If you haven’t heard Baba Yetu it means you haven’t played Civilization 4. This means your gaming experience is faulty. You should remedy that. Go to Steam, go buy it, thank me later.
You back? Played it for over 400 hours, lost your family and your job? Good stuff, now you understand, right? Great game, I’m sure you’ll agree. But the song is what’s important here.
The song Baba Yetu, the intro song for Civ 4, is quite simply amazing. As is known, it’s the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili.
It’s a fantastic piece that manages to take the words of a religious anthem, put it into a language that a great number of people speak but most people haven’t heard – outside of the names of the characters in the Lion King – and performed by a choir that manages to make a prayer uplifting.
What’s so incredible about the song isn’t just it’s inherent awesomeness as a musical piece, but it’s message about humanity. It’s religion, joy, and multiculturalism all in one. By having it sung in Swahili, the piece ceases to actually about God or religion or any of that, and instead becomes a kind of anthem about mankind.
This is the song we should be sending out on the Voyager Golden Disc! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record for reference). This is the music that should be representing all of mankind’s achievements and cultural accomplishments in a beautiful 3 minutes and 55 seconds.
Love it or hate it, religion is a part of our history that can’t be avoided; we are all shaped by the religions created by our majestic species – through repression or advancement – and this song brings that historical significance, but at the same time removes the inherent… religiousness of it? I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like… Listening to all of mankind, in one beautiful chorus, celebrating our achievements and creativity whilst not neglecting the importance that religion played in our development.
So. I propose this: it should be our species’ anthem. When we eventually make alien contact with some form of sentient other many years from now, this should be the song that accompanies the dignitaries we send to them their laser-ray dooms. But seriously, let’s do it! Let’s make it our Earthly Song!
We’re sending more voyager discs out? 😮
I know they put on erm.. i forget but its about loneliness (simply because space is so empty and we are so alone)
No, not to my knowledge 😛 But my point was that this is the song that should be there. It’s just such a perfect example of our culture and existence.
There are a lot of great pieces on the actual Voyager, though 🙂
You think we should tell aliens that a majority of humans believe the contents of millennia old fairy tales to be true?
I imagine that any sentient race is likely to have developed some form of worship in one capacity or another; I am not saying that people are inherently religious however! I’m simply saying that I think that sentience grants an individual too much curiosity through thought for someone in their race’s existence to not have created some form of reason for everything.
I imagine that any race that manages to reach us would understand our capacity for religion; what I fear however, is that they may not understand how we have yet to outgrow it.
My high school choir performed this song last year =) Pretty much brightened my entire day to see this post; thank you!
And your comment just brightened my entire day 🙂
Hopefully you’ll keep reading so I can keep making your day better!
Thanks for reading!
PS: I wish I could be a part of choir to sing that song; I’d love to be the main voice on it, that’d be so cool…