The other day I was walking up a hill and found myself humming The Princess Pat. For those of you who didn’t spend any time at brownies or summer camp, it’s a repeating song. “The Princess Pat (the Princess Pat), lived in a tree (lived in a tree), and sailed across (and sailed across), the seven seas (the seven seas).” As I walked and sang I wondered for the the first time what the princess pat was, that she could both live in a tree and sail across oceans, but given the song used the nonsense phrase “rick-a-bamboo” I wasn’t really expecting logic. Nevertheless, I googled.
Turns out this song, that I’d sung while tramping through the Hunua Ranges and to energise little kids before assembly at Camp Adair, was an army song from 1917 (!). The original lyrics to princess pat weren’t “lived in a tree”, they were “light infantry”.
That sent me down a rabbit hole of every camp song I could remember. Camp singing apparently has a long history of adopting both war songs and spirituals (Kumbaya, Peace Like a River), but also folk songs like Blowin’ in the Wind.
This got me to thinking about the odd array of songs we used to sing at primary school in the 1980s. We didn’t know any of the artists — we were eight or whatever — but I can still belt out The Rose (Bette Midler, 1979), Top of the World (The Carpenters, 1972), The Rainbow Connection (1979), Mull of Kintyre (Wings, 1977), and so on. There’s a great nostalgic thread of the best hits of the singing assemblies here. I guess I’d always assumed there was some hideous primary school song book that the teachers adhered to, but now I realise that they were just playing the songs that they knew and liked that had been in the charts a decade earlier. I asked Jess to see if her boys still sang at school and if they’d abandoned dusty folk bangers for contemporary hits. She said they’d just sung Bruno Mars’ Count on Me — which is fifteen years old. My niece Isha in London tells me she also sings Bruno Mars, and Katy Perry’s Roar, which is twelve years old. So my theory checks out. But then she crushed me by saying they also sing “really old” songs like S-Club 7’s Reach. She’s not wrong. It came out 25 years ago.
All of which got me pondering why I remember these songs so vividly. Like, all the lyrics. I can’t speak another language, but I can remember all the words to Yellow Bird. There’s a bunch of reasons: kids have plastic brains, we form strong memories when we do things in groups. Group singing is actually extremely good for you, releasing oxytocin and improving social bonding.
Daniel Levitin, who wrote This is your Brain on Music, is super interesting on this. You can watch him give some amazing demonstrations in this talk. Music engages nearly every region of the brain that we’ve mapped so far.
Lately I’ve been rewatching House. Mostly because I like to have an endless procedural on in the background while I do other things, but also because I tried the new CBS show Watson because I love a new Sherlock take, but Watson is just House but bad. Anyway, in s3 of House, which aired in 2006, the song Walter Reed (Michael Penn) started playing and even though I didn’t know the name of the song or the artist I knew all the words.
I realised that this season sat squarely in the era where The OC had transformed television soundtracks, and had remade my taste in music for a period of time. My CD collection was those albums, the Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, and Elizabethtown soundtracks. That’s basically all I listened to. From Why We Remember Music and Forget Everything Else:
“Music is inherently bound up with personal identity, and so [when people can] identify pieces of music without a lot of information, it’s often music from their youth [which can trigger] what we call the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory,” Jakubowski says. “Older adults have a really good memory for certain songs from their youth because they listened to that same record over and over … It can bring back your memories from that time period when you were having these self-defining experiences.”
(Here’s a podcast from Rolling Stone with The OC creator Josh Schwartz and music supervisor Alex Patsavas. Here’s every real band that played on the show.)
At the poppier end of the spectrum, this was also the era when Grey’s Anatomy made Chasing Cars, How to Save a Life, and Breathe (2 a.m.) completely inescapable.
Now it feels like the tv soundtrack is a meme moment (music to data refine to, dancing to the s2 White Lotus theme, Stranger Things fans rediscovering Running up that Hill), rather than a pathway to current artist discovery. Is that right, or am I not watching a show with a kick-ass array of tunes?
I guess the modern equivalent for music discovery is maybe now the tiktok trending sound, little snippets of songs that have worked their way into my brain and will never leave. I’ll be humming Doechii’s Anxiety when dementia has taken everything else. That and a light infantry marching song from more than a century earlier.
On 6 June, I’m bringing my keynote about The Good Internet to JAFAC (Just Another F$%king Awesome Conference) in Auckland. Earlybird tickets are available now, and if you email me I can even share a discount code.
If you read my newsletter about Shakespeare and the art that survives, you’ll love this piece about what gets excluded when we centre Shakespeare:
In 2018, I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pop-Up Globe. All the fairies spoke in te reo Māori. In one scene, Oberon told Puck: “Kapua te pō”, a translation of the Shakespeare line, “Overcast the night.” That phrase was a lightbulb moment for me. In English, the word “overcast” suggests a flatness, but “kapua” evokes swirling mist and uncertainty. And te pō is not just darkness — it’s the fertile space where thought and form take shape before emerging into the world of light and understanding, te ao mārama. Suddenly, I saw how Māori knowledge is a standard of excellence against which the accepted classics can be measured, not just the other way round.
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