After a year like 2020, which has undoubtedly been quite unusual and ‘isolating’, what better way to conclude the year than to celebrate what unifies us ?
People all over the world turn to music when they look for hope and for a new outlook. Moreover, music truly has a unifying power that can build bridges.
One of this years’ smoothest musical revelations that crossed borders was the Crucchi Gang project, in which German musicians re-recorded their songs in Italian, gifting us for example with "Carta bianca", a translation by Element of Crime of their song “Weisses Papier”… A beautiful new version of a wonderful song, which highlights the power of each language to give a different ‘color’ to a song…
A similar transformation was experienced by Bilderbuch's "Bungalow", Sophie Hunger's "Walzer für niemand" and Wir sind Helden's "Nur ein Wort", just to name a few. Perhaps the Crucchi Gang were inspired by earlier Italian adventures of the Austrian band Wanda, for instance the Italian version of their song "Auseinandergehn ist schwer"...?
A more extroverted musical bridge-builder may have been this year’s new “Imagine your Korea” campaign. It may just be a personal preference, but their Seoul-focused clip seems to be most well-designed one out of the series, combining awkwardly blissful music with wonderfully weird dance moves (not too desperately seeking to go viral, yet still immediately likeable), set on touristic hotspots in Korea.
Granted, it is a commercial, so one should probably keep a critical distance and not confuse it with art…
But then again : in this year of 2020, which has brought us unprecedented peaks of online streaming (music, news, home fitness, entertainment), this ad was sometimes more delightful than the YouTube clips that it interrupted.
A more gospel-inspired song has touched people around the world this year with a message of hope and unity, and with viral dance moves : the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge not only inspired unity throughout countless adaptations across the global, starting in South Africa (without any choreography, which was apparently added to the song at a later stage, just for fun, in Angola), and soon spreading to everyone, from German nurses to Venezuelan nuns. It can also be argued that the lyrics of the song refer to the biblical (and, ultimatelty, universal) dream of a world full of peace, happiness and unity…. Which might help to explain the song’s success in this very particular year of 2020.
