The idiosyncratic Swede is back, this time with another song in her native Swedish language, ‘Som Du’, which Google translates as ‘Like You’. That could mean I’m like you, or “I like you”, as Dick Emery would have said. Does anyone reading this actually remember Dick Emery? However, the English lyrics sent to me by SoLBLoMMa indicate ‘Anyone like you’.
She says “in the video I am becoming Madame Butterfly - I am her in so many ways.” That’s a brave statement because the opera Madame Butterfly doesn’t have a happy ending. And the subject has already been tackled by Malcolm McLaren of course and you can’t get any higher, or weirder, than that.
The song’s lyrics are quite poetic so I think it’s in order to talk about stanzas, and each one of them ends with “but I’ve never met (never touched…never known) anyone like you.”
I just love her lyrics and these are some of the best she’s come up with, even in translation. They habitually mix the observationally acute with the rhymingly bizarre, the best example being in the third verse/stanza:
“I have felt the tears burn against my cheek/I've heard planes crash in the wind/I've seen the king of Peru/but I`ve never known anyone like you”
The meaning of the video escapes me so far but they often do. It could be that Cio Cio Solblomma is travelling to meet Pinkerton on a bus, making up as she goes along, rather than waiting for his return at the marital home. Transport often plays a part in them. She’s previously been stuck in an airport departure hall and turned up on trains, a particular interest of hers.
What she continues to do is to corner the Scandinavian market in sad, visually expressive and slightly off the wall songs and videos and I can’t think of anyone over here to compare her to, either.
It may all seem a little strange, but she’s a smart cookie who knows exactly what she is doing.