Enigma – Return to Innocence
1993 · Directed by Julien Temple
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Best comments
1.“When you desperately try to find the title of this song, so you type 'ooyyayeeya ooyayaiyaa.'”
More comments
- 2.“I SPENT TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE TRYING TO FIND THIS SONG. I EVEN GOOGLED 'HAAA YO WAII YA EH OH AIYAAAA' AND NOTHING CAME UP... UNTIL TODAY, WHEN MY SIS CASUALLY DROPPED IT. MY LIFE IS COMPLETE NOW. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.”
- 3.“The chanting at 1:34 is Guo Yingnan, a highly respected elder of Taiwan's Amis tribe; the high-pitched female voice is his wife, Igay Duana. Enigma never got their permission, which led to an international lawsuit. All he asked afterward: that everyone know this song comes from the Amis people.”
The story
Enigma was Michael Cretu's studio project, built in Ibiza, and Return to Innocence was the lead single from The Cross of Changes. It opens with a chant sung by Difang and Igay Duana, an Amis couple from Taiwan, lifted from a CD of a 1988 concert in Paris. Under it sits the drum sound from Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks. Cretu said he thought the chant was public domain. The Duanas sued in 1998 and settled out of court, with full credit on future releases.
Julien Temple directed the video in Málaga, Spain, and ran a whole life backwards. It opens in black and white: an old man on his fruit farm bites a quince, lies down in the grass and dies. Then the fallen fruit floats back up into the tree, the color comes in, and we rewind through his country life with his wife, their church wedding, their youth, all the way to his baptism as a baby. A white unicorn gallops through it, in reverse too.
It hit number four in the US and number three in the UK in 1994, and MTV Europe played it on heavy rotation. Death first, baptism last. Innocence as the finish line instead of the starting gate.
