Deep Forest – Sweet Lullaby
1994 · Directed by Tarsem Singh
69K Likes
The story
The voice at the heart of Sweet Lullaby belongs to a woman named Afunakwa from the Solomon Islands. In 1970 ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp recorded her singing Rorogwela, a traditional Baegu lullaby about an older sibling comforting an orphaned little brother. UNESCO put it out on an album in 1973. Two decades later the French duo Deep Forest, Michel Sanchez and Éric Mouquet, built a dance track around it. Nobody asked Afunakwa, Zemp or UNESCO, and the liner notes even credited the voices to African Pygmies. She died in the 1990s.
The track went top ten in the UK and gold in Australia, and the famous video came from Tarsem Singh, a couple of years after he made Losing My Religion for R.E.M. A little girl (his niece, Shaan Sahota) rides a tricycle around the world looking for sleep. He shot it in eight countries over four and a half weeks in late 1993, reportedly with his own money, and later called it an uninsurable movie that went all over the world. Every frame is a postcard with something slightly off about it. It picked up several nominations at the 1994 MTV VMAs.
A lullaby from one corner of the planet, sold to the rest of it with a kid on a trike. Beautiful and a little uncomfortable, both at once.
