The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 17/05/16
Taxi - "Jumătatea Mea"
Today, dear friends, we combine a little music with a little laugh at the expense of foreigners, as befits the midst of a referendum campaign in which - so we are reliably informed by people who have no history of going over the top with dog-whistle racism, oh, dear me, no - we have to rescue our pure and chaste democracy ("Rah, Rah!") from all those nasty aliens who want us to do nasty alien things like stop thinking that 'we' still have an Empire.
This is what comes of my insomnia being a proper twat at the moment, leading me to once again kerb-crawl along the short-wave bands at dead of night in search of anything remotely interesting. That's what I was doing shortly after 0100 on Tuesday when I came upon a strong and steady signal (itself a rarity) in the 31-metre band, playing a song in a language which I suspected was eastern European but not Slavic. This meant that the primary candidate was Romanian and such indeed it proved to be, the programme coming from RRI in Bucureşti.
The song itself wasn't anything more than pleasant, musically speaking, but I found myself chuckling in the darkness for reasons which you may divine for yourself when you hear it.
What I have been able to discover this morning is that the song is called Jumătatea Mea (which, if Google Translate is to be relied upon, means My Better Half) and is performed by a band called Taxi whose songs - it sez 'ere - often have a political and satirical intent, and who even appeared in Eurovision in 2000, finishing seventeenth. The song appears on a 2002 compilation album called De Cursă Lungă (The Long Haul), but I don't know if it popped up anywhere before that.
So why the laughter in the depths of darkness? Listen to it and see what you think Dan Teodorescu is singing in the chorus:
This isn't as bizarre as it may seem: after all, I was in Sainsbury's yesterday and passed a display of 'beef tomatoes', so I suppose they must have something similar on the banks of the lower Danube.
