What on earth... I mean... I mean… okay.. well, fine then.
A spider has been crawling up the same wall for generations, and only now are we realising what we've subjected it to...
We've misgendered it.
Millions of Danish children have sat in circles and misgendered an innocent arthropod, without a single educator intervening... and no one has ever asked the spider itself how it identifies, or which pronouns it prefers up there on the wall.
They just assumed!!!???
And to assume is, as we have by now learned, one of the grossest acts a human being can commit with their mouth closed.
But on Monday, help arrived. Two musicians have gone through nineteen of our most beloved Danish children's songs and liberated them from their gender-binary captivity - so Mester Jakob has now become Mester Maja, Lille Peter Edderkop has become Ida Edderkop, and the baker in Nørregade has undergone his own... gender-transformative... journey... somewhere between the pretzels and the pastries.
The authors make no secret of it. They say themselves that there's a political intention behind it, and the reasoning sounds exactly as you've heard it so often here on this page - "language shapes our reality".
And it does. That's precisely why it's so serious when it gets hijacked. Because that's exactly how the modern fog-brains from generation woke operate - they hijack the words, empty them, replace them and reinsert them into the language, without A SINGLE HUMAN BEING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD having asked for it - and afterwards the Man on the Television, the Municipal Woman and the Woman in the Party stand ready and repeat the new words in hypnotic chorus, as if they were true - and afraid of the consequences if they don't - until no one can remember anymore that someone decided it.
But fine then.
So let's put the glasses on and look at it. But let me warn you first - the problem with these glasses is that once you've got them on, you can never take them off again, because then the Danish children's song treasury is one big bleeding crime scene.
Now you're prepared.
Follow along.
Mester Jakob is sleeping while the bells are ringing, but why is it church bells that are even allowed to colonise the public soundscape with their Christian hegemony? And by what right do we even ask "are you sleeping?" - as if a stranger's bodily state is something the communal song can just demand insight into? "Bim, bam, bum" isn't just sounds, by the way. It's a normative rhythm that disciplines the child's body into white Western four-four time's reductive regularity.
And notice, by the way, what's actually happening in this song - a sleeping person is woken by an entire circle singing his name in chorus.
It's SHAME-WAKING in public space. Maybe Jakob works nights. Maybe Jakob is a B-person. Maybe he suffers from a sleep disorder. We don't know, because NO ONE has ever asked about his sleep architecture and problems - they've just publicly shamed him in front of the whole class for generations!! What on earth do the original songwriters think they're doing? If they're still alive, it should at least cost them a fine!?
And Ida Edderkop, as she's now called - she crawls up the wall, the rain washes her down, she crawls up again. We used to call that a children's song, but today anyone can see it's a story about structural resistance, where the wall represents the patriarchy, the rain represents systemic exclusion, and the sun that dries away all the rainwater represents privileges the spider never earned herself.
And it's worth noting here what the authors themselves have done while rescuing her - they've assigned the spider a new gender without asking it.
Again! From Peter straight to Ida, from binary to binary, as if a modern arthropod couldn't be nonbinary, fluid, trans or questioning. EIGHT LEGS and ONLY TWO GENDERS to choose from. That's how - exactly how - structural oppression looks, if you've got the glasses on, that is. The only thing no one in the entire process has considered is whether the spider might just want to go up that wall. But who the f*ck gives two flying f*cks about that. It's the political message that needs selling here. There are children who need converting to the new faith.
The baker in Nørregade is his own case. A cisman with a monopoly on the neighbourhood's fast carbohydrates, selling sugar things to minors without so much as a warning about either gluten, lactose or gender roles. The pretzels are, by the way, culturally appropriated from the German bakers' guild, and the pastries are unfiltered body-shaming. That he's now become a girl naturally solves everything, because the problem was never the sugar, the monopoly or the power.
The problem was his gender. And notice that movement, because it's the very heart of this - the problem is no longer what anyone does.
The problem is what they are.
You can almost hear the grant application, "an intersectional, norm-critical, trauma-informed rewriting of the Danish song treasury that deconstructs melody's hegemonic structures, rethinks the songs' gendered spaces and creates inclusive, listening communal singing for all bodies, regardless of number of legs".
And the creepy thing isn't that someone can write a sentence like that. The creepy thing is that it gets funded. It gets funded every time. Ask that Baron fellow who was in talking to Joachim B. Olsen the other day.
And the next release - the follow-up album - practically writes itself. So let me just give the basic idea away for free here -
The Ladybird Evigglad carries her gendered species name as an open violation, and her eternal happiness is toxic positivity that makes invisible all the ladybirds who are struggling.
Jens Petersen's cow has never been allowed to articulate her own identity.
The elephant who came marching along the spider's fine web and thought the journey was so interesting that it brought another elephant along - that's homosocial recruitment in direct transmission, it only invites someone who looks like itself, and not once does it check its privilege before putting four tons on another being's home.
The man who wanted to build himself a farm with horses and cows and pigs and sheep doesn't mention with a single word who owned the land before him - was it appropriated? Was it part of a warmongering colonial project? Religious hostile takeover? We don't know... - so from now on that song always begins, naturally, with a land acknowledgment to the moles and demands for restitution.
And that's only the beginning.
Sleeping Beauty was a beautiful child, until a total stranger prince kissed her while she slept - a hundred years of sleep and not a single second's consent - prison for him - and we've set that to melody and danced around it for three generations.
Hodja from Pjort goes straight to committee for orientalism... and somewhere on Højbro Plads sit three little Chinese and know perfectly well they're next. They've always known. They've seen cultural revolutions and communism before.
And when the catalogue is fully revised, comes the implementation phase, because it always comes. Each song is furnished with trigger warning and a QR code to a facilitated conversation guide.
The circle is renamed a non-hierarchical, trauma-sensitive listening community. Institutions must be song-environment-certified by external consultants at an hourly rate no one dares disclose, and naturally a whistleblower scheme is established so children can anonymously report those classmates who accidentally sing Peter where it now says Ida.
And at the very top, as the crown on the work -
"THE AGENCY FOR SAFE COMMUNAL SINGING", with its own logo, its own action plan and forty man-years.
You laugh, and you should, but at the same time look at what these people actually believe.
They don't believe they can change Reality. The spider crawls up the wall, regardless of what we call it. What they believe is that they can change what you're allowed to say about it - and that if they correct the words long enough, you eventually forget what you could see yourself. It's a generation of cultural administrators who have lost the ability to create anything new, and who therefore rename the old and call it.... no, allow themselves to call it "courage".
The authors say that if we don't - dare - touch the traditions, the song treasury loses its relevance for the next generation.
It's exactly the opposite. It's the world turned 180 degrees on its head, thought with the wrong end.
The song treasury has been relevant for generations precisely because no one touched it. No children - not a single child - has ever asked for representation in a spider.
THEY'VE ASKED TO SING AND BE SUNG TO!
They are - as we all were - COMPLETELY INDIFFERENT to this infernal unbearable political idiotic attempt to make gender relevant.
Lille Peter Edderkop survived all the world's rain. A storm surge. He could presumably almost manage the flood that Noah sailed through - on the outside of the boat.
But it's doubtful he'll survive being "rescued" by this.
😁🤷♂️
