Dee Dee na nah nah nah naaaah!
I have long been a lover of a Scandinavian bop with a melancholic streak. Searching back in my history, Saturday Night may have been one of the first that I truly loved. It’s not just the catchy beats and the repetitive lyrics, it was the simplistic (but oddly iconic) video and the incredibly involved and energetic dance routine which went along with it. I remember being in discos or parties and jumping around trying to follow the dance moves to the beat of the song.
Revisiting the song now, years later, I really felt the melancholy that lies underneath the pop and rewatching the memorable video I discovered, to my horror, a moment of pure David Lynch style nightmare fuel (more on that later…)
The song seems to exist within a state of hope, or a sense of hoping for something to happen. The lyrics all lean on this “I WILL”:
“I’ll make you mine, you know I’ll take you to the top”
The sense of getting ready and of it actually not yet being Saturday Night is reflected in the video. Whigfield sits in her towel with her hair up in front of a glamorous mirror getting ready. Through the video we cut between Whigfield in her towel and Whigfield dressed and plaiting her hair.
Of course music videos in the early 90s were not the grand affairs we see now. In this video there was just Whigfield and her mirror, her towels, and her hair dryer. A relatable and seemingly normal world. She was a normal girl getting ready to go out, she has someone she has a crush on that she is going to see out tonight, someone she has a history with or wishes to. The song plays on, the electronic beats never really waiver but the keyboard modulates in the background in tones which I’d call either hopeful or pensive (if not outright sad). She has tried to pick up this crush before but it hasn’t worked. This is the last chance for her to get out there and make it work. She “likes the way [they] move” and pleas several times “BE MY BABY”.
As the video builds we notice that Whigfield has a handful of black and white photographs on her nightstand, which she is flicking through, the pictures are of attractive men, potential suitors from the club perhaps? Then, in what I found to be a truly upsetting moment of pure Lynchian horror, one of the pictures is a colour photograph of a bloodied man with large devil horns coming out of his head, grinning demonically at the camera. Whigfield rests on this photograph for a second, kisses it and places it on her mirror.
All of this happens very quickly in the video around the 2mins 50secs mark, as the song itself is resolving and begins to repeat its refrain to the end. If you doubted the melancholic undertones to the song, this moment in the video surely proves that Saturday Night is about a strange longing which can never be fully realised. Are we to believe from this moment that Whigfield is in love with the devil? Or does Whigfield repeat this towel and hairdryer ritual each Saturday Night as a tribute to the devil until her strange magic has worked and the devil in the photograph has done her bidding, bringing the person she has a crush on into her Danish embrace?
I’m sure you’ll agree that there is something uniquely disturbing about watching something you loved and (thought you knew) every frame of from your childhood to see it again as an adult and see this clear moment of unsettling horror all amongst the familiarity of the rest of the video. Like noticing a ghostly face in the background of a family photograph.
I love you, Whigfield, and I love your strange Scandinavian Devil Magic. I hope whoever it was was worth it in the end and you were released from the groundhog day existences of these Saturday Night rituals.
Whigfield is still performing now, sometimes going by her real name Sannie, her most recent album W was released in 2012.
Dee Dee na nah nah nah naaaah!