It is not often that the worlds of music and sports crossover. When you think of some of the musical efforts from sports athletes in the past, that is probably a good thing. But the biggest sports events seem to attract other strands of culture, and there is nothing bigger than the quadrennial FIFA World Cup.
This year’s tournament will be the biggest ever, with 48 nations competing for football’s most prestigious prize. All the best players and national teams will be in attendance, and many fans will be reading the latest Lucky Rebel review to see whether it is a good place to back their favorites throughout the tournament.
Musical fans might also be interested in what’s going on in the US, Canada, and Mexico this summer, and to get them in the mood, FIFA has released a World Cup album with Lighter by Jelly Roll and Carin León as the first single. We will leave it up to them to decide whether it is a hit or not, but here are some other World Cup songs that have lived long in the memory.
Daryl Hall and Sounds of Blackness – Gloryland
Where better to start off with than with one of this summer’s co-hosts? Football in the US is in a very different place than it was when the country hosted its first World Cup finals in 1994. Back then, the tournament was used more of a way to introduce the sport to vast swathes of a country more interested in their own style of football.
The official tournament song is always fairly over-the-top, but Daryl Hall (of legendary duo Hall and Oates) dialed it up to 11 on Gloryland, extolling the virtue of the US and its position as a “Gloryland”, presumably compared to some of the places the teams and players were coming from in 1994. Gloryland is memorable as a song very much of its time, but the main thing most people remember from the 1994 finals is Diana Ross missing a penalty in the opening ceremony.
Shakira – Waka Waka
By the time the 2010 World Cup came around, the USMNT was far more established and was looking forward to its sixth consecutive finals appearance in South Africa. FIFA had modernized a little as well, boosting its marketing know-how by hiring Colombian singer Shakira to record the official tournament song.
It is a shame that FIFA didn’t see fit to hire a local singer to be sound of the first World Cup held on African soil, but the chorus of Waka Waka does at least incorporate some lyrics using the Fang language, commonly spoken in Cameroon. This catchy earworm of a song proved so popular that football fans are still singing versions of it to this day.
New Order – World in Motion
Most sports songs are not exactly high in cultural merit. Teams from England, in particular, used to record their own tracks every year when they made it to the FA Cup final, but none were particularly rated for their musical ability. That all changed when the English Football Association approached cult band New Order to record a song for Italia ‘90.
By then, New Order had moved on from their more moody Joy Division sound and were producing house music-influenced classic pop songs – and World in Motion is a perfect example of that. It sounded nothing like a traditional football song and even featured England international John Barnes rapping. It is still regarded as a high point of the football songs genre.
Ricky Martin – La Copa de la Vida
It might have been eight years after World in Motion, but Ricky Martin’s tournament anthem for the France World Cup was much more of a commercial pop tune. The upbeat message and football chant stylings proved incredibly popular, however, providing Ricky Martin with one of his most successful songs ever.
Much like Shakira’s effort 12 years later, the song uses a Latin American music base (even though the tournament was held in France, a country hardly without musical history) and that seemed to work for just about everyone across the world, as the single went to number one in places as far afield as Belgium and Australia. It is really the standard for what World Cup songs should sound like for maximum appeal.
Ennio Morricone – El Mundial
For our final World Cup song, we have decided to travel further back, to a time when FIFA wasn’t as commercially musically savvy as it is today. The 1978 FIFA World Cup was held in Argentina, with the country under the rule of a military dictatorship that was hoping that the tournament would present the nation in a more positive light. Perhaps that’s why the famous film composer Ennio Morricone was chosen to record the anthem.
It was a strange decision, even so, and although the song is perfectly fine, it doesn’t really seem to fit the remit of a tournament anthem. It sounds a little more like a track that Morricone has decided not to use for one of his famous Spaghetti Western soundtracks than an upbeat party song for the fans to join in with. Waka Waka, it is not. FIFA may never have used a film composer again – and finals anthems have definitely been more Latin-inspired in recent years – but how many other legendary composers could say that they came up with the soundtrack of a World Cup finals?
