Emperor Penguin’s Heartsong: “Boogie Wonderland”
Summary
For legal reasons this post is a joke: please see my real post on Of Monsters and Men.
Seeing as there are no indigenous HUMAN populations to Antarctica, it felt appropriate to survey the next best population of congregating and communicating animals: penguins. The Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is one of the most iconic species of penguin and one of the few animals that are able to survive the harsh winters of Antarctica. They are known to be serially monogamous, which means they will only mate with one individual at a time, but each breeding period (year) they find a new mate. The courtship call sent out to others in the population became known as a “heartsong”, as detailed in the 2006 penguin documentary Happy Feet.
Each penguin has it’s own call, most of which can be interpreted by experts at Warner Bros studios and related to popular human songs. The heartsong in particular I will be looking at is “Boogie Wonderland”, sang by Gloria, a prominent female penguin in this community but originally written by the famous Earth, Wind, and Fire. It details her quest to select the appropriate suitor in a sea of men trying to appeal to her.
Boogie wonderland
Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts
Of men who need more than they get
Daylight deals a bad hand
To a women who has laid too many bets
The mirror stares you in the face and says
“Baby, uh uh it don’t work”
You say your prayers though you don’t care
You dance and shake the hurt
If these Antarctic inhabitants are singing songs by Earth, Wind, and Fire, it shows how far American culture has spread. Sure this song wasn’t originally about life in the snowy South Pole, but these penguins, particularly Gloria, has altered the lyrics and made her fit her quest to identify a suitor in the polar desert. This gives us a little insight into what it might be like to live in one of these communities native to a land that is deemed uninhabitable by the vast majority of other species.
You can also see some original uninterpreted songs performed by Emperor penguins and compared to sheet music by Alexander Liebermann below:
Works Cited:
Williams, Tony D. (1995). The Penguins. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-854667-2.
Miller, G., Morris, J., & Coleman, W. (2006). Happy Feet. Village Roadshow Entertainment. Warner Bros Studios.