We have doo-wop to thank for all of the nonsensical words we’ve sang along to over the decades.
In the 1940s groups like The Ink Spots started building songs around strong vocal harmonies instead of instruments. Taking cues from the popularity of scat singing in jazz, the backing vocalists in doo-wop would sing made up words that accentuated rhythms they wanted employ. Since then, gibberish has permeated all genres of popular music, from Michael Jackson’s “sha-mon” to Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba.” It has proven an effective way to get songs stuck in heads, and has even given meaning to words that weren’t meant to have any meaning at all.
From “shoop” to “papa oom mow mow,” Gibberish in pop music will look at some of these lyrics, and give an overview of how they’ve “bomp-ed” along through the musical decades. First up:
Mah na mah na
Instantly when these four syllables are uttered, minds quickly flash to images of Muppets dancing around. Originally however, “mah na mah na” was to accompany something very different and very sexy.
In 1968, Italian film composer Piero Umiliani composed the song and called it “Viva La Sauna Svedese” ("Hooray for the Swedish Sauna") because the song accompanied a sexy sauna scene for the film Svezia: Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden: Heaven and Hell), a film about wild sex in Sweden.
The song found its way to the U.S. in 1969, but neither the title nor the composer did and so DJs at the time erroneously referred to it as the “Mah Na Mah Na Song” by some guy named “Pete Howard.”
The song (along with Yakety Sax) was used by The Benny Hill Show for their chase sketches in the '70s, but garnered real fame when Jim Henson and the Muppets used it. In 1969, on episode 14 of the then-recently debuted Sesame Street, Henson’s puppet creations performed the first of many incarnations of the song.
Then in 1974, on the first episode of the The Muppet Show, Mahna Mahna and The Snowths performed the version that helped The Muppet Show album hit No. 1 on the charts, and gave these four syllables the recognition they carry today.
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