The year 2005 was good for many reasons – I graduated high school, I went on an awesome trip to Europe, and I started university. One of the not-so-great memories concerned bananas. More specifically, it concerned a Gwen Stefani song where the main line is: “this S**t is Bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!”
Why would a song like this ever receive radio play, let alone international recognition? As a proud supporter of the weekly top-forty pop list, the answer, my friends, is beyond me.
Through out the course of my European extravaganza, I was “blessed” to hear this catchy, but ridiculously annoying song in five (yes, five) international countries. Not only was I now hearing the jingle in bad American karaoke bars, but I was also given the joy or experiencing it in Prague, dancing to it in Venice, drinking to it in Paris, singing it in Germany, and loathing it in the United Kingdom. It was like the song that would not go away. No matter how much I prayed to avoid it, and regardless of how authentic or other-worldly our bar of choice was, come midnight, it was inevitable to hear a crowd of drunk Europeans spelling out the word “banana”.
The upside of my musical distress is that now, whenever I hear the song, I actually do have mental flashbacks to Europe. In fact, I sometimes wish (in a drunken fit) to feel the strange sense of togetherness that one feels when a group of strangers start to synchronously spell out words to music.
Anyway, in a strange twisted way, the “bananas” song helped me meet other backpackers, caused me to consume more foreign beer, and has taught me to expect the unexpected in rural, European bars.
