The Great Blue Crisis of 2000

Certain tapes and CDs were allowed at school; others weren’t. The same went for singing the songs and such.

Prior to the summer of 2000, it was a rather simple matter. Typically, issues only arose when the boys (knowingly) tried to listen to something with swear words, or the girls tried playing something too spicy.

Yes, there had been the incident in 6th grade where I wanted the band class to hear “Good Morning Star Shine” from the musical, Hair. This other kid then found and introduced everyone to a song called “Sodomy” from the soundtrack, but still.

It was relatively clear-cut, wasn’t it? Certain music wasn’t appropriate for school, and, moreover, there were clear reasons for that, right?

If a song involved someone screaming “STICK IT IN YOUR ASS” (more on that later) over and over, we’d likely be banned from listening to it, singing it, or mentioning it at school. Sure, there were gray areas to the equation, but we had an idea of what we could do, and what we couldn’t.

And so did the teachers. Right up until the entrance of a terrifying album called Europop by an ascending Italian group, Eiffel 65. It was one of the first CDs I ever purchased on my own. Apparently many of my classmates also enjoyed it, or at least the hit single, “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Almost everyone had a copy, ultimately.

The Song Itself

The Controversy

As you can probably tell from the lyrics, this is really riveting stuff, especially when you’re in middle school. We, after all, had blue feelings all the time. True, we couldn’t exactly agree on what that meant, nor the song’s general meaning, but it seemed deep, right?

Amid the da ba dee da ba di da ba di da ba di da ba di da ba di da ba di da ba di,” this song spoke to my seventh grade class in a way we could not explain. We poured over the lyrics by singing them over and over and listening to them (when we could) in class. There just had to be a secret meaning at least.

Or at least, the song meant something. Blue feelings?! And songs do have meanings, right? Heck, even that dreaded “Mmmbop” (we were sick of that long before) had a plot, somewhat. This one surely had a deeper meaning, too.

We just had to find it, this true meaning of the song. A weird fixation on the color blue itself quickly came to accompany our obsession with the eurodance hit. When, for the spring science projects, we had to make rudimentary Rube-Goldberg Machines, one group wanted to paint theirs blue and name it the “Da Ba Dee Machine.” This annoyed the adults, I think?

There was also an incident were we thought it was a good idea to do a vote about the song’s “true meaning” on notebook paper. Embarrassing in retrospect. This, too, seemed to irritate the teachers, but they couldn’t exactly do much because writing notes about song lyrics isn’t against school policy. I believe we decided it was about a lonely rich man.

I’d been bullied most of my time in elementary and middle school. This was the beginning of the time when I was actually able to finally make friends, to feel included and somewhat normal. The matter of this song, its potential esoteric meaning, and our half-facetious attempts to decipher it (but mostly to annoy our teachers) helped that… somehow?

I don’t understand that in the slightest, but for some reason, being included in my classmates’ attempts to drive the school staff crazy with a single eurodance song made me feel more like a person than I had before. I felt part of something bigger than myself, and while it was completely frivolous, it was fun, loud, and we all loved the looks we got every time someone mentioned the color blue.

The ultimate outcome, though? They banned the song, at least from the study hall held in the choir room (where we most often listened to it). I felt brave by that point. I spoke up I said no, that they couldn’t just ban it - it contained no profanity, nothing vulgar or sexual. The teacher told me to sit down and shut up, and that there would be no more eurodance whatsoever.

Remembering right, we eventually moved on to that weird mixture of country and pop music that flooded our region at the time, which the teachers tolerated, mostly because we’d grown a bit and stopped playing the same song over and over. We were, thankfully, past that point when Crazy Frog was developed.

Bonus: Stick it in Your Operating System

In seventh grade, we were required to write poetry that followed the rhyme and meter (or whatever) of a song (of our choice). In other words, we had to write a cover song with new lyrics as an English class assignment. I chose 99 Red Balloons and wrote a song about crows or something. The point? Another kid, a boy I was actually fairly friendly with, wrote a song about Microsoft Internet Explorer. I’m not sure what song it was he copied, but it apparently contained the chorus “stick it in your ASS!” or something similar.

For his English project, he had changed this to something that contained lines like, “make a browser that nobody likes, and stick it in your OS!” This was some kind of protest, he tried desperately to explain to me, against the school’s insistence on using Internet Explorer on some of the computers, simply because it was part of Windows. He then would randomly sing the song during computer class when stuff was crashing. This set a valuable precedent for the “I did it all for the Cookie” crowd.