the far right hijacked this eurodance song. we reclaimed it!

a few months ago, after that 90s night, someone came and found us.

they looked really concerned. they said the dj on the eurodance floor had played l’amour toujours. you know the one. that song.

and we said. ok?

we knew the song. we knew exactly what they meant. we weren’t playing dumb. we got why they flinched, because if the last place you heard a track was a clip of germans chanting foreigners out with some guy doing a hitler mustache, your gut turns when it comes on at a party. that is a real reaction and we’re not going to laugh at it. the person who came to us cared, and they came to us because they trust what black planet is. that counts for a lot.

a few idiots grabbing a song does not mean we hand it over.

here’s what they did to it.

l’amour toujours came out in 1999. gigi d’agostino, italian dj, a love song, the title literally means love always. it lived in clubs and stadiums across europe for two decades and nobody thought twice about it.

then late in 2023 a video turned up from a club in dortmund. men chanting ausländer raus, foreigners out, over the melody. in may 2024 it blew up properly. a clip from a bar on sylt, a posh little german island, young well-dressed people singing deutschland den deutschen, ausländer raus. germany for the germans, foreigners out. one of them throwing a salute and holding two fingers under his nose for the mustache.

it spread from there. afd accounts ran it under their videos. uefa pulled it from euro 2024. oktoberfest banned it outright. and it wasn’t only germany. in june 2024 a sweden democrats politician got caught by an expressen reporter singing the exact same chant at an election night party. here. not somewhere far away. here.

d’agostino came out and said what anyone could see, that it’s a love song, that it’s about a feeling that connects people, that he had nothing to do with what they turned it into.

the funny thing is, they didn’t just pick a love song to be racist with.

they picked the worst possible song they could have picked.

the producer is italian. the voice on the track, on every version of it, belongs to ola onabule. british nigerian, born in london to nigerian parents. a black man, the son of immigrants. his own records are about exactly the kind of injustice those people on sylt were performing for the camera; his last one drew comparisons to marvin gaye.

so the chant “foreigners out” was being screamed over a song sung by the son of foreigners.

and the genre. eurodance is about as mixed as music gets. italian producers, black vocalists out of britain and the states, built for rooms packed with every kind of person. it crossed every border in europe in the nineties precisely because it never cared where you were from. that is the entire point of the music. a song like this even existing is already an argument against them. they reached for the one scene that was never theirs and was never going to be.

so at the last klubb retro, we played it again.

not without a second of hesitation, if we’re honest. what if someone’s new to black planet. what if they don’t know us yet, don’t know what we stand for, and they hear it and assume the worst before they understand why it’s on.

we played it anyway.

because the alternative is letting a handful of racists decide what we’re allowed to put on our own floor. and they don’t get that. they don’t get to take a song this good and make it radioactive for the rest of us.

it’s a love song. it was always a love song. the people who made it are everything those idiots are afraid of.