In a 2017 essay for NPR’s “Shocking Omissions” series, reporter Melissa Locker cited Robert Christgau’s D+ review of Watermark from 1988, in which he snidely said the album “makes hay of pop’s old reliable women-are-angels scam.” “It’s a fair assessment,” Locker responded, “but he says that like it’s a bad thing-when in fact, it’s why the album should be included in a canon of the greatest albums made by women.”Įnya, the Anglicized stage name of Eithne Ní Bhraonáin, was an anomaly from the start. You’ve got a bias against the idea that this music is ‘soft.’ It is something that is soothing, rather than challenging, noisy, disruptive. You’ve got a bias against the idea that a woman can be an independent creator. This is not like, I’m speaking to you with the heartland truth, and here’s my guitar. “Let’s say you’re an earnest rock ’n’ roller,” says Raggett. Spa music, dentist office music … fake music. “She’s someone who’s very clearly in control of her product and what she does.”Įnya got lumped into the “New Age” genre, which the Grammys canonized in 1987 and which quickly became a pejorative term-gobbling up everyone from Yanni to George Winston and John Tesh. “Speaking frankly here, I do think it’s what happens when you have, in large part, anyone who can be best described as a ‘female auteur,’” says Ned Raggett, a music critic who gave Watermark its glowing review on AllMusic. So why did “Orinoco Flow” become a punch line in the first place? The last laugh, it should be said, belongs to Enya, who is one of the wealthiest musicians in Europe (£104 million)-despite having released only six albums since 1988, never touring, and hardly ever performing live. it’s nearly always called upon for a laugh.

From a Season 1 South Park parody (“It’s cheesy, but lame and eerily soothing at the same time!”), to Steve Coogan singing it in a 2002 episode of I’m Alan Partridge, to Shrek Forever After’s cheeky deployment under Rumpelstiltskin’s call for a mob to bring him Shrek, to the scene in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo where Stellan Skarsgård turns on a reel-to-reel tape of it as he begins to torture a bound, mid-asphyxiation Daniel Craig. īut after the initial wave of unironic popularity, it mostly stuck-at least in pop culture terms-as a punch line. MTV played the music video on rotation, both the single and video were nominated for Grammys, and the song became a bona fide phenomenon. 1 hit in the U.K., and a few months later it charted in the U.S. (It was the lead single off her proper debut album, Watermark, which dropped a few weeks earlier.) The song became a no. His entrance music? Naturally, that ethereal chorus: “Sail away, sail away, sail away!”Įnya sailed into the culture’s consciousness on October 15, 1988, when “Orinoco Flow” first crested British airwaves. when Jake theatrically bursts into court.

Cut to a full courtroom, and the judge impatiently asking where detective Peralta is.

Jake (Andy Samberg) and Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) were awaiting the fateful hearing in a trial for a crime they didn’t commit the outlook was grim, and so, sitting in a parked car about to leave for the courthouse, a gloomy Jake makes a special request: “Just put on anything by Enya.” He corrects himself: “No, not anything-‘Orinoco Flow.’ On repeat.” Then, a witness suddenly appears and offers to testify and save the day. There I was, minding my own business, catching up on Season 4 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Orinoco flow