and Christmas albums by Andy Williams and Mitch Miller, and also Buddhist chance. This became a fairly famous incident. The New York Times wrote about in an article with the very memorable headline has got a good beat and you can surrender to it. I swear this must have been while the stand off was still occurring, because it was written in a very flippant, lighthearted way, which seems to suggest that nobody had died. So it was pretty jarring to read that article. Now, was this a sub partaining too? But they used believe that makes sense? I'm sure, Yeah, that sounds familiar. And yeah, the Waco thing was I think the first time when the whole like we're gonna play music to somebody day and night at excruciating volumes, over and over and over again. Was kind of the first time that that entered the popular consciousness as far as I'm aware. But things really got ramped up during the War on Terror in the early aughts. A BBC News report claimed that Enter Sandman by the American heavy metal bands Metallica was used for sleep deprivation and to culturally offend Iraqi po W's. I've also read that Marilyn Manson's The Beautiful People and Nine Inch Nails March of the Pigs were also used, both of which were particularly effective on those who lived in rural Afghanistan and had never been exposed to Western music. That's a hell of an introduction.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: My favorite quote about the time is that Lars Auric was supposedly quoted when they asked him about like what do you how do you feel about Metallica drummer lawyers are reck They asked the me, like, how do you feel about Metallica music being used to torture people? And he was like, I don't know. I don't have control over what they play. Like, what do you want me to do? Ask them to play venom?

00:29:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a quote from uh from James Headfield that we get to in a minute. He was similarly nonplussed. There's a quote fro an American sergeant speaking of Newsweek saying, these people, ooh, haven't heard heavy metal. They can't take it. If you play it for twenty four hours, your brain and body functions start to slide. Your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them. They also blasted Britney Spears the theme to Sesame Street and also the theme to Barney and Friends on repeat, which that just sounds sadistic. The composer of the Barney theme, Bob Singleton, reportedly quote just laughed when he heard of the song's status as the quote most overused torture song on the CIA's mixtape. He elaborated, it seems so ludicrous that something totally innocuous for children could threaten the mental state of an adult. I would rate the annoyance factor to be about equal with hearing my neighbor's leaf blower. It can set my teeth on edge, but it won't break me down and make me confess to crimes against humanity.

00:30:56
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:30:57
Speaker 1: Tom Morella, over Rage against the Machine, was less amused by the news that his music was being used to torture human beings. In protest, he would appear on stage frequently in two thousand and six in Hoods and Orange, Guantanamo Jumpsuits, and Trent Reznor was also horrified by this. He issued a statement on his blog, Remember Blogs, It's difficult for me to imagine anything more profoundly insulting, demeaning, and enraging than discovering music you put your heart and soul into creating has been used for purposes of torture. If there are any legal options that can be realistically taken, they will be aggressively pursued, with any potential monetary gains donated to human rights charities. As I said earlier, James Hetfield was a little less perturbed. He's very famously pro military, and in a radio interview in November two thousand and four, he said he was quote proud that the military had used as music, even though he specified they hadn't asked his permission or paid him royalties. He added, if the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure. But he added, if I listened to a death metal band for twelve hours in a row, I'd go insane too. I'd tell you anything you wanted to know. Hilariously. An article in the Guardian reported that the US military may owe royalty payments to the artists whose works were being played to torture captives, which irving azof could get that out of them.

00:32:22
Speaker 2: That's The most metallical thing ever is if Like Metallica actually sues the US government for unearned royalties because their music has been played in interrogation sessens yeh.

00:32:37
Speaker 1: God Well. At other times during the War on Terror, the US used the real Slim Shady by Eminem You're God by Decide Decide, Oh my God, what's wrong with you? Decide? Whips? Dude, you aren't need to like Florida death Metal? Did you think I know? You know? I don't know who they are. They also played the Meo Mix theme on repeat to torture prisoners. The best or worst part of this was that the Miamic song was employed immediately after a long spell of heavy metal in hopes that the shift in dynamics would destabilize the prisoner. In the case of blasting Slim Shady, it would go on sometimes for twenty days non stop. Another prisoner reported that We Are the Champions by Queen was played for thirty hours non stop, which is at least five hours too many. A man named Mohammed al Katani, the alleged twentieth hijacker of the nine to eleven attack, was blasted with Christina Aguilera's Dirty chosen specifically for its sexual overtones, which the government believed would make it difficult for him to observe strict Muslim practices. To this end, female military personnel would supposedly go shirtless during interrogations and give forced lap dances to Muslim inmates. Psychologists have written that this specific musical torture works by eliminating the prisoner's ability to have a quote safe interior space by invading it with the sounds and cultural expressions of their captor, thus leaving prisoners nowhere to go to quote escape the pain. And that's why ultra patriotic music like Neil Diamond's America or Don Maclean's American Pie is often used during these torture sets. That's what you did to me with Hot California and Don Maclean's American Pie. You got my pie and Margueritaville, and I'm doing it right now with Barbie curl Ah.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: At least I had to eat burgers while you're doing it on the microphone.

00:34:44
Speaker 1: Uh. The government also apparently used David Gray's Babylon Prisoners due to the biblical connotations of the title. I thought that would be offensive to people of the Islamic faith. One German musicologist studying the effects of MU torture played the song once for a former Guantana inmate, who immediately burst into uncontrollable sobs. He reportedly had been forced to listen to the song at volumes so loud he genuinely feared his head would burst. Other inmates were blasted with the Beg's Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. In one truly remarkable quote, a since released prisoner is on the record saying that his captors quote cuffed me and put earphones on my head. They played hip hop and rock music very loud. I remember they played meat Loaf and Aerosmith over and over. I hated that.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: This is what Jordan does to me, Literally, what Jordan does to me. I want to talk about John Carpenter movies and late era John Coltrane records, and Jordan is like, let's do Barbie Girl.

00:35:52
Speaker 1: We're doing well next week? Yeah, we're doing to talk about let's do Armory Geddon And you loved Armageddon? Did you did? I did love? Oh, what's the Arnold? What we're gonna do Predator? Yeah, a little bit of a preview for you. TM. I faithful that's gonna be that's gonna be fun until you pull the rug out from under me and you're like, surprise, we're doing David Gray's Babylon. What's up with David Gray? How's he doing? You know, I don't know. I you know, in my mind, I've replaced his face with Dave Matthews, you know, similar white men. Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, and even kind of sounds like Dave Matthews. Jordan's psychologically, what does Barbie girl do to us?

00:36:41
Speaker 2: Take us home?

00:36:43
Speaker 1: He says halfway through the outline, and we have so much left to go. Take us home? Jordan. Uh. It's worth noting that music doesn't necessarily have to be bad or even played non stop to be torturous, just at irregular intervals to disrupt regular sleep. One Prisoneric Guantanamo is quoted as saying, sometimes it would stop at three am or so, but your ability to sleep was already disturbed. You lose the ability to have a routine sleep. The other thing they did was play the music at various times. The random aspect of when it would start or end was frustrating. It makes you tired, agitated, upset. On top of all the other situations of not knowing when you're going to be released, interrogated, or moved to those other cells. Many people suffered from various kinds of anxiety attacks. People hyperventilate, lose control of their senses, hit their bottle of water against the cell against other people, trying to scrape their hands against the concertina wire, sometimes breaking down and crying. One US Navy veteran who was doing undercover work in Iraq did time in an unofficial prison camp and was tortured with song. Thankfully, he'd been specifically trained for this eventuality and put his background to good use. He started to talk to himself, telling himself jokes, trying to keep a rational train of thought going, believing that if he let the music complete quote mask his thoughts, he would never recover his sanity. He added that the experience quote sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that, and as a result, he emerged damaged, but not broken in his words. Another released Guantanamo prisoner explained in an interview, I can bear being beaten up. It's not a problem once you've accept that you're going to go into the interrogation room and be beaten up. It's fine, you can prepare yourself mentally, but when you're being psychologically tortured, you can't. It makes you feel like you're going mad. Another prisoner said that this psychological torture was worse than the physical torture he received, which included having his penis regularly cut with razor blades. He said, imagine you're given a choice, lose your sight or lose your mind. So that's all horrifying. But on a slightly lighter note, as we get off this topic onto as you'll recall Barbie Girl. No, no, mmm no, we're getting back to this. How can I torture you?

00:39:03
Speaker 2: Is it Slayer? Late era John Coltrane? What could I do to you? I think because you you're such a sweet boy, and you love such You're so pure, you love pop music, and you love the baroque influence of pop music, and you love composition. What could I do that would really break you? Like free, like a really aggressive free jazz, or like really abrasive like Norwegian black metal? Can I get some Mayhem? Or who's the guy that murdered his bandmate?

00:39:41
Speaker 1: I think that.

00:39:43
Speaker 2: Uronymous can I get some really like uh vragvirknez Norwegian black metal or or like really heinous free jazz. Yeah, like like like like late Coltrane or like Albert Albert Eylor. Yeah, yeah, what do you what do you got what?

00:40:01
Speaker 1: I'm pretty good at disappearing into myself though. Yeah, so well you say that now, you say that now? Well on an hour twenty six? Yeah. Yeah.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: By the way, don't answer any knocks at your door anytime soon, because I do know where you live, and you do you have a key? Hey, you have a key? Yeah, And this is a project for iHeart. Yeah, they've signed out. Your bosses have signed up on this. So you know, when you wake up handcuffed to a corpse and Interstellar Space by the John Fortring Quartet is playing, know that that's me.

00:40:42
Speaker 1: It's cheaper than laying me off.

00:40:47
Speaker 2: The classic New York media answer, I would rather be tortured than eventually laid off. All right, where let's take this home. You got like seven more pages going, Come on, Jordan, take us home.

00:41:00
Speaker 1: That's going to be my new cue.

00:41:01
Speaker 2: By the way, when we have like seventeen more pages here, Jordan, take us home.

00:41:08
Speaker 1: Canadian Police reportedly use Nickelback's music to punish and or torture DUI suspects. But alas in all of my research, I have not uncovered Aqua's Barbie Girl being used in such a way. So now I guess everyone can quit their bitching about having to hear the song every now and again, because there's a lot worse things that can be done with music. Poor Lini, the lead singer of Aquas, quoted as saying, we weren't prepared for all the negative reactions to Barbie Girl. You know in your heart what your intentions were, and reading all the negative reviews was a bit tough to swallow just the cloying sing song nature of the chorus. The song got attention for its suggestive lyrics, which many took to be an insult to feminism. To wit, you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere. I'm a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world. Dress me up, make it tight on here, dolly, make me walk, make me talk, do whatever you please. I can act like a star. I can beg on my knees, kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky, I don't remember that. Come jump in Bimbo friends, let us do it again. I'm reading this like Gore Vidal.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: If you read, if you're reading like Charlton Heston reading the Iced Tea. They like die Die, Die, pig die.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: More than ten commandments. Uh. The Ken voice in Barbie Girls starts the song by asking if Barbie wants to go for a ride? So what is up with that Ken voice? Why do they say that was the Ken voice?

00:42:42
Speaker 2: That sounds like uh, like like b squad. Tom waits, he sounds like a predator.

00:42:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's That's been a major complaint against the song, is that the Ken voice sounds like a sexual predator. Yes, that's true. Over the years, many pundits and critics have read a great deal into the lyrics of this song. Was it a social comment, was it satire? Or was it just merely problematic? The band have taken great delight in blanking all journalists who try to hold their feet to the fire and get an explanation as to their meeting behind this song, much like Britney spears Wood and the famous truck Clausroman profile when he's asked her about these sexual undertones of Hitney Baby one more Time and she just completely blanks him on it sore and told Variety in twenty twenty two we have the line come on, Barbie, let's go party, and thought it was great. There were a lot of headlines about plastic surgery at that time which influenced us, but we really just wanted to make a fun song. We didn't put much thought into it. The hook just worked really, really well. Whoever, he gave what appears to be a totally different explanation to Rolling Stone that same year twenty twenty two, Barbara Girl was, of course a song about plastic surgeries. Other parts of the song were just sexual. When we had the lawsuit for Mattel, which we'll talk about later, the lawyers made us change the story. They said, please don't say it's anything sexual. But we were not really trying to make a statement. We were just trying to write a fun song. And Lena said something similar to Rolling Stone linking it to the era of Baywatch and quote taking the piss out of Pamela Anderson. It's tongue in cheek. It's pop music. If you want to see the layers to it, there's all the layers you want. We wanted to take the piss out of that kind of perfect girl. That was the main thing we discussed. We didn't say it very often, but that was the main thing behind the song. Choosing Barbie is so half fast, man, I mean, like, oh my god, there's so many other icons of American culture. You could choose Juice what you just like choosing John Wayne? You know, pick a better topic, pick like what would you have done? Chuck Berry? That guy liked to watch people piss. James Brown, you know, Elvis Elvis is Wow?

00:44:57
Speaker 2: I was there an Elvis boy. El This is a ripe for parody from the European perspective.

00:45:05
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like that's an easy one. That's it what it is, it is, but it is.

00:45:09
Speaker 2: But we but we got Barbie Girl, and we got the most half assed Barbie Girl. Come on, Barbie, let's go party. That means nothing to me. Come on, Barbie, let's extend our credit. Come on, Barbie, Let's go into debt to achieve the lifestyle that our parents told us we could afford. Come on, Barbie, let's go to college, liberal arts. Let's get a liberal arts degree because our parents told us that that would be the path to success. Come on, Barbie Capitalism is a failed experiment. All of these would have been really valid options for a pop song, and instead they.

00:45:49
Speaker 1: Come on Barbie, Let's sign up for Twitter Blue. Yes, these are all valid options, Jordan, take us home. One of the people who hated Barbie Girl was the guy who ultimately directed the cartoonish fantasy video for the track, Peter Pederson. I can't say, I need to check and make sure that I did. That's not a type. That can't be his name, Peter Peterson is his name. Yes, as Peter told Rolling Stone for their o history that we keep citing, I was just starting out as a director and it was hard. The night before I got the request to do the Barbie Girl video, I was doing some grainy black and white art stuff in while we were setting up, Barbie Girl came on the radio. I remember saying, angrily, what the hell is this? The next day I got a call asking if I wanted to do a video for it. I went cheerfully yes, of course. To prep he watched a bunch of old Hannah Barbara cartoons like The Flintstones and Scooby Doo to capture that bright, technicolor aesthetic which would mimic the cartoonish feel of the song, and Peterson also took notes on Spike Jones's video for Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. He said, I love those crime movies and exploitation movies that they were referencing. It was an inspiration since it had the Beastie Boys playing characters. That was a good reference for me to say, if we can go this way and have a kind of irony, we can go a long way. He held a brainstorming session with the band where he asked all the critical questions what does Barbie do? What kind of props does she have? And the answer was, of course, well she has a house, a car, a horse, a hair dryer, a telephone, a dog. And they storyboarded from there, with the ultimate premise being summed up as Barbie does a lot of things and it ends in a party. That's the log line for the video. The video was filmed in just two days in a warehouse in Copenhagen. Despite the quick turnaround, there was some drama when Linney arrived on the set and discovered that she was expected to dye her hair blonde to portray the Barbie character. She said, I don't get angry very often, but you can only stretch me so far. I had my own kind of opinion about that. I didn't want to look like Barbie. That's against the whole point of the song. I came into the dressing room and the stylists were there, so we had a long, hard argument. Universal came in the record company, the director came in, and I just stood my ground. So Patterson went back to the storyboards and colored all the shots of Lennay's blond hair black. But he still wanted Barbie and Ken to make an appearance, so he called two friends who he thought looked the part, and according to bands myth the Rich Myth of Aqua, the Barbie and Ken actors met on the set that day and wound up getting married and having kids. Apparently that's not quite the case. They actually met while working at a cafe a few years earlier. But I still think it's cute that the Barbie and Ken characters from the Barbiego video are now married, or at least they were. Reflecting Peter Penderson's dim view of the song, He also said that he didn't have high hopes for the video, and he said he vividly remembered the day when one came running into his office shouting the videos on MTV, and, as he told Rolling Stone, his response was, really, I didn't understand it at that time, and I still don't understand it. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, Aqua.

00:49:32
Speaker 2: The band Not the Color, tried to blunt any backlash to their song Barbie Girl by including the line in their liner in the liner notes, in the liner notes that said, the song Barbie Girl is a social comment and was not created or approved by the makers of the doll A very you know, derogatory way to so very dismissive. How do they refer to I'm gonna tell that way?

00:50:00
Speaker 1: Uh. This is not enough to soothe the raging tempers of Mattel, who launched legal action six months after the song's released, kicking off a battle that would drag on until two thousand and two, five years after.

00:50:12
Speaker 2: Barbie Girl came out. Funnily enough, Uh, Aqua is not even the first entity to be sued over Barbie Uh.

00:50:20
Speaker 1: Todd Haynes, famously the director of I'm Not There, the Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, the Bob Dylan film and Really Underground Dot, the veloted Underground Dot, Well Velvet Undergrond doc and also the voted Underground dramatization uh of a gold Mine. Uh yeah yeah.

00:50:38
Speaker 2: He was sued by Mattel for his use of the doll the nineteen eighty seven film Superstar The Karen Carpenter Story, which re enacted the life and struggles of the titular character Karen Carpenter of the Carpenters and her battle with anorexia nervosa using you guessed.

00:50:55
Speaker 1: It, Barbie dolls.

00:50:57
Speaker 2: So they also soothed the Danish The toy manufacturer Fold eleven claims against MCA Records, Aqua's American record label, claiming that the song had violated copyrights and trademarks, even in bringing on what they referred to in the suit as the color quote unquote Barbie pink.

00:51:18
Speaker 1: You're a Laura Haigel. How can you can you copyright a color? No? Good? No? Because colors have hex codes. You know, there's a whole thing about.

00:51:28
Speaker 2: What do they call Uh, there's like a phrase for white people online that they use, like a six YT or something. It's like the photoshop hex code for like absolute white h.

00:51:41
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah anyway. Uh. Mottel filed suit against MCA, claiming that the song Barbie Girl had violated copyrights and trademarks. They also claimed the song.

00:51:53
Speaker 2: Tarnished Barbie's image by sexualizing her, specifically by referring to her as a blonde bimbo. MCA's lawyers, meanwhile, went on the offensive bite, basically questioning the dolls character and history, at least in terms of as Mattel had provided it. In other words, they subjected an inanimate doll to brutal character assassination.

00:52:20
Speaker 1: Lawyers. Yeah.

00:52:22
Speaker 2: In the Rolling Stone, Sorry, the MCA lawyer is quoted as saying, my view was reinforced when I learned about Barbie's background pause through a pool quote. Barbie began her life as a German doll known as Lily, and Lily was a plaything for adult men. Brackets essentially a three D pup. Brackets closed. So her background was not Christine. This is all the quote, so continuing quote. It also became very clear that Barbie had been represented in books and other media, even in recordings priory to Barbie Girl, as representing a certain type of person. She became an icon standing for a certain type of person. That led to the major defenses in the case, which were essentially First Amendment.

00:53:10
Speaker 1: Cases end quote.

00:53:12
Speaker 2: MCA responded by filing a defamation counterclaim against them, claiming that Mattel's mind was in the gutter and that they added their own meetings into the song's lyrics, with their lawyer continuing quote, we hired literary experts, record industry experts, marketing experts and came up with all sorts of material that was more critical of Barbie and a lot more sexual, frankly, than Barbie Girl.

00:53:38
Speaker 1: There was no doubt that for many, many years, even people who didn't buy Barbie dolls were aware that Barbie was either viewed as a feminist or as a bimbo.

00:53:47
Speaker 2: That was an indisputable fact. Also, trademark names have been used in songs for many years. Think of Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz, Paul Simon's Codochrome, Bruce Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch. At one point, Mattel argued that they could have called the song party Girl. However, party Girl obviously does not convey the same message as Barbie Girl. The lawsuit dragged on for years and ultimately went to the United States Court of Appeals COBBA, which Circuit Ninth Ninth Circuit Judge Alek Kozinski ruled in favor of MCA, staying staying that the song was protected as free speech under the First Amendment, basically ruling that it was a parody and therefore didn't violate any copyright laws. He also threw out a deformation lawsuit Aqua's record company filed against Mattel, ending is ruling with a line the.

00:54:46
Speaker 1: Parties are advised to chill.

00:54:51
Speaker 2: I don't have a lot of respect for the US judiciary infrastructure, but I do have that line.

00:54:59
Speaker 1: Good for you.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: It's gotta be from the Bay Area. Good for you, Judge Kaczinski, the case was dismissed.

00:55:06
Speaker 1: Mattel tried to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, but their petition was denied.

00:55:10
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, the band's response to all of this was essentially Danish bewilderment the national brand along with tinned Fish and melancholy Renee Deef. The DJ told Rolling Stone that his first thought was, Wow, the biggest toy company in the world is going after the little band from Denmark. Accent's mine Leney said something similar. I thought it was hilarious. To be honest, I have to say only in America. They didn't sue us. They sued our label. For a long time. We couldn't talk about it. If we were interviewed, we couldn't speak about it. There were a lot of hassles around us. But it was also hilarious, and it was a free commercial on both sides, for Mattel and for US. Parentheses closed. Aqua followed up Aquarium in two thousand with Aquarius, which no one cared about. It sold well around the world but peaked at just number eighty two in America. They took a break in two thousand and one that lasted until two thousand and eight. Seven years they released their third album called Something Magalomania I'm just now told in twenty eleven. During this time, one of those Danish people, Soren I don't care, married Lene I also don't care, and they had two kids who cares. But since they have separated after sixteen years, that's sad. I wish their children grew up with two parents.

00:56:39
Speaker 1: Quote.

00:56:39
Speaker 2: We're the best of friends, one of them told Rolling Stone. They still live in the same apartment building in units next to each other. Leyne quote, my boyfriend is Soren's studio technician. We go out to dinner with Soren and his girlfriend. It's just a big, modern, happy family. Renee and Sworden are my two best friends, to which Soren said, I can imagine it looks really weird from the outside, but it feels good from the inside.

00:57:10
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:57:10
Speaker 2: Oh, that is an out of context quote for the Ages. Thank you, Soren. Aside from all the lawsuits, the.

00:57:18
Speaker 1: Song may have impacted Mattel's Barbie in a material way. It is interesting to note that since late nineteen ninety seven, a few months after the song peaked on the American charts, Mattel announced that they were.

00:57:30
Speaker 2: Changing Barbie's body type for just the third time in her history, giving her a bigger waist, slimmer hips, and b cup breasts. I'm told, I'm told. Ironically, seven years later, in two thousand and nine, Mattel was looking to juice sales for a new product, Comma Barbie Fashionistas.

00:57:52
Speaker 1: Jordan, what is Barbie Fashionistas? Let me kick it to you. It's a new doll that boasted a whopping twelve points of movement. Wow, making flexible than any Barbie Doll in history. Well, they turned to Barbie Girl for the song in a commercial. Yeah, they took some of the more scandalous lyrics and they gave him a kids bop style rewrite. So they had lines like you can be a star no matter who you are and I'm a girl in my world full of fashion and fun. But yeah, because this doll was this big selling point was that it had all these points of movement. They incorporated a dance into the commercial called the Barbie by choreographer Jaquelle Knight, who was famous for working on Beyonce single Ladies Video the year before in two thousand and eight, Jordan, what does this remind you of? It reminds me of a listicle I did way back when I was at VH one, the most inappropriate Kids Bop Songs ever, which was I mean, it's kind of amazing. First of all, there are a zillion of those kids Bob CDs. It's kind of like the now that's what I call music volume, like four hundred and eighty six, it's the same deal for kids bop. They did a version of Christina Aguilera's Come On Over, which is essentially a booty call song. There's also Kanye West Heartless, j Lo's I'm Real, and Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball, plus the emotional devastation of Adele Someone Like You. Nicki Minaj's Anaconda with the lyrics altered to being about big smarts instead of big butts, but there's still the whole Anaconda metaphor, which is troubling. There's kids singing Leona Lewis's Bleeding Love with lines like you cut me open and I keep bleeding, I keep bleeding. I believe left unaltered. Evan Essen says bring Me to Life is included with the line save me from the nothing I've become left Intact, sung by little kids. They also did My Immortal by Evan Essence two. The opening line of Kesha's TikTok was changed to brush my teeth when I have to pack instead of with a bottle of jack. Paparazzi by Lady Gaga was included, which I guess doesn't sound that weird until you realize that the entire song is about stalking. Cake by the Ocean was done by Kids Bob, which I guess should probably get a pass because there's a Jonas brother on there and closer by the Chainsmokers and Halsey and that uncra cracker song follow Me. It's also done by kids Bob, so that's all weird. Follow me?

01:00:23
Speaker 2: Everything is all right?

01:00:25
Speaker 1: That one yeah? That one yeah. Anyway, once again, back to Barbie Girl. By including the song in a Mattel commercial, you would expect that the toy makers and Aqua have buried the hatchet, but you would be wrong. In April twenty twenty two, Aqua's management confirmed to Variety that the song wouldn't appear in the upcoming Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, although the spokesperson declined to say why. It's believed to be a result of the tense relationship between the band and Mattel, who are co producing the film. Lena, for one, it's fine with their song not being in the upcoming Barbie movie. She told Variety and in a twenty fifth anniversary piece about the song that using it in the film would be like quote cheese on cheese. In other words, two on the nose. That's a great expression. I totally understand why they didn't use it, but it's gonna bring us a lot of attention no matter what she said. Soren also joked, we should say we turned it down. Ryan Gosling is not good enough. However, the soundtrack features the Nicki Minaj joint Barbie World, which promptly samples Barbie. That's such a gimme. Nicki Minaj's fans are called Barbie's. It makes perfect sense. Great, but thank god, that's not the only twenty first century revamp of Barbie Girl. In the midst of all this film related Barbie mania, in early June twenty twenty three, Aqua released the first ever remix of Barbie Girl, on which they enlisted the talents of DJ Tiesto, you know with the umlauts. That is hilarious to me that in June of twenty twenty three they were.

01:01:57
Speaker 2: Like, who's in the zeitgeist? I don't know DJ Tisto from ten years ago?

01:02:05
Speaker 1: What did he even do? I don't remember.

01:02:07
Speaker 2: I don't know thebig dumlouds Derude's Sandstorm incredible ten years at least, Oh my god, Jordan, take us home.

01:02:20
Speaker 1: Apparently Tiesta's daughter inspired the remake because she loves the original song, and also, we can't forget other twenty first century tracks that tip their kangle Hat to Barbie Girl. In twenty fourteen, Ludacris nodded to the song with Party Girls featuring Wiz Khalifa, Jerremine and Kashmir Kat, and in twenty eighteen, Ava Max transformed the song into an anthem about consent with not Your Barbie Girl, on which she sings you can't touch me there, you can't touch my body unless I say so. Ain't your Barbie No. All this to say, Barbie Girl's legacy looms large. This is especially the case on lists of bad songs. When the readers of Rolling Stone were asked to pick the worst song of the nineties back in twenty eleven, the honor went to Barbie Girl, vaulting it above the likes of I'm Too Sexy, Achey, Breaky Heart, mumbop mm mmm mmm, and Nookie was that last one? Nookie? No? One more time? Nokie.

01:03:21
Speaker 2: I'm getting a little feedback from your mind? Can you can you uh maybe try without the plosive.

01:03:27
Speaker 1: Blender magazine Right Now One More Time rated Barbie Girl as the thirty third worst song ever in its two thousand and four article Run for Your Life. It's the fifty worst songs ever. In a section entitled Scandalegian Pedo, pop alart erk God the Century print Media. Yeah, seriously, what is that? They suggested that quote perhaps the gambit sounded acceptable in the helium huffing singer Lena Lindstrom's native Norwegian, but that in English it's just plain wrong, racist or true. They labeled rapper Renee Diff's Besso profundo, come On, Barbie, Let's Go Party as the worst part of the song. I'm in mine to agree, and even Renee herself admits that listening to Barbie Girl can be a challenge. She told Rolling Stone, I can totally understand people getting pissed at it. It can be super annoying. It sticks like glue, and that's true. In February twenty twenty two, the videos surpassed a billion views on YouTube, an achievement reached only by heavy hitters like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and Guns N' Roses November Rain. So you know, suck it? Oh, thank god? Right at the end of this, well, let's give the final word to oga's resident DJ, Renee Diff, the man who first met the lead singer of Arbi Girl on a cruise ship or I guess a ferry. I should say fell in love and invited her into his band, only to split up soon after. Wait, is that actually what happened? I wasn't paying attention for any of this. Holy did they meet on a cruise ship? No, they met on a ferry. They met on a Denmark to Norway, so lame and not surprising, and made all these nerds met on a boat. You love boats. No, this is why you pitched this. This is why you made me do this shit.

01:05:32
Speaker 2: It's because it was about a big boat. Were of Scandinavian nerds on a big boat. That's why you pitch this? And I almost got away with it. I haven't worn't for you medaling kids. It's midnight where Jordan is. And he made me get through a whole episode that I tried to disrupt constantly. And he'll pay for it too, because hit.

01:05:54
Speaker 1: In editing in the piece from Rolling Stone, Renee Diff explained the message is that it's a ok to be the person you are and look the way you look, and be confident in that you don't necessarily have to have plastic surgeries to be a better person. All these metaphors in the song were taboo to talk about, but we came out with a tongue in cheek way to present our song. It's a pop song, but it's also a song about how it's okay to be who you are, love who you are, and be yourself. Thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtag. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and a ghost Funk orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows that lack the

01:07:03
Speaker 2: Black Batimum and