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Together, Let Us Shake the "Happy Birthday" Song Off It's Fortified Perch

The song Happy Birthday to You (HBTY) has a story to tell, and it’s not wishing you to have a good one on this, the anniversary of your birth. The most recognizable song in the English language – a simple six notes and words - is owned by Time Warner, who will charge you ten grand to legally sing the four verses in a public place like a school or restaurant. But the history of how HBTY turned into a two million dollar a year corporate earner is the interesting part. It’s a case study in the copyright-by-fiat strategy that has recently proven so popular with corporate minions and robots. They allege intellectual ownership where none exists, and they often get away with it.

There are many ways to right this wrong. You could challenge HBTY’s dubious copyright in court, as long as you’re prepared for a foe like Time Warner. Or you could try to shame Time Warner by urging innocent birthday revelers to request permission for every innocent public “performance” of the song. Both are worthy endeavors, but neither one sounds like much fun.

No, for our purposes here, we’ll encourage you to unseat (or at least unsettle) “Happy Birthday to You” from it’s cultural throne by composing possible replacements. The Free Music Archive Happy Birthday contest seeks a few new Happy Birthday songs that are simple and catchy, with great earworm potential (remember: HBTY uses only six notes!) that can be sung in restaurants, bowling alleys, even in TV shows and movies – free of charge. Together, let us shake “Happy Birthday” from it’s fortified cultural throne, and replace it with a melody that the children can sing without fear of being served.

The three top entries will be all dressed up and distributed to the most powerful media companies on earth with colorful, Ross Perot-style financial incentive charts encouraging the recipients to better their bottom line by using one of these shiny new Happy Birthday replacement tracks.  WFMU will organize and pay for the digital and physical mailings of the three winning tracks to the luckiest people on earth-  any media or public organization who might have need for new birthday songs - movie studios; theater troupes, restaurant chains; sport leagues, scouting associations, youth groups; minor league baseball teams, major league Jai Alai squads, bowling alleys and we’ll also send the track to music journalists, bloggers and radio stations to help get the word out and cement the new songs into the cultural subconscious.

I Rokk by Kasvot Vaxt

Listener Victor writes in from Minneapolis with a photo of private press LP from the late ’70s or early ‘80s that he recently came across at a flea market stall in Duluth, too intriguing not to buy, even though the record itself was MIA. Being the global center for private press Scandinavian LPs that we are (especially ones with front covers that depict strange-looking dogs), he naturally wrote to us wondering what could tell him. Well, Victor, we know a little, but wish we could tell you more.

Back when the “U” in WFMU still stood for “Upsala” and the station was part of a Lutheran college campus in New Jersey, we used to get occasional donations of record collections from former students or their families. There was tons of Nordic/Scandinavian dreck, and a few DJs went through Swedish country music phases. But for a brief period in the late ‘80s, the hands-down DJ favorite was an extremely rare LP from Stavanger, Norway by the group Kasvot Växt with the improbable but absolutely real name í rokk.

It was such a favorite, in fact, that within a year or so our copy of í rokk walked away with a certain now ex-DJ. And so rare that it was only at our annual Record Fair a few years ago that we’ve even seen a copy since, albeit at a price that would’ve cut well into the Record Fair’s profits had we reacquired it on behalf of station’s library.

What we know for sure are their names, at least as they were credited on the album--Horst Guomundurson, Georg Guomundrson, Jules Haugen, and Cleif Jårvinen--though no instruments are credited. (One very stoned DJ had a theory that the bandmembers actually played in different configurations on each song.) í rokk was pressed in Stavanger, and there’s a label credited, Elektrisk Tung, but who really knows if that was a real label or just a joke by the band or one of their friends?

The lyrics, which we guessed were in Norwegian, were impossible to understand, of course. There were weird synthesizers that sounded either homemade or like some obscure European model. One song, “Liggur í Gegnum,” I believe, featured chanting and became a hit on the dance floor at the DJ holiday party that year, not long before the LP disappeared.

During that all-too-brief period when the album was at the station, though, we tried to get some of the song titles and lyrics translated by enlisting the help of a Norwegian minister visiting campus for a semester. And, if you think inviting a Norwegian minister into the den of iniquity that was our college radio station in 1988 was a bad idea you, dear listener, would be absolutely correct. There’s a good chance he was put off by the smells emanating from the DJ lounge before he even got to the listening station at the record library, but he tried to be polite. At least at first.

From the jacket, he could only tell us that the band’s name was actually in two languages, which was news to us, and when he listened to the record itself, he told us that the lyrics seemed to be possibly in even more than two languages. Besides Norwegian, at least one of the languages seemed to be Finnish, and maybe also Swedish, though he wasn’t sure, and clearly was in no mood to figure it out.

What is indisputable is that the words he did understand seemed to upset him greatly, and the visiting Norwegian minister didn’t even make it through the first side of the record. In DJ lore, the troublesome chorus had something to do with what he hastily translated as “the cubes,” after which the young minister reportedly departed the record library while remarking that he didn’t think that anybody should be singing about such topics, let alone to a potential audience of young music fans. Cubes? Fuck if we know.

It’s a record we dearly hope surfaces again someday in playable shape, and we’re keeping our eyeballs peeled. Frankly, we don’t care if some wealthy collector hoards a copy as long as they make mp3s for the rest of us. We’d just like to hear it again! And if anybody knows anything about those fucking cubes, please get in touch.