July 24, 2010: Ace of Base - The Sign

Ace of Base - The Sign: youtube.com/watch?v=FwatjHcV1ZM

Remember this song? Of course you do. Even if it’s before your generation's time I promise you know this song. When "The Sign" by Ace of Base came out it was played everywhere by everybody all the time. How is it that a song, so meaningless and simple, among so many other catchy and well produced songs, can reach into your body and never let you not remember it? Why was this song played so much while others went neglected?

Every generation has a song like this. I don’t know what the generation that preceded me would say is their song but we all seem to have one. It was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for one, “Hey Ya!” for another, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” for one long before. There doesn’t seem to be any common thread between them that I can decipher but they somehow speak to our collective psyches at one point and form a history.

Stories are our way of creating our environment. They can be, from my experience, very 2-dimensional, everything becomes fiction; there is a beginning, middle, end format from one perspective, generally. And stories tend to move in 3 acts with the action and the tension in the second act. So if we tell a story from one perspective we’re missing all the other perspectives around us and how they created the story. If we move from beginning to middle and end there is so much more that came before and after that we are neglecting. If we focus on the 3 act format we’re stuck telling the same story over and over. And it’s all fiction because in telling stories within the confines of all these systems we’re taking the entirety of an event and boiling it down into a concentrated form that no longer represents the entirety of the event.

And songs are a form of storytelling.

So, what does “The Sign” by Ace of Base say about my generation? What did it say that it spoke so strongly to my neighbor in grade one, my cousin in high school, myself and near everyone I knew, to the point where we accepted it as a representative of an ongoing creation of our entire history? I doubt anyone over 25 at the time it came out would realize the enormity of this song on my generation or even care, and good. They had their own songs at the time that I didn’t know of, that I wouldn’t care for. But “The Sign” was there for my generation, everywhere, and I don’t know what it means. I could come up with all sorts of theories but I feel they would all be so pointless and pretentious when there has to be an easy answer. Maybe it was just super catchy and people really wanted to dance and not think about the enormity of life? I don’t remember any significant news stories from 1993/1994 that were concerning to our way of life (no war, no economic trouble, no domestic epidemics); maybe it was a celebration of a life somewhat unanalyzed and therefore growing pointless? Maybe it spoke to our want of seeing the sign?

I don’t know what the generation that is coming after me has as an equivalent, as their song. I hope it’s something by Interpol or The Constantines or The National. Actually, maybe it’s “1,2,3,4” by Feist? Shit, I hope so.