Thursday, August 03, 2006
MODERATTO
At the first meeting for our Fluid Movement performance, our director announced that she was looking for a Spanish version of “Eye of the Tiger". Apparently one of the other directors heard it once and they agreed that it would be perfect for our Mexican wrestling scene in the Charles Darwin show. Unfortunately, she had “looked all over the internet” and could not find it anywhere. I decided to take a look for myself.
The next morning, I googled “Ojo del Tigre” and got about a million hits. (The director stated later say that she did look for it under the Spanish translation but found nothing, so I have no idea what search engine she could possibly have been using.) My wife was looking for it at the same time, and even enlisted the help of our message group. That kind of miffed me, since I wanted a chance to exhaust all our resources before calling for help.
Finding the song’s existence was not the problem. Many sites quoted the band Survivor’s wikipedia entry which stated that the Mexican band Moderatto covered a Spanish version back in the 80’s. Moderatto’s home page was easy to find. They started out in the 80’s mocking glam rock stereotypes and covering Spanish versions of popular American songs. They are positively huge and have kept up the act to this day. The funny thing is, surveys of their fans indicate that most of their demographic don’t understand that they’re a parody act.
The real problem was the fact that this song was released on vinyl in the 80’s. I was hoping to just find the track on napster or trapster or wapster or whatever, but no such luck. On-line sources for Moderatto’s recordings only had their recent albums. I was unable to even confirm on which of their first few self-titled albums the track appeared. My wife had by that time discovered another band, Aracner, that apparently had also done a cover, but it appeared it was in English and again we couldn’t find the actual track anywhere to check.
On a hunch, I started searching for Moderatto’s albums with the word “tigre”. One of the hits was for a Spanish message board. I found the entry, copied it, pasted it into a translation page, and while the translation wasn’t perfect, or maybe the message poster used the same sterling grammar as everyone else does on message boards, the poster did indicate that the song “Ojo del Tigre” appeared on a soundtrack album, and they included a link! At CDUniverse, under that soundtrack album, there was the song “Hijo del Tigre”, which included a short preview track. In Spanish, “ojo” means “eye” and “hijo” means “son”, so I can only imagine that they changed some of the lyrics just so the translation would actually scan to the song, but it definitely was the version we were looking for.
I sent the link to our director, and she was amazed and impressed. I was just pleased that an exhaustive search had paid off. At our cast party, it’s traditional for the directors to hand out awards to everyone in the cast for something or other, and I’m betting that’s what I’m going to get singled out for. It’s not like I’m going to be up for “Best Abs”, but there’s always next year…
At the first meeting for our Fluid Movement performance, our director announced that she was looking for a Spanish version of “Eye of the Tiger". Apparently one of the other directors heard it once and they agreed that it would be perfect for our Mexican wrestling scene in the Charles Darwin show. Unfortunately, she had “looked all over the internet” and could not find it anywhere. I decided to take a look for myself.
The next morning, I googled “Ojo del Tigre” and got about a million hits. (The director stated later say that she did look for it under the Spanish translation but found nothing, so I have no idea what search engine she could possibly have been using.) My wife was looking for it at the same time, and even enlisted the help of our message group. That kind of miffed me, since I wanted a chance to exhaust all our resources before calling for help.
Finding the song’s existence was not the problem. Many sites quoted the band Survivor’s wikipedia entry which stated that the Mexican band Moderatto covered a Spanish version back in the 80’s. Moderatto’s home page was easy to find. They started out in the 80’s mocking glam rock stereotypes and covering Spanish versions of popular American songs. They are positively huge and have kept up the act to this day. The funny thing is, surveys of their fans indicate that most of their demographic don’t understand that they’re a parody act.
The real problem was the fact that this song was released on vinyl in the 80’s. I was hoping to just find the track on napster or trapster or wapster or whatever, but no such luck. On-line sources for Moderatto’s recordings only had their recent albums. I was unable to even confirm on which of their first few self-titled albums the track appeared. My wife had by that time discovered another band, Aracner, that apparently had also done a cover, but it appeared it was in English and again we couldn’t find the actual track anywhere to check.
On a hunch, I started searching for Moderatto’s albums with the word “tigre”. One of the hits was for a Spanish message board. I found the entry, copied it, pasted it into a translation page, and while the translation wasn’t perfect, or maybe the message poster used the same sterling grammar as everyone else does on message boards, the poster did indicate that the song “Ojo del Tigre” appeared on a soundtrack album, and they included a link! At CDUniverse, under that soundtrack album, there was the song “Hijo del Tigre”, which included a short preview track. In Spanish, “ojo” means “eye” and “hijo” means “son”, so I can only imagine that they changed some of the lyrics just so the translation would actually scan to the song, but it definitely was the version we were looking for.
I sent the link to our director, and she was amazed and impressed. I was just pleased that an exhaustive search had paid off. At our cast party, it’s traditional for the directors to hand out awards to everyone in the cast for something or other, and I’m betting that’s what I’m going to get singled out for. It’s not like I’m going to be up for “Best Abs”, but there’s always next year…
# posted by Renfield @ 11:14 AM 
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Hey, very cool! Apparently, the guitarist for Aracner was searching fro referneces to his band and came upon this entry. He left a comment on the previous Fluid Movement post, which make him my first Comment! It was in Spanish, but at least I knew the route to deal with that now (although I knew enough to get the gist). Bueno!
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