From Tribe to Trinitron: The Strange Journey of a Traditional Southeast Asian Lullaby
Songs: “Sweet Lullaby,” Deep Forest/”Rorogwela,” Afunakwa
“We worked out a deal with Sony that featured ‘Sweet Lullaby’ on a Trinitron commercial, with a chyron identifying it. That was on TV every 10 minutes. . .”- Billboard, March 18, 1995
If you’re a Generation X-er, or even an older Millennial, there’s no doubt that you’ve heard this song dozens of times. Its use has ranged from Discovery Channel promos to Body Shop, Sony, and Neutrogena commercials. It was even on Pure Moods Vol. 1, a cassette that your mom got stuck in the tape player of her Dodge minivan back in 1994 and finally pried out with a set of pliers in 1997. When I sent this song to a friend, she exclaimed, “That’s a family road trip classic!”
Unless you saved the Pure Moods Vol. 1 cassette case from being crushed into plastic splinters by a horde of soccer cleats and two-liters of Surge, you probably don’t know who made this song in the first place. It’s by a duo called Deep Forest, consisting of French electronica musicians Erik Mouquet and Michel Sanchez. In 1992, they layered a female vocal sample over a drumbeat, added a vaguely tribal-sounding chant, and finished it off- whipped cream and a cherry on top!- with synthesizers and flute. The result was “Sweet Lullaby,” a song that reached the Top 20 in countries ranging from Norway to Australia.
And unless you’re a huge dork who trolls the Internet at 1:30 a.m. researching obscure 90s pop hits, you probably don’t know who sings this song either. While most aspiring singers complain about cramped dingy studios with too little time, the provider of the female vocal could do ya one better: she was recorded in her rural Solomon Islands village by Swiss ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in 1970, presumably under less than favorable conditions. Her name was Afunakwa, and she sang a simple yet chilling children’s song called “Rorogwela” about two recently orphaned brothers:
“Sasi sasi ae ko taro taro amu/Ko agi agi boroi tika oli oe lau/Tika gwao oe lau koro inomaena/I dai tabesau/I tebetai nau mouri.”
Which translates into English as the world’s least comforting lullaby:
“ Little brother, little brother, stop crying, stop crying/Though you are crying and crying, who else will carry you/Who else will groom you, both of us are now orphans/From the island of the dead, their spirit will continue to look after us.”
Lullabies worldwide tend to skew morbid- “Rock a Bye Baby,” “The Ghost of John,” and “London Bridge” among them- but “Rorogwela” is almost in a class by itself. Oooof that’s some tragic shit. You almost want to curl into a ball and go to sleep simply to escape the hardships of the world. In her book No Go The Bogeyman, Dame Marina Warner argues that “[Lullabies] deal with fear by confronting its possibilities, and these include the unknown destiny that lies ahead for the baby”- including the eventual death of both parents.
I don’t know much about Deep Forest’s other work, or really electronica in general, but the reason this song still deserves a listen is Afunakwa’s voice. Cracked, world-weary, quasi-soothing, her singing immerses the listener in another world and another reality; an older time, perhaps, a simpler but no less brutal one. “Sweet Lullaby” begins with her singing alone, then builds into a chorus (in which her sweet, on-key vocals still stand out.) Admittedly the song as a whole hasn’t aged well- the synthesizers, pan flute, and tribal chants sound dated, like a bad early-90s rat-tail haircut- but the central component is flawless.
So who was Afunakwa? And how did her song, recorded twenty years prior, end up selling TVs and shampoo in the Clinton-Gore era?
Almost nothing is known about Afunakwa, other than she was a Northern Malaita woman from the tropical Solomon Islands near Papua New Guinea. No pictures exist of her and she was unfortunately never credited on the album. Traveler and dancer Matt Harding tried to find her relatives in a video called “Where the Hell is Afunakwa,” only to find that she had died in 1998. While “Sweet Lullaby” earned Deep Forest a significant chunk of change, no royalties were ever paid out to her family.
The path of “Rorogwela” from fuzzy jungle recording to slick electronica is both fascinating and infuriating. It’s true that the Deep Forest boys sifted through extensive world music samples and found a real gem; however, they failed to obtain permission from either UNESCO (which had released “Rorogwela” in 1973 as part of a Musical Sources collection) or their record distribution company, Auvidis. Hugo Zemp, who originally recorded the sample, publicly insisted that the ethnic Baegu tribe should receive a portion of the song’s profits and nearly published a journal article accusing Deep Forest of lying about the sample rights (it was retracted at the last minute, fearing legal retribution from Sony.) The story only gets murkier: paired with an album introduction into pygmy chants and a music video showing a dark-skinned child playing on sand dunes, many people assumed that the vocal sample was actually African- 8,000 miles away from where “Rorogwela” was initially sung.
Traveler Matt Harding couldn’t find much information about Afunakwa when he visited her village in 2003. But her lovely lullaby lives on, and maybe that’s enough for now.
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