get behind the mule
Iowa City fireworks festival, yeah yeah. It was one of these "concerts in the sky" with synchronized music, which was technically impressive even if the song lineup was baffling. We had Disney's "Be Our Guest" and the theme from Pocahontas; we had whichever fourth-generation Pearl Jam clones do those "Arms Wide Open" and "Can You Take Me Higher?" songs; we had some soft-rock classics from the '80s; and "Live and Let Die" was the closer. The only song I could really get behind was "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and it turns out that song's melody and "wimoweh" chorus come from a traditional Zulu lion-hunting song. I only know this because the original song "Mbube" aka "Wimoweh" shows up on a Miriam Makeba album.
