My Favorite Game

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My Favorite Game
The cardigans
publication October 5, 1998
length 3:36
Genre (s) Alternative rock
text Nina Persson
music Peter Svensson
Label Stockholm Records, Polydor
album Gran Turismo

My Favorite Game (German: My favorite game ) is a song of the category Alternative Rock of the Swedish band The Cardigans in 1998. The song is the eighth title of the studio album Gran Turismo and was the first single released. In the English lyrics , the bitter end of an apparently destructive and hopeless love relationship is discussed.

My Favorite Game had some international success, reaching number three in Sweden and number 14 in the UK. It made it into the top 40 in several European countries and in New Zealand. While it failed to make it into the charts on the US Billboard Hot 100 and its radio counterpart, it reached number 16 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks charts.

The accompanying music video was shot by the Swedish music video and film director Jonas Åkerlund and shows singer Nina Persson driving recklessly on a country road in the Mojave Desert . The video sparked controversy because of this depiction and the resulting car accidents and was therefore re-cut to alleviate the drama and to avoid an impending lockdown by music TV stations .

composition

Guitarist Peter Svensson and lead singer Nina Persson wrote My Favorite Game during the recording session of the fourth studio album Gran Turismo between May and July 1998. The song, like the other songs on the album, was recorded in Tore Johansson's newly established recording studio Country Hell in Skurup, Sweden . Persson began with the chorus that "marries the music so quickly that it couldn't be torn apart." She then wrote verses to "make sense of the chorus," which enabled her to "put a lot of text into the verses" unlike other Cardigans songs with less lyrics than the song Erase / Rewind . Before the sound recordings, Svensson played the song to producer Tore Johansson on an acoustic guitar . Although the song was originally designed as a slow country / rock shuffle , similar to the style of Neil Young's Old Man , the pace was doubled at the producer's request. According to Svensson, the band was aware of the song potential and that it was “a single, but it didn't work at first” with “the shuffle beat at half speed”. Immediately after changing the musical direction of the song, the song's signature hookline developed . Both the drums and guitar parts were recorded in a 1970s-style drying room, while the vocals were recorded in the studio's attic. Although the drums were recorded with analog tape compression, the rest of the production of the song, including the Fat Fuzzy Bass Line and the coda , was finalized using Pro Tools 24 professional audio editing software .

My Favorite Game is a rock song in the key of C minor . It is composed in four-four time and has a tempo of 143 beats per minute . The song is not structured in the standard verse-chorus form , the instrumentation includes electric guitar , electric bass and Hammond organ . The text is about a failed relationship, which Persson summarized with "fucking up in love". It is also about "how women often try to change people in relationships so that they are better suited to themselves or to save people from themselves." Svensson commented that this concept "is not always a good idea, like when." Women stay in a relationship with a man who beats them because they think he'll be better one day ”. The song is driven by its two-part guitar riff , which forms the basis of the “electro rock power center”. The verses are significantly faster than the slow, bass-heavy chorus , in which the drums only start halfway.

Music video

The video begins with a scene of lead singer Nina Persson looking for a heavy stone on the edge of a desert road. Meanwhile, a radio host urged safe driving, as the outside temperatures in the desert will be very hot that day. When Persson finds a stone, she goes to her car, a dark blue 1974 Cadillac Eldorado Cabriolet, blocks the accelerator and puts it into gear. The song starts when you leave. While driving at full throttle, the Carbio snakes back and forth between the two lanes at top speed, pushes oncoming vehicles off the road and causes numerous accidents. At one point in the video, she throws a Felix the Cat stuffed animal out of the convertible, which is then run over by another car. In some versions of the video, the doll is blurred. In different versions of the video, Nina is also shown steering the wheel with her feet. There is a flat, colored tattoo on Persson's arm, which was painted on for the video and rubbed off on the car seat as the video progresses. She also drives towards pedestrians, forcing them to jump out of the way as she drives through the village of Daggett. At the beginning of the last chorus, she turns the car and drives back towards Barstow at full throttle. Towards the end of the song, she gets up from the driver's seat and controls the direction of the car with her foot on the steering wheel. She steers on a collision course with an oncoming delivery truck in which the other band members of the Cardigans are, with the drummer Bengt Lagerberg at the wheel. While the occupants of the van react in horror, she calmly stretches her arms to the cross before the two vehicles collide head-on at the end of the song. The radio host reads the State Patrol warning of “a runaway high-speed vehicle on Route 666” off-screen and then goes on to advertise.

Filming

The music video for My Favorite Game was shot by Jonas Åkerlund, who was previously responsible for the provocative music video for Smack My Bitch Up by the British big beat group The Prodigy . The singer described the music video as a "mini road movie ". The three days of filming in California's Mojave Desert between Barstow and Daggett cost £ 220,000. Nina Persson reported that she needed oxygen several times during filming and that temperatures around 43 ° C were "hot enough for a Swede to fall over".

“It was amazing - the weather was really hot and the car was super-hot. I did try to drive it a couple of meters but that shoot was surrounded by crazy security and insurance matters, so mostly the car is sitting on a truck and I am pretend driving. When you see the whole car it's a stunt woman driving it. "

“It was amazing - the weather was really hot and the car was super hot. I tried to drive a few meters, but the shoot was accompanied by insane safety and insurance issues, so most of the time the car was on a truck and I was just pretending to drive. If you can see the whole car, a stunt woman drives it. "

- Nina Persson : NME, 2013

Controversy

The music video sparked significant controversy when it was first released. Many European broadcasters, including MTV UK, only played an edited version of the video, in which all car accidents and depictions of reckless driving were removed, although director Jonas Åkerlund tried to evade censorship by making four differently edited cuts of the video to varying degrees of violence and blood. Four days before the single was released, a more drastic cut was shown on the Cardigans website once. The reason MTV UK declined the video was because it feared that the video would encourage jaunts and cause car accidents among teenage motorists, so ultimately the defused version was played the most on MTV UK. In the US and Germany, the music channels were significantly less restrictive, with many of them playing either the completely uncensored or only slightly censored version of the video with only a few of the car accidents removed. The director commented on MTV's behavior as follows:

“I think it's terrible if I make a video which is censored or not shown. I can't really understand MTV's decision to censor parts of the video in England and America. I think it's really stupid. "

“I find it terrible when I make a video that is censored or not shown. I don't really understand MTV's decision to censor parts of the video in England and America. I think it's really stupid. "

- Jonas Åkerlund : The Irish Times

Alternative endings

The director produced five different endings of the video with different outcomes of the car accident.

  • "Dead Version": Persson's body flings out of her convertible into the air after the frontal impact and over the roof of the van, where she lies dead on the street on the back of the van.
  • “Stone Version”: Perssons also flies over the roof of the delivery truck, only that when she gets up she is hit in the head by the stone that pinched the gas pedal, as if in a cartoon.
  • “Walkaway Version”: At the end of the video, Persson can get off the ground after the flight and walk away from the accident, wiping blood from her face.
  • "Head Version": Persson is beheaded from the windshield of her car on impact. The next shot shows the head of a mannequin rolling down the street.
  • "Censored Version": In this version all car accidents are censored. Persson just drives the car singing. The entire video is almost entirely of a single long setting shown.

Media use

My Favorite Game was released in 1999 in Gran Turismo 2 , a racing game with (coincidentally) the same distribution name as the album the song was taken from. The song was featured in an episode of the MTV animated series Daria and in the US sitcom Sabrina - Totally Verhext! (Season 3, Episode 17) used. It was part of the music game Dancing Stage Party Edition , the European counterpart to Dance Dance Revolution by Konami for the PlayStation , as well as in the European version of Band Hero .

Single releases

CD single, Pt. 1

  1. "My Favorite Game" - 3:36
  2. "War (First try)" - 4:07
  3. "Sick & Tired" (live) - 3:24 am

CD single, Pt. 2

  1. "My Favorite Game" - 3:36
  2. "My Favorite Game" (Wubbledub mix) - 5:57
  3. "Lovefool" (Live at Hultsfredsfestivalen) - 3:20 am

CD maxi single

  1. "My Favorite Game" - 3:36
  2. "War (First try)" - 4:07
  3. "Was" - 3:56

Contributors

  • Singing: Nina Persson
  • Electric guitar: Peter Svensson
  • Bass guitar: Magnus Sveningsson
  • Electric guitar, keyboards : Lars-Olof Johansson
  • Electronic drums , programming : Bengt Lagerberg

Sound engineering

  • Recorded at Country Hell , Skurup , Sweden
  • Producers: Tore Johansson, Peter Collins
  • Sound engineering : Tore Johansson, Peter Collins, John Holbrook, Janne Waldenmark
  • Sound engineering assistance: Lars Göransson, Jim Caruana
  • Recording technique: Tore Johansson
  • Mixing : Tore Johansson
  • Mixing assistance: Jim Caruana
  • Mastering : Roger Jonsson

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena: Video thrills the Radio Star: Music videos: history, topics, analyzes . Transcript Verlag , 2007, ISBN 978-3-89942-728-8 , pp. 121 f . ( google.de ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e Recording The Cardigans 'My Favorite Game'. (No longer available online.) In: Sound on Sound. September 8, 1998, archived from the original on January 12, 2005 ; accessed on April 9, 2020 (English).
  3. ↑ Helienne Lindvall: Nina Persson: knitting the Cardigans back together. In: The Guardian . Retrieved April 26, 2012, April 12, 2020 (UK English).
  4. ↑ a b c Liner Album Notes from the Best Of The Cardigans . January 2008.
  5. ↑ a b Mark Savage: How The Cardigans survived success. In: BBC News . Retrieved March 3, 2008, April 9, 2020 (UK English).
  6. ^ A b Carrie Bell: The Modern Age . In: Billboard . December 5, 1998, ISSN  0006-2510 , p. 113 (American English, google.com ).
  7. ↑ a b c Notes for My Favorite Game . Hal Leonard Publishing House. 2005.
  8. ↑ a b c d Gil Kaufman: Cardigans Don Trip-Hop Trappings For New Album. In: MTV . June 10, 1998, Retrieved April 9, 2020 (American English).
  9. ↑ Cardigans' Crash Video Banned. In: New Musical Express (NME). September 8, 1998, accessed April 9, 2020 (UK English).
  10. ↑ My favorite game . In: Songfacts .
  11. ↑ Cardigans 'Game' video flunks crash test . In: USA Today . October 16, 1998.
  12. ↑ Mark Savage: Cardigans Banned in the UK? In: chartattack.com. October 13, 1998, archived from the original on May 12, 2008 ; Retrieved April 9, 2020 (UK English).
  13. ^ Courting controversy? In: The Irish Times . November 18, 1998, accessed April 14, 2020 .