“‘Cause she’s so high, high above me, she’s so lovely. She’s so high, like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite.”
A quick plug for the 90’s Bangers Bracket, where today is the last day to vote on which songs make the 64-banger field. Please, click on that link and vote on what’s a banger. Otherwise, we’ll try to get Tal Bachman to make incendiary cameos claiming you don’t brush your teeth.
My favorite thing about the song “She’s So High” is how good it is. Absolute bop. Is it a banger? I’m not sure. But there’s no denying that it slaps.
My second-favorite thing about the song “She’s So High” is that when looking for three great examples of women, Bachman landed on Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Aphrodite.
To be fair, meter and rhyme scheme probably influenced which ladies got the cut. But it’s fun to think of Bachman, 30 years old, sitting down to write Canada’s greatest pop song and thinking to himself, Who are the three greatest women in history, then landing on these three.
It’s not that it’s a bad take. If pressed to choose the three greatest women in history, you could do worse. Cleopatra was a great woman. Joan of Arc was a great woman who evidently didn’t, contrary to popular belief, disguise herself as a man (you can see which direction this blog post was going to go). Aphrodite wasn’t exactly a woman, but she was a goddess, and the song’s about idolizing a woman, so goddess talk is pretty conventional.
Instead, it’s just funny to picture anybody asking themselves the question. It’s like the Billy Eichner “Name a Woman!” bit. At some point, Tal Bachman had to come up with three great women. He had to sit down and think about it. In 1999, it probably wasn’t that scary. Today? I’d be shitting my pants. Can you imagine trying to rank the greatest women of all time? In an attempt to appeal to a wide swath of people (the whole point of pop music)?? That’d be like leading military campaigns as a teenage girl. Might end up ok! But you can see the downside.
