Sacred Spirit 'Yeha-Noha (Wishes Of Happiness And Prosperity)'

Chart Peak: 37

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Sacred Spirit's Chants And Dances Of The Native American Indians project has already been hugely successful in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and New Zealand... This 'Yeha-Noha' single is due for re-release on 30/10/95. From CD/tape "Chants And Dances Of The Native Americans".

Side two starts with another of those tracks that seems a little out of place, although admittedly, it'd be hard to fit it in anywhere on this or just about any Now album. People who write the history of pop in the mid-1990s tend to stick to a certain template: Britpop (of which more soon, BTW), Girl Power, various forms of dance, hip-hop etc. What tends not to get mentioned so often is the whole wave of music like this (mentioned so little that there doesn't seem to be a name for it) that sold by the bucketload, albeit mostly in the album market as you can see by the peak of this single. And this was its second chart run, after it had barely scraped the Top 75 in the spring; in the meantime it had been the Number One single in France for six weeks, which may tell you something about the openness of the UK pop market to foreign languages.

For whatever reason, maybe traced back even to Paul Simon in the 1980s, this seemed to be a time when producers from the Western world (Germany, in this case) seemed on the lookout for "ethnic" sounds to weave with modern-day pop production. Obviously, the source material for this is the music of the people we British were learning to call Native Americans (they were still Red Indians when I was at primary school), and this particular track features a Navajo elder singing a version of a creation myth. I remember having a bit of a WTF reaction when I heard this on the Top 40 countdown and I'm still not sure what to make of it now, really, musically or even sociopolitically. There's a part of me that always wants to condemn this kind of record as patronising, and producer Claus Zundel doesn't exactly help matters by using the psuedonym The Fearsome Brave. But perhaps that's more a reflection of my own predjudices. Either way, I'm not a particular fan of the Western elements of this record either, but the whole thing is so far off what I'd normally choose to listen to that I feel oddly unqualified to pronounce on whether it's good or not, only that I personally don't enjoy it.

Available on: Sacred Spirit Vol.1: Chants & Dances of the Native Americans