The Rewritten Lyrics in the Aladdin Remake

“Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!”

Aladdin (1992)

I don’t know whether you noticed. Perhaps you were too busy enjoying the beautiful, lavish costumes and sets, the dramatic chases and the skilful dancing; too busy comparing Will Smith’s portrayal of the genie of the lamp to the late Robin Williams’; too busy cheering on a newly assertive Princess Jasmine, whose major concern in life has gone from the freedom to explore her country to the right to govern it. I don’t blame you, on any count. But as for me, well, I was practically raised on Disney animated classics, and their soundtracks were about the closest thing to popular music that I had any substantial awareness of as a child, and I did then spend my first four years as a university student, as music director of the Disney society’s a cappella group – so yeah, I know the songs from Aladdin pretty blooming well. And hence I did notice. I noticed the selected careful adjustments made to the original lyrics in the recent live-action remake.

 

Will Smith as the genie, according to the talented berto654 at newgrounds.com.

The first adjustment loses no time in making its appearance, right in the first verse of the opening number, ‘Arabian Nights’ – although the version I remember from my childhood actually already represented a change from the song’s first incarnation. Here are the lyrics as they were when the film was first released in 1992:

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!

Apparently some people objected to that mention of gratuitous maiming, and so in 1993, the lyrics were changed – in time for the film’s video release, hence why I remember them like this:

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!

The thread of logic frays a bit in this alternative rendering. Cutting off people’s ears if you don’t like their faces probably does qualify as barbaric in most people’s thinking, but barbarism can hardly be reasonably ascribed to mere features of geography and climate. Still, when you’re already having to patch in a new voice actor over the original recording, you’re probably keen to make as minimal a change as you can get away with while still smoothing over the controversy. This year’s remake allowed for greater flexibility than that:

Oh, imagine a land: it’s a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where you wander among every culture and tongue –

It’s chaotic, but hey, it’s home!

The change in the first line is presumably just because the character singing it in this version is not strictly one who necessarily comes from the place he’s describing; the more interesting change, again, concerns that second couplet. We’ve moved from geography and climate back to culture, but the image is one of positive multiculturalism rather than grim corporal punishment, and no mention of barbarism now remains at all. Controversy thoroughly neutralised. Honestly, it’s now the following ‘but hey, it’s home!’ that seems a little inconsistent with the thread of logic: ‘but hey, it’s home!’ is the kind of thing you say after you’ve said something bad about a place, as a kind of counterbalance; otherwise, what’s the ‘but’ for? Here, though, apparently the narrator can’t think of anything worse to say about this faraway place than that it’s ‘chaotic’, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. Still, changing that bit would have messed up the rhyme scheme and really the whole shape of the verse, so I can see why it was left alone.

Some extra lyrics are added to pad out the song so that it fills a lengthier opening sequence, but the rest of the original lyrics remain. There are then a few changes to the first verse of ‘One Jump Ahead’, but they mainly stem from the fact that, in this version of the scene, Aladdin isn’t trying to steal a loaf of bread as he was in the animation; and there’s the odd small adjustment to ‘Friend Like Me’ as well, mainly to the effect that the genie can’t remember Aladdin’s name; but the other properly interesting lyric changes in the film come in my favourite track of all, ‘Prince Ali’.

 

'A Whole New World', with its magic carpet ride, remained entirely unchanged, as far as I could tell. Though this scene, gorgeously rendered by cesarbigstar at newgrounds.com, is actually not from then but rather the very end of the film.

Where the original had,

Now, try your best to stay calm.

Brush up your Sunday salaam.

the remake has,

Now, try your best to stay calm.

Brush up your Friday salaam.

In English, ‘salaam’ apparently usually refers to a ceremonial low bow denoting deference; the word is Arabic for ‘peace’, but came into English via the greeting ‘peace be upon you’, which was presumably quite often accompanied by a gesture of this sort. This meaning makes perfect sense in the context of ‘Prince Ali’, since just the previous line, the genie urged his audience to show some respect and genuflect (one of many very pleasing rhymes in the song). But what have days of the week got to do with it? My best guess – though I’m very aware that I may be missing something about the connotations of ‘salaam’; this isn’t my field, so do enlighten me if you can – is that the exhortation is being elevated by an appeal to religious observance: we might no longer be a society of regular churchgoers, but terms like ‘Sunday best’ are still understood in modern English as indicating a kind of decorous formality, specifically one arising out of a need to present oneself appropriately before a higher authority. It is, of course, stupendously daft to suppose that God is any way impressed or appeased by the donning of a smart outfit in which to attend church – if you’re not clothed in the blood of Christ as the fee for your ransom from sin, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what you’re wearing, plus the apostle James has some pretty uncomplimentary things to say about people who treat others differently based on how they’re dressed – but nonetheless, the traditions our society has emerged out of have left us cognizant of these connotations. In the same vein as ‘Sunday best’, then, though Prince Ali might not quite be God, the genie is nonetheless urging the citizens of Agrabah to adopt a quasi-religious sense of formality when in his vicinity. The attachment of these connotations to Sunday in particular, however, probably feels like a rather western phenomenon, and so a bit of an anachronism or cultural imposition in the Arabian world of Aladdin. Hence, in the 2019 version, the day is switched to Friday, the day designated for collective worship in Islam. Not that we particularly have any evidence that Agrabah is a Muslim society, or any solid way of pinning down when the film is supposed to be set – possibilities both before and after the emergence of Islam have been advanced.

Next, where the original has,

He’s got slaves, he’s got servants and flunkies.

the remake has,

He’s got ten thousand servants and flunkies.

The point of the change here is nice and obvious; the song has been scrubbed clean of any reference to slavery. We simply can’t have our hero keeping slaves – even fake ones generated by genie-magic to prop up his invented identity.

The final change I’ll mention comes in the final verse of the song – the one that begins at half-speed as Prince Ali makes his dramatic entrance into the palace. For the original’s

Prince Ali, amorous he, Ali Ababwa

Heard your princess was a sight lovely to see,

And that, good people, is why

He got dolled up and dropped by.

the remake has,

Prince Ali, amorous he, Ali Ababwa

Heard your princess was hot; where is she?

And that, good people, is why

He got all cute and dropped by.

I assume the replacement of ‘dolled up’ is simply because it feels a bit dated; the striking thing is the change in that second line of what I quoted, because it actually seems to have been made more offensive. In the animation, if you recall, Jasmine was pretty ticked off at being cast as a prize to be won, as if she were just another shiny bauble that Ali was hoping to add to his collection of possessions, and the idea that the reason why he hopes to win her is because he’s heard she’s a sight lovely to see definitely fits in with that. There’s enough disrespect there as it is. But then in the remake, Jasmine’s not even ‘a sight lovely to see’ any more; she’s just ‘hot’, which, as a term, surely carries even less respect. Put it this way: you wouldn’t expect someone to refer to the daughter of the person he was speaking to as ‘hot’, as the genie does in this scene; whereas if he called her ‘lovely’, that wouldn’t be anything like as jarring. The slight against Jasmine has worsened; it might not have worsened to any great degree, but it’s worsened. Why make that decision? Perhaps to turn the thing into a bit more of a relevant comment on how men sometimes treat women in our own society (which doesn’t usually involve bringing a procession of expensive gifts to her father’s house before you’ve even been properly introduced). Perhaps to further accentuate the objectification of Jasmine, the reduction of how she’s valued to the very basest sort of aesthetic interest, so as to emphasise her not being taken seriously as a competent political leader – a role that, in the animation, she showed no interest in, only being concerned that she should be free to make her own decisions instead of being passed from the charge of one man to another purely according to their wishes on the matter. Perhaps because Will Smith was rubbish at delivering the line in its original form; I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

 

A lot of the contributors on newgrounds.com also think Jasmine is hot, judging by the kind of artwork of her they tend to produce. Big thanks to Twintan for using her epic art skills to draw this lovely version of Jasmine with, you know, some actual clothes on.

Indeed, trying to work out the reasons for these lyric changes is bound to be fairly speculative – but the fact remains that, if normal procedure was to keep the lyrics the same as in the original, then in every instance where they were not kept the same, there must have been some reason for that. And that reason often seems to have been the sensibilities of the cultural moment, and a desire not to impose or offend. I don’t really have a grand argument I’m trying to make here, but I do find it interesting to observe these things. Twenty-seven years is apparently long enough for the expectations of a society to shift to the extent that filmmakers decide to tweak a few lyrics to appeal to this new audience; what would happen in another twenty-seven? Which elements will be replaced in the next remake?

We can’t see the future, of course, so our only way of stepping out of our own cultural moment is to visit the past. Elements of media from the past, even the recent past, might trouble or offend us, and these reactions to them might be very right, but it’s good for us to engage with the material all the same. After all, it would be laughably arrogant to suppose that our generation is the one that’s suddenly got everything right; only by looking at how our ancestors saw things, and trying to figure out why, do we stand any chance of becoming aware of our own blind spots.

That’s a far, far broader point than can be indicated by a few rewritten lyrics, but of course, rewritten lyrics are only one small way in which the live-action remakes currently being released by Disney in absolute droves hint at the cultural shifts that have taken place since the originals on which they are modelled were released. I’m not prescribing approval or disapproval of changes either to lyrics or to any other element of a remade film; I just think it’s good to be aware of them. For the sake of being more aware of the nature of the society of we live in and how it might be shaping us for better or worse, I just think it’s worth our while to notice.

Those Two Awkward Passages About Women Being Silent

“I don’t want to be Catholic any more … They have all these silly rules about women, and I think it would have been hard for me to become Pope.”

Outnumbered S4 E4, ‘The Parents’ Evening’ (2011)¹

 

Self-explanatory, for once. Thanks to photostock at freedigitalphotos.net.

Believe it or not, the post I’m now sitting down to write is actually the post I originally sat down to write on Tuesday, until I realised that there was another post I really needed to write before I got to this one. I wanted to write about the end of 1 Corinthians 14, but in order to do that I had to write about the beginning of 1 Corinthians 14, and in order to do that I had to write about 1 Corinthians 12, and in order to do that I had to write about Ephesians 4, and, well, you get the picture. I’m kind of just picking up where I left off.

Strive after the higher gifts, Paul exhorts the Corinthians at the beginning of chapter 14. Strive after prophesying, he says in the penultimate verse. Same thing. This whole chapter is enveloped in the context that Paul really, really wants his addressees to be speaking comprehensible gospel truths to one another for the edification of the body. He wants that to be their next obsession after love in terms of how they do church. And in that context, he now gives three scenarios in which it’s more productive to shut up than to speak.²

1) If anyone speaks in a language, (let there be) two at a time or at most three, and each in turn, and let one person interpret. And if there be no interpreter, let him be silent in assembly, and let him speak to himself and to God.

2) And let two or three prophets speak, and let the others make a judgement. And if (something) is revealed to another sitting, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one at a time, so that all may learn and all may be encouraged, and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets – for God is not of disorder but of peace – as in all the assemblies of the saints.

3) Let the women be silent in the assemblies, for it is not permitted for them to speak; but let them be subject, as the law also says. If they wish to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in assembly.

Three scenarios in which particular people are told to be silent (same Greek word in each case). Now look at those first two scenarios: in neither does the command to be silent in assembly apply to any given individual all the time. Our hypothetical brother with the gift of mysterious languages is perfectly free to speak if there’s an interpreter present. Our hypothetical brother who’s right in the middle of prophesying is perfectly free to continue if no revelation is given to anyone else in the room. And likewise regarding the third scenario, even if one were initially to suppose, by some utterly bizarre logic, that Paul’s repeated exhortations to strive after prophecy applied only to the men of the congregation, that supposition would immediately collapse upon a brief glance at the eleventh chapter of the epistle, where Paul makes the case that women ought to cover their heads while praying or prophesying. I mean, that wouldn’t even be a question if they weren’t supposed to be prophesying at all, now would it? So what we need to work out is what the specific scenario is in which our hypothetical sister should be silent in assembly rather than speak.

Take a look at the given reasoning. Rather than speaking, our hypothetical sister should ‘be subject’. To what or whom is she to be subject? Well, when women as a specific category are asked to be subject to something in scripture, it’s invariably their husbands: check Ephesians 5:22, 24; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; and 1 Peter 3:1, 5. (Worth mentioning at this point is the fact that Greek only uses one word for both ‘woman’ and ‘wife’, and likewise for both ‘man’ and ‘husband’, so do feel free to swap in the one or the other as seems to make most sense.) In all but two of those verses, the adjective ἰδίος (idíos) ‘one’s own’ is used of the husbands,³ which is a really emphatic way of indicating possession: often, you just get a definite article and have to imply the idea of belonging. Women are to submit to their own husbands – so the scenario in which they’re not allowed to speak must be one in which threatens that state of affairs specifically. And what do you know, the women’s ‘own husbands’ show up in the very next sentence. I couldn’t render the Greek word order in a sensible English fashion for my translation above, but it goes at home their own husbands let them ask. The emphasis, then, is first on ‘at home’ and second on ‘their own husbands’; so the idea is, if they want to ask their own husbands something, let them do it at home, not in assembly. Otherwise it would be shameful – i.e., our hypothetical sister would be bringing shame on her husband.

Scoot back to the second scenario for a smidgen more context. We’re talking about a church setup in which, when someone prophesies, the others make a judgement about what he or she has said. So suppose that married couple Bob and Sharon are in the assembly of the saints one day and Bob delivers a prophecy that Sharon reckons is a bit dodge. If Sharon were to take up her issue with what Bob said right then and there in front of everyone, it would be shameful. It’s not appropriate to have a marital tiff in front of the assembly, and as Bob’s wife, Sharon has made a commitment to submit to him, just as he’s made a commitment to love her as Christ loves the Church. So she should be silent in the assembly – but she should definitely ask him about it at home later. Plus, hopefully somebody else present will pick up on the fact that what Bob said was a little suspect, and, lovingly, say so in front of the assembly. It doesn’t shame him if the person who challenges him is some random other sister he’s not married to; she owes him no obligation of submission.

 

Bob and Sharon, maybe. Don’t ask me why I picked those names.

So, with all that in mind, let’s have a crack at understanding that other awkward passage about women in 1 Timothy:

Let a woman learn in quietness, in all subjection. And to teach, I do not permit a woman, and not to usurp authority a man, but to be in quietness.⁴

Remember that we can read ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as ‘wife’ and ‘husband’, and given that we’ve again got women as a specific category being told to be in subjection, that’s deducibly the scenario we’re dealing with here. Also, Paul’s about to make an analogy with Adam and Eve, who are basically the archetypal married couple – as well as the archetypal case of a woman teaching disobedience of God to her husband and him just going along with it. She was deceived; he wasn’t – he knew full well what he was doing – but her let her exercise authority over him anyway, and then blamed her for everything going wrong.

Again, it’s just not consistent with the broader picture given in scripture for Paul to be saying that women must never teach anyone ever: strive after the higher gifts; to each one of us – women included – was given grace; every woman praying or prophesying with uncovered head dishonours (her) head, i.e. women should be praying and prophesying, just not with their heads uncovered. If I might digress a little here, the mandate that we should all be zealous to exercise our higher gifts for the edification of the body is such a strong one that, even before I felt I really understood this chunk of 1 Timothy, I still felt compelled that I had to be teaching. After all, there are lots of little corners of scripture that I don’t feel as if I totally get, and others that I do and am then proved wrong by someone else’s loving correction; a command I see repeated multiple times in no uncertain terms – strive after the higher gifts – surely has to take precedence over a few words that seem at first glance to contradict that command? One has, after all, to do the one thing or the other.

But back to the passage, I think what must be happening is that Paul anticipates that to teach, I do not permit a woman might cause a bit of confusion given that it’s totally legit for women to be prophesying in the general sense (which includes teaching), and so he clarifies, and not to usurp authority over a man, i.e. a husband; in other words, I’d take the and not as explicative rather than additive. The contrast is between being in quietness and subjection, and usurping authority over a husband: the risk, when a woman teaches, is that she’ll step outside the bounds of the submission she owes to her husband. Suppose, again, that Sharon and Bob are hanging out in the assembly of the saints, and a topic comes up that Sharon knows she disagrees with Bob about. Let her learn – hear what others have to say – in quietness and subjection; let her not usurp Bob’s authority over her by deliberately teaching something he disapproves of. Again, it’s not appropriate to have a marital tiff in front of the assembly; they can sort this jazz out at home. Only two or three prophets are going to speak at a time anyway, so it’s no great hardship for Sharon not to be one of them on this occasion – but it’s crucial that she, just like every other saint, exercise her higher gift at some point, or else the body is cheating itself out of precious edification. So suppose the conversation moves on, and the subject at hand is one on which Sharon and Bob have no such disagreement; she can now quite happily teach on it for the edification of the body without usurping his authority.

I hope you can see why I felt why it was necessary to write my previous post before I wrote this one. If you look at these awkward little passages about women detached from the context that we all ought to be falling over ourselves to prophesy for one another’s edification, then it doesn’t seem totally crazy to conclude that women ought to shut up in church altogether. But if you look at them in that context, then such a conclusion strikes me as entirely precluded. In both 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, the thing that’s potentially threatened by a woman speaking in the assembly is her submission, which can only be to her husband. As long as she avoids dishonouring him or usurping his authority over her, then, she’s free to say whatever she believes will edify her brothers and sisters.

Of course, all of this only applies to a woman who’s married, so my lucky single self doesn’t actually have to worry about any of it. But I think it’s worth working through anyway, if only to be reassured that God does actually think women have a valuable contribution to make to what’s said in the assembly of the saints, and only restricts them from speaking for the sake of preserving the proper Christ-and-the-Church setup of the marriage relationship. I still sometimes get it in my head that what I have to say about God and the gospel is worth less than it would be if I were a man, which is a sad and frustrating thing to get in one’s head when one burns with a compulsion to talk about God and the gospel pretty much whenever one finds oneself in the company of fellow believers. (Seriously, sometimes it feels as if everywhere I go turns into a Bible study: phone catch-ups, late-night conversations with housemates, dinners out, other people’s birthday parties, you name it, I just can’t help myself.) But women are no less included in Paul’s exhortations to strive after the higher gifts than men, and they’re not the only ones called to shut up on occasion in order to maintain good order in the assembly. The crux of the matter is that the wife plays the role of the Church in a marriage, and her husband that of Christ; and as Sharon is to submit herself to Bob’s authority, so we are to submit ourselves to Christ’s authority. And that means obeying the perfect commands he gives us – including the command to strive after the higher gifts, so that his body might be built up into a fuller reflection of his glorious image.

Footnotes

¹ As usual, thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for their goldmine of TV scripts: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/episode_scripts.php?tv-show=outnumbered-2007.

² Here’s the whole chapter again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+14&version=ESVUK.

³ If you’re thinking it looks an awful lot like the English word ‘idiot’, there’s a very good reason for that: it was used to describe people who were only interested in their own affairs instead of politics and the public sphere, and the Ancient Greeks took rather a dim view of such people, hence the sense in which the term made its way into English.

⁴ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+tim+2&version=ESVUK. I’m not really going to deal with the Adam and Eve stuff today; I’d have to start talking about the Septuagint, and this post is long enough already.