I May Look Like a Sugar in a Plum Today, I Don't Know

Boney M. I don’t remember this disco band growing up, but wikipedia tells me that they were “phenomenally successful in the 70s and 80s”. How I learned of them was through my best girlfriend N, an Indian who was raised in Dubai and my then boyfriend, B, who was of Jordanian nationality. B was a HUGE AC/DC and Led Zeppelin fan. Imagine my surprise when, in the car on the way to dinner, he pulled out of his glove compartment a blank tape on which he had recorded a compilation of Boney M music. My girlfriend's boyfriend, a fiery, red-haired tall white guy from Appalachia, was in the car as well. My friend and B went on and on about how great this band was. What her boyfriend and I couldn’t get over was how bad this music was. And the lyrics made no sense at all. For example,

Brown girl in the ring
Tra la la la la
There’s a brown girl in the ring
Tra la la la la la
Brown girl in the ring
Tra la la la la
She looks like a sugar in a plum
Plum plum

We couldn’t help but mock this music by screaming the nonsensical lyrics. While we cracked ourselves up, we didn’t realize how upset we were making the other two. Apparently, this band was incredibly cool in the Middle East during the 70s and 80s. But how do you look like a sugar in a plum? What does that mean? Just today, B IM’ed me from Jordan and he was very eager to tell me that one of their songs has now been remixed and you can download it from iTunes. In fact, you can download multiple tracks of theirs on iTunes, I discovered. I’ll close this post by reacting as I did in IM, “cool”.

Note to American readers: Strongly recommend not making fun of your foreign friends' musical tastes. The conversation may spiral downwards and morph into a culturalist discussion on how the American collective considers itself superior to the rest of the world. This may put a damper on the rest of the evening if you're on your way out to dinner with the aforementioned foreign friends.
-K