Celine Dion is keeping people up at night in New Zealand
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. By listening here, you can improve your vocabulary, practice your listening, and even learn something about the world. This is lesson number 627 and so JR, our producer, has uploaded the full lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/627. Thank you JR for that.
Coming up today, I’ll explain why certain New Zealanders are losing sleep over Celine Dion. But to understand the story, you need to know two words—megaphone and loudspeaker.
A megaphone. You know what this is. This is something you hold in your hand, and you talk into it and it makes your voice louder. If you were leading a parade or something, you would have a megaphone. The sound isn’t great, but it makes your voice louder.
The other word I’m going to use is “loudspeaker.” And for that I mean, the kind of speaker that might be in a stadium or public place, often used for emergency messages. Like a public address system—not something you would listen to for a long time, but something that would tell you there’s a fire and you should evacuate the building. So I’m going to use those words today—watch out for them.
And if you want to see a picture of what I mean, just find the lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/627.
In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression “rig together” and we have a song of the week.
Now before we get started, I wanted to remind you we are running a Black Friday special this year, so if you are listening here in late 2023, this is your chance. The special has not been released yet, as of today, Thursday, but check back in your podcast feed tomorrow or any time during the weekend Black Friday—that’s November 24 to 27, 2023. If you want to upgrade your English with us, you are going to want to grab this special. So check out your podcast feed or PlainEnglish.com during Black Friday weekend. Ok here we go.
New Zealand’s hearts go on (and on) for Celine Dion
The Canadian singer Celine Dion is known as the “Queen of Power Ballads.” You probably know her from “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song of “Titanic.” Or maybe you recognize her other hits: “It’s All Coming Back to Me” from 1996 or “The Power of Love” from 1993—wow that’s 30 years old!
If you live in New Zealand, however, especially if you live in the town of Porirua, then you definitely recognize these songs. That’s because they play at loud volumes, all over town, all during the day and night.
Let me explain.
There is a thing called a “siren club.” The short explanation is that this is a competition to see who can play music the loudest on home-grown speaker systems. And in Porirua, Celine Dion songs are the most popular to play during siren battles.
Here’s the longer explanation. Pasifika, in New Zealand, refers to people of indigenous Pacific Island origin, so their ancestors lived in the small islands of the Pacific—Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji are examples.
And a subculture of Pasifika people in New Zealand organizes “siren clubs.” And the point of a siren club is to play music out loud, outside. But they don’t play music on a traditional stereo system, with traditional speakers. That would be unoriginal.
Instead , they take megaphones and loudspeakers—the kind of speakers you would use when addressing a large crowd, or making an emergency announcement—they rig together lots of these megaphones and attach them to cars and bicycles.
Remember, these speakers are not designed to play music. They don’t really have bass. The speakers are designed to amplify a person’s voice—to tell people to evacuate a building, or to help guide a crowd. They’re not designed to sound good with music.
But the siren clubs rig them together to play music. And because they don’t have any real capacity to reproduce bass, or lower notes, they play music that primarily has higher notes. And that is why Celine Dion is playing at high volumes in New Zealand. Her songs are perfect for the siren clubs—they’re very clear, heavy on vocals, and they don’t have much bass.
So the siren clubs get together and they have—just wait until you hear this—siren battles. This is when they get together to see how loudly they can play music on their homemade siren systems on their bikes and cars.
So in Porirua, you have groups of people all competing to see how loudly they can play Celine Dion songs outside. And to make matters worse , Porirua is in a valley, so the sound echoes around town and carries up to the residential areas in the nearby hills.
This—it won’t surprise you—is not popular with everyone in Porirua. As one resident says, he doesn’t have anything against Celine Dion. He just wants to enjoy her songs on his own speakers, at the volume he decides—he doesn’t want to hear her music being blasted at high volume all around town, especially late at night.
The siren battles used to be held at an industrial park at night—but they used to end around 10 p.m. But now, the siren clubs are playing songs later and later at night, and in more residential areas. They cruise through town, playing Celine Dion songs from their cars or bicycles.
Residents are demanding the local government do something about it. They say seniors and children can’t sleep at night; some people are considering moving away. The mayor doesn’t know what to do—“At the moment,” the mayor said in one interview, “there’s no answer on how we’ll fix it.”
Siren clubs say that this is part of their culture. The leader of one club, called the Noizy Boys, said they do this to stay out of trouble. Another said that they love music and dancing and “doing this is better than night clubbing or drinking in a bar.”
Could you imagine—everywhere you go, you hear Celine Dion? Like, everywhere in your town, at any moment, you might hear a Celine Dion song? And as you can imagine, they don’t play the whole song from start to finish—they either mix it with other sounds, or just play clips or something.
Would you move? If this were going on, would you move to a different city? Buy earplugs? Or just develop a new appreciation for Celine Dion? I don’t know what I would do, but moving would be on the table.
JR’s song of the week
JR always picks a good song for us to listen to on Thursdays, and today is no exception. Today’s song of the week is “Into the Mystic” by the Irish singer Van Morrison.
Van Morrison is one of my favorite artists. And this song is one of his more famous ones. It’s very mellow, a blues-ey song. It’s an early one, from the album called “Moondance,” from 1970.
This is a really, really good one. “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison is the song of the week, thank you JR.
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