You can probably attribute some of that attitude to Pure Moods, the Virgin Records compilation whose TV commercial ran incessantly in 1994, before a captive audience of snarky, Beavis & Butt-head–watching kids. Also like “Kokomo,” people sure did love to hate it. Like “Kokomo,” “Orinoco Flow” was a Sandals resort package of a song, speaking to a pent-up yuppie longing for escape. Some of this, surely, came down to serendipity: Released the same year as Cocktail and The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” the song’s dreamy “Sail away, sail away, sail away” refrain reflected the collective, seafaring fantasy that so gripped the 1980s, a Miami Vice-fed, Sex on the Beach-soused, palm trees-and-pastels high where the ocean seemed ineffably, inextricably tied up with sex, success, and happiness, and the luxury yacht was the ultimate Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous status symbol. “Orinoco Flow” has been derided as a dull song for neo-hippie drips and dentist’s waiting rooms since its debut in 1988 - though that certainly didn’t stop it from becoming a massive, omnipresent hit, launching its parent album, Watermark, to quadruple-platinum sales, and making Enya one of the wealthiest artists in the world. “Bland, bloodless music ideal for elevators,” as the Los Angeles Times sneered upon release. “I’ve always loved that song, and I felt Enya had gotten a bad rap, because she’d been appropriated into what we think of as, like, massage music.” “I don’t love that it’s always been used as a joke,” he says. But even beyond that, we’ve been conditioned by decades of pop culture to think of “Orinoco Flow” as a punch line, something Burnham was well aware of when he set out to redeem it. Besides, there is something obviously waggish about Enya’s reverie on “sailing away” across a geographically impossible archipelago of pleasantly rhyming islands, paired to someone scrolling listlessly through social media.
Still, we’ve been trained by countless commercials and Will Ferrell movies to find the retro needle-drop inherently funny - and “Orinoco Flow” is, as of October 15, now a hilarious 30 years old. “In screenings, the moment it came on, people would chuckle, maybe for just a split second,” Burnham says, though that certainly wasn’t his intention. “How can we feel the internet - not in a way that’s tongue in cheek and funny, but genuine?” Burnham turned to the song he says he “would listen to when I was in eighth grade, to feel bigger than I was, to feel deeper and more exciting.” That song is Enya’s New Age pop hit, “Orinoco Flow.” “I wanted so badly for the sequence to feel spiritual, and not like ‘hacking into the internet,’” Burnham tells Vulture.
Enya album sail away update#
In this wordless swirl of Snapchat filters, Burnham captures the peculiarly hyperengaged detachment of the Extremely Online generation, like an update on Dustin Hoffman drifting aimlessly around his family’s pool in The Graduate to “The Sound of Silence.” And Burnham gives the scene its own, similarly indelible soundtrack.
Enya album sail away movie#
It’s a mesmerizing and especially poignant moment in a movie full of them - the scene that feels most likely to be placed in one of those time capsules Kayla’s school is so obsessed with. But director Bo Burnham gives Kayla - and everyone else - one much-needed breather: After a tough day at school, Kayla retreats to her bedroom and the ambient glow of her MacBook, where her slackened face floats through a comforting abyss of Instagram selfies and BuzzFeed quizzes, hoping for the abyss to click “Like” back. It is a persistent, low-level hum that trails its 13-year-old protagonist, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), in the fluttering electronic heartbeats and 16-bit synth blares of composer Anna Meredith’s score. Eighth Grade is a film permeated by anxiety.
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