An unfortunate obsession

I cannot always control the things I'm interested in, but I can usually sway my interests to be thematically consistent. Unfortunately, these past two months, the only thing I've been able to think about or focus on is the three versions of the song Wavin' Flag by K'naan which was released when I was a teenager. Each version became more famous than the last. I don't yet know how to turn all my accumulated knowledge into art, all I have is lots of feelings.

For context, K’naan has kind of an anime-level tragic origin story. He was born in Mogadishu and had a unique art-nerd childhood, his grandpa was a renowned poet and his aunt was a famous singer. At age 12, a child soldier shot at him and three childhood friends with a machine gun. He was the only one who survived. Progressively things were getting worse and civil war was breaking out in Mogadishu. With his family, he fled on the last commercial plane to the US with his family and later moved to Canada. Before he left, his childhood crush gave him a letter written in English teasing that it would be a good inspiration for him to learn faster. Three days after they left Somalia she was killed. The song “Fatima” is in dedication to her.

His original song Wavin' Flag is about fleeing a worn-torn country, the struggles with immigration, and the grief of leaving a home you can't return to.

In 2010 Wavin’ Flag was remade by a supergroup of Canadian artists as a fundraising effort to spread relief in Haiti after a Hurricane. This song was the little sister version of the American supergroup that made We Are The World 25 For Haiti

The last iteration of the song was the Wavin' Flag (Coca-Cola Celebration Mix) which heavily aired during the World Cup and was toured worldwide.

I am weirdly obsessed with this story because I loved this song as a teen. I loved it so much that I have footage of myself at 15 singing it at a Frisbee tournament with the lyrics changed to fit a Frisbee theme. I also still have my Fifa World Cup Soccer Ball. Despite this, I always felt like something was weird about the different versions of the song. I recently revisited the different versions two months ago. I tried to close read them and finally realized what was off. I kept re-listening to the chanting part of the song because it sounded familiar. It finally dawned on me that they changed the chanting hook of Wavin' Flag to the Coca-Cola Jingle.

I don't know why this matters to me but it does. This was 15 years ago!! It's not like product placement is a secret and it was done with the full consent of the artist. I've read a lot of articles from 2010 discussing the Fifa World Cup cover, but nobody ever talks about what happened to K'naan after the Coca-Cola tour and why HE was chosen. Shortly after his tour he started canceling shows, stopped making music, and published two articles in the New York Times: Censoring Myself for Success and A Son Returns to the Agony of Somalia.

In it, he tells an old Somalian folk tale about selling your soul for fame:

The fox, they say, once had an elegant walk, for which the other animals loved him. One day, he saw a prophet striding along and decided to improve on what was already beautiful. He set out walking but could not match the prophet’s gait. Worse, he forgot his own. So he was left with the unremarkable way the fox walks today.

His final remarks in the article are:  I may never find my old walk again, but I hope someday to see beauty in the graceless limp back toward it.

I really feel like this is a tragedy. To take a refugee's song about his experience with war and make it into a Coke ad. In his article about censoring himself, he talks about how his record producers told him his audience was 15-year-old girls. If you recall, the Somalian folk tale is about a fox changing his step to copy a prophet's walk and losing his talent. In this case, the music industry and 15-year-old girls are the prophets that stole his fox walk. I find this so interesting because I was that 15-year-old girl, unknowingly causing destruction.

I am wondering if there is a spell out there to fix this. A spell that combines all the corrosives done to the song to make something new. Sugar (a soccer ball), Spice (Coca-Cola), and Everything Nice (a former 15-year-old-prophet). A spell that repairs nothing but creates a monster out of the tragedy.