Beyond Words

Spain should be the coun­try with the tourist board tagline we wear so proudly. OK, not so proudly, but with a befud­dled expres­sion and lips mouthing a “har?” (Only jok­ing, don’t take my link off your page)

As I was say­ing, Spain. She doesn’t have words to her national anthem. How bizarre. Imag­ine if we didn’t have words to ours. How would we know the mean­ing of what we were singing? Thou­sands of kids across the coun­try would never know that our national lan­guage was Bahasa Melayu.

Or imag­ine if you didn’t have an anthem at all, and had to make one up on the spot when some­one asked what your anthem was: As was the case with the state anthem of Perak, the tune of which later became the melody of the national anthem of Malaysia:

The state anthem was cre­ated dur­ing a state visit of Sul­tan Idris of Perak to Eng­land in 1888. It was noticed that no anthem existed to greet the Sul­tan. The Aide-de-camp of the Sul­tan, Raja Mansur ibni Sul­tan Abdul­lah, did not dare to tell that no anthem exists and so instead hummed a song he knew from the Sey­chelles, a melody orig­i­nally writ­ten by Pierre Jean de Beranger. After he told the Sul­tan about it, the sul­tan accepted the song as the anthem. The lyrics were writ­ten by Raja Ngah Manur bin Raja Abdullah.

In 1957 the national anthem of Malaysia, Negaraku, was selected to use the same melody.

Imag­ine if we had to make up the words to the tune of our national anthem…

But just only imag­ine, because it is an offence to sing unof­fi­cial lyrics or any trans­la­tion to the anthem…

Semua Kita Jan­gan Stress (ini bukan lagu negara)

Casi­nos save econ­omy
Just don’t go on a gam­bling spree (whee!)
The cli­mate is get­ting hazy
Gov­ern­ment say don’t worry
Gov­ern­ment say don’t worry

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