Is Denmark’s “Heart of Handball” the Worst Handball Anthem Ever Made?

Late last week, the Internet gave us a gift. A bundle of unrestrained inspiration, you could even call it. A window of welcoming enthusiasm; a portrait of innocent, child-like joy. Happy choreography! Bright smiles! True unity and camaraderie! If you haven’t seen it yet, prepare to be enlightened: the official anthem for IMF’s Women’s World Handball Championship—happening in Denmark in December 2015—is out. Brace your eyeballs and watch it now:

Unfortunately, it kind of seems like somebody did a quick Google search of every PG-rated inspirational stereotype, dumped ‘em all into a Google Doc, schlepped ‘em haphazardly together and decided to call the whole mess a ‘song’. Combined with the video, it makes for a hefty dose of cringe-worthy commercialization. On the one hand, you’ve got the lead singer/songwriter, Zindy, who (bless her) looks like she's fighting through sheer exhaustion just to yell at us about handball for three minutes. Her botoxed face is in a pained smile as she squeezes phrases like ‘celebration for every nation’ through her teeth, and a tube top (what is this, 2002?) printed with the Danish flag suffocates her poor torso as she feebly pumps her arms. You’ve also got the Danish Women’s Handball team acting as dancers, and you can just imagine how the conversation went down before that: ‘Now, ladies, we know you don’t dance, but c’mon on now, just this once. Just try it. Do the worm, for goddsakes. Smile, dammit, smile!’ Props to the ladies for trying their best to look cheerful, but the result is kind of disheartening. Do genuine handball fans really need to be force-fed something this white-washed and over-the-top to get their stoke on? Is this really the state of handball in 2015—reduced to a bleak sport powered by nothing but commercial songwriting and poor excuses for excitement? We could rip into the video further, but that’s too easy. Instead, we thought we’d see how this anthem compares to other official handball songs produced over the past few years. The verdict? Yeah, this one’s bad—but it’s only adhering to the standard of puke-worthy positivity set by other official handball songs. Here are a few of our favourite ones, collected for your viewing pleasure.

From the moment the electric guitars crash in to your eardrums – the kinds you’d imagine hearing at a casino populated by geriatrics – you know you’re in for a rockin’ ride. Thing is, though, the vibe gets thrown off pretty soon once the vocals kick in because, well, you don’t really get what the singers are saying. Granted, this is an English translation of the original Serbian version, but it still makes you kind of sad. Like, if you’re going to translate a song, don’t you want to do it properly so that listeners actually get what the song is about? Apparently not—however, you can make out the phrases ‘handball fantasy’ and ‘handball dream’ pretty clearly, which indicates just how little the producers backing this care about minor details like complexity and proper songwriting in the first place. You can also make out ‘all the world, just one big family, living in a handball fantasy’—'cause yay, inclusivity! Also, from a commercial standpoint, it kind of makes sense they’ve got a few really easy-to-remember phrases driving this thing in hopes that some rowdy, raging handball fans will rip their shirts off and cry-sing this anthem into the night. Unfortunately, that's impossible due to the confusing footage throwing the whole thing off. It somehow manages to go from slick-looking handball players flying all over the place at each other, to blurry camera footage of games in shabby gyms, to really fast shots of Serbia, to weird maps flashing in your face. Props to the dudes behind the video for attempting to shove all that stuff in a three minute long video, but unfortunately, we suspect that even the biggest handball fan will have trouble watching this without reaching for eyedrops and maybe some earplugs.

Perhaps the most impressive video in this collection for its ambitious scope, Qatar’s 2015 Official Anthem for their Men’s Handball Championship is surprisingly high budget and surprisingly lacking in actual handball. From the beginning of the video, you get the distinct feeling you’re just watching an extra-long Coca Cola commercial—complete with multiple ethnicities represented for political correctness and ‘hip’ people wearing fedoras for good measure. Said ethnic people are dancing in the streets (‘cause people always dance in the streets, duh), the singers in the studio are dancing together, the kids running through the streets are dancing with tambourines, and, well, there’s just a lot dancing. No handball yet, but a lot of dancing. When the song changes to Arabic with Qatar’s flag being waved around and some inter-religious bonding going on, the typical message becomes clear: INCLUSIVITY! BONDING! FRIENDSHIP! COMARADERIE ABOVE DIFFERENCE! Not unsurprisingly, the comments have been disabled for this video, probably because handball fans got pissed that there’s no actual handball in the whole thing. Like, this video is 6 minutes and 52 seconds long. Wasn’t there any room to showcase the actual sport? Isn’t handball good enough to communicate this message of equality and diversity? Anyway, if you can last up to 6:00 minutes props to you—but if you watch this for longer than that, prepare for your brain to melt when the dancing diverse people start throwing around confetti.

Ok, you know this one’s gonna be a goodie as soon as it starts and you’re introduced to the singer—some guy called ‘DJ Otzi’ from Austria. After all, when you’ve got a guy who looks like a combo of Fred Durst and that creepy distant uncle who hugs you a little too tight at family reunions, you can only expect the best. As promised by the image, the song delivers. With a happy-go-lucky guitar twang driving the song, some peaceful ‘aaaaah’s in the background and lyrics like ‘HAAAAAAANDS TOUCHING HANDS, REACHING OOOOOOUT, TOUCHING MEEEEEEE, TOUCHING YOOOOOOOU’ it’s sickly sweet enough to stay on par with the other handball anthems we’ve reviewed. Unfortunately, however, this is probably the most blah anthem of all because that sickly sweetness gets pretty boring really fast. Like, we don’t get any of the pumpin’ EDM beats of the previous songs: we just get DJ Otzi crooning about ‘Sweet Caroline’ and spicing the whole thing up with a teensy bit of intense electric guitar riffs. Looks like Caroline’s sweet and all, but apparently she isn’t sweet enough to make a banger of anthem.

So the song starts and you kind of get the feeling that the producers were like, ‘Alright, guys, let’s spice it up with a Middle Eastern vibe to make it feel all worldly and exotic. Not for too long, though, because Middle Eastern stuff is kind of a faux pas right now.” The sitars and whatever they’re using soon disappear and melt into the kind of song that genuinely feels like a hammer slowly tapping away at your brain. You’ve got EDM-fueled beats, you’ve got some auto-tune and you’ve got dismally stereotypical lyrics in there to really drive the whole thing home: “we gonna celebrate tonight together, we gonna celebrate tonight—we’re glorious, we gonna party til we drop—people, are you ready for it?” By now, it’s become apparent that there are only a handful of tropes going on in handball anthems: things about celebration, about every nation, about putting your hands up, about having fun. This video actually takes it even further, though, by embellishing the song lyrics in the kind of motion graphics you remember seeing on your mom’s computer in 1998. “Are you Ready for it?”, the screen screams at us. “Have Fun!”, it urges. Just like this year’s anthem for the Women’s Handball Championships in Denmark, the whole result is kind of depressing. Like, wouldn’t you think that handball fans don’t need this much convincing to actually enjoy handball? They already like the damn sport. They don’t need somebody yelling at them to celebrate, to be glorious, to party, to have fun, to lose their minds at handball.

Basically, we're forced to ask: what happened to you, handball? It couldn't have always been like this. There's no way that from the very beginnings of handball, the sport was respresented by manufactured music that sounds like it came out of a factory. So, please, handball: stop being so self-conscious and nix the over-the-top anthems. People will still love ya—we promise.