“Yo, listen up, here’s the story
About a little guy that lives in a blue world.”
The year was 2020. The month was May. Most of the world was quarantined. Already, symptoms of delirium and the madness of isolation were seeping into the social consciousness. We all coped with these lockdown blues a little differently, desperately grasping for a lifeline to sanity. Some of us caught up on reading or finished that show they’d been meaning to watch. Some of us rekindled old hobbies or took up new ones. Some exercised regularly, some honed their cooking, some took up painting, and some of us embraced the void and growing attitude of global nihilism.
This last tactic was the one chosen by Harley Streten, the Australian producer known as Flume, when he teased a remix of “Blue (Da Ba Dee),” the infamous Eurodance song by Eiffel 65.
“Roses r red my face is blue here is a song I made it for u,”
captioned Flume on his Instagram post.
The post, from the caption to the dead expression on Streten’s blue face, reeks of 21st-century irony and quarantine cabin fever. Why did Flume remix “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” in 2020? Frankly, the producer himself probably couldn’t elaborate on that one. Chalk it up to quarantined delirium, a marketing grab, or even the 20-Year Rule of cultural cycles, but whatever you do, just don’t bother interpreting any deeper meaning from the track.
Truly, it was a remix few could have foreseen and none really wanted, but somehow, someway… the song actually kind of slaps. Eiffel 65’s original version is simple and ridiculously catchy, qualities which have allowed the track to maintain relevancy for the past twenty years while propelling it to a meme status parallel even to Crazy Frog.
In his remix, Flume delicately respects the source material while embellishing the track with loops and effects more befitting a modern EDM song. The intro is nearly identical to the original, barring a sharpness in the notes, which is further accentuated in the buildup and culminates in a more characteristic EDM drop, though one still unmistakably of the same species as “Blue (Da Ba Dee).”
You can check out the remix below and decide for yourself whether Flume’s version of the song truly lives up to the legacy that is “Blue (Da Ba Dee).”