A Little Fun Must Be

The song just comes out. I can’t help it. In the subway, waiting in line, middle of the night with nothing to do—suddenly I’m singing it. Ein bisschen Spaß muß sein, the whole thing, Blanco’s voice somehow deep in my head like a splinter I can’t extract. It’s been happening for years, probably longer. The kind of thing that just attaches to you and you never find out why.

The guy himself is actually broke. Seventy-seven, apparently owes his ex a hundred fifty grand in alimony or something. He’s got real problems—the kind that don’t go away. And yet his song, this throwaway hit from who knows when, is the thing that stays with you. Not his career, not his life. Just the song. Just those four minutes of terrible sincerity that somehow worked on you once and never stopped.

So of course he remixed it with a car rental company. Sixt, I think. A hip-hop version of his biggest hit, which is either the most logical thing a broke seventies pop singer could do or the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Probably both. You’re stuck, so you lean into it. You make something absurd, maybe you make some money, maybe you don’t. Either way you’re out there remixing your own hit in a commercial.

The song itself is genuinely terrible and genuinely perfect. The melody is aggressively earnest in a way that shouldn’t work but does. You hear it once and it’s in you. Been in me for years now, and I’ve stopped pretending I’ll ever get it out. The Sixt remix just makes it clearer—the original was always a little cheap, a little desperate, trying too hard to make you feel something. The new version is exactly the same, just with a beat and a car rental company behind it.

I don’t know what happens to him now. Maybe the remix helped. Maybe he’s still underwater. All I know is the song will be stuck in my head in thirty years the same way it’s stuck now, and I’ll probably still be singing it at the worst possible moment, unable to stop myself, unable to explain why.