Classical music can be tough. Audiences are fickle, wanting only Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. Apart from the violin playing teenage girls they're not much to look at. Too many men. Too old. Bad fashion sense. Even the violin girls have limited sex appeal. On top of all that, the money is no good. And you have to practice all the time if you want to stay at the top of your game. All hard work, no fun, no sex, no money - it's easy to see why you would want out of this world if you're young.

But that is no excuse for The Safri Duo

A few years back one of the most popular ensembles in classical music in Denmark got off the train and started making pop music instead. The result - this superficial, dance-oriented, synthesizers + drumming extravaganza makes me ashamed that I'm Danish. It is much much worse than the horrors of Aqua and Michael Learns to Rock combined.
Why is it worse? Because it thinks it is better. The Safri guys think they really have this cool new thing going on fusing their amazing ability to hit really big things in a rhytmic fashion with modern drum machines and synth riffs, but the reality is that it is trash, trash, trash, trash, trash. In the end their percussion skills, the point of the band one would have hoped, simply don't matter at all. The dance-pop genre simply doesn't allow for any kind of deviation from a strict programmable 4/4 beat anyway, so you could easily do with just sampled beats instead of the Safri Brothers drumming away. The drumming is pure spectacle with no musical consequence. And because of the spectacle, they completely forgot to add anything else of interest to the sound. Songwriting is absent from all their material, being displaced by cheesy synth riffs hardly worthy of the name 'riff'. Their lyrics in general makes Aqua sound like Shakespeare.
Rarely has so much ability been wasted by so few people with such devastating results.