Why a wonderful world

How about all them wars all over the place, you call them wonderful? Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby - love. That's the secret.

Like other songs with universal themes - say, REM's Everybody Hurts - the imprecision of the lyric is seen by the many it reaches as a strength and by others as a weakness - a vagueness approaching greeting-card levels. It's also irrepressibly public-spirited, people shaking hands on the street are, apparently, "saying I love you" - illustrated in the Attenborough video, oddly, by two hippopotamuses fighting each other in the Okavango river. And this is not the first time What A Wonderful World's generosity of spirit has been juxtaposed with less-than-cheerful imagery.

The song became better known in America after its ironic use to soundtrack the carnage of war in the film Good Morning Vietnam. Suffering subversion is an occupational hazard for earnest, buoyant music, but What A Wonderful World is still used in sincere contexts, for example in tribute to the people of Armstrong's hometown New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

It also crops up on soundtracks in non-ironic contexts, though these days you're more likely to hear it as part of a medley with Over The Rainbow, performed by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole in a bare-bones ukulele format that lends an aura of authenticity. To some, you could add "spirituality" to "authenticity".

Like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Stand By Me, it's in a genre you might call "secular sacred" - as at home in choral versions on Songs of Praise as it is in the record collections of atheists. Its latest rendition shares an authoritative feel, the year-old Attenborough giving the same sense of having seen it all in the line "they'll learn much more than I'll ever know" to Armstrong's original, although the prodigious smoker of marijuana and the former controller of BBC Two perhaps have little else in common.

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