In January, Lanie Pritchett expressed her displeasure with the second inauguration of President Trump by passionately lip-syncing a 30-year-old Disney song.
“I had this rage in me,” the 22-year-old theater major at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas said in an interview. “It was a rough day for a lot of people. I thought, I can’t do much, but I can share my thoughts.”
Her thoughts were encapsulated in a few lines from “Colors of the Wind,” the power ballad from Disney’s 1995 animated film, “Pocahontas.” Specifically, “You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you / But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.”
She uploaded a TikTok video with the overlay, “me arguing with magas for the next four years” — and a caption explaining that her progressive views partly stem from “Pocahontas” being her “favorite princess movie growing up.” It quickly racked up more than half a million views.
Pritchett, who is a lesbian, was raised in a conservative household in East Texas, where she and her sister would give living-room performances of “Colors of the Wind” while the “Pocahontas” DVD played in the background. She now views the song as an important commentary on queer inclusivity, cross-cultural understanding and environmentalism.
“Obviously, that movie has its problems,” Pritchett said, “but the music was really good.”
In fact, 30 years after Disney released “Pocahontas” in theaters in June 1995, the film’s Oscar- and Grammy-winning track has broken out as a beloved entity with millennial and Gen Z fans.
On TikTok, people like Pritchett have reinterpreted the “Colors of the Wind” lyrics to comment on an array of contemporary topics they feel strongly about, like immigration, the Middle East, the president and Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter and oil drilling. They play acoustic versions on guitar, set audio snippets to nature montages and animatedly mouth the lyrics. Even the British singer Ellie Goulding posted an a cappella rendition with the caption, “Colours of the Wind radicalised me.”
The song’s popularity is especially impressive given that “Pocahontas” hasn’t aged well, and the film isn’t often discussed in a nostalgic light. Instead, “Colors of the Wind” seems on track to one day join “When You Wish Upon a Star” (originally from “Pinocchio”) as the rare Disney anthem that’s almost completely divorced from its parent property.
“Colors of the Wind” was written in 1992, when the veteran Disney composer Alan Menken and the Broadway scribe Stephen Schwartz convened at Menken’s home studio in Katonah, N.Y., to craft the ballad that would anchor Disney’s still-scriptless animated musical about Pocahontas.
In the film, the track served to convey Pocahontas’s dismay at John Smith and other English settlers who had arrived in the 1600s with little regard for the Powhatan people and the natural surroundings they encountered. (“You think you own whatever land you land on.”) As the song unfolds, Pocahontas educates Smith on respecting the Earth and each other, “whether we are white or copper skinned.”
Schwartz has said his lyrics were inspired by the words of Chief Seattle from the 1800s, though the recorded accuracy of Seattle’s speeches and a purported letter from Seattle to President Franklin Pierce that Schwartz referenced have been much debated. The songwriters were also aware that they would be speaking to contemporary audiences.
“We had a conscious desire to have the overarching theme be about protecting the environment,” Menken said in an interview. “It’s one of the vital issues of our time.”
Menken didn’t recall any studio pushback about the song’s message being too progressive. Instead, after they mailed a demo tape to Disney executives in California, Menken said, “I got back a report that Jeffrey Katzenberg” — then head of the studio — “was walking around with a boombox and the cassette and playing it for anybody who would listen.”
The composers next approached Judy Kuhn, a Broadway performer, to record a more formal demo of the track. Although Kuhn, who is Jewish, was told that Disney hoped to ultimately hire a Native American woman to sing for Pocahontas, in the end, Kuhn performed on the soundtrack, as well. (Pocahontas’s speaking voice was provided by the Native American actress Irene Bedard.)
“It was a different time, and I didn’t really think about it that much,” Kuhn said in an interview. “I was just excited that they asked me to do the movie.”
Earlier this year, her version of “Colors of the Wind” was certified multiplatinum, after selling more than two million copies.
“I really look forward to the day that this song seems quaint and irrelevant, Kuhn said. “It just feels, sadly, more meaningful all the time.”
Keeping with tradition, Disney also released a radio-friendly pop version, sung by Vanessa Williams. She had previously been considered for the voice of Nala in “The Lion King,” her then-manager told her, but those talks had fallen through. So, when the call came for “Colors of the Wind,” which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, “I was happy to be part of it,” Williams said. “It’s all about melody and meaning. When you have the two of those at the same time, those are the tunes that have longevity.”
So timeless is the song that it has overshadowed the “Pocahontas” imagery and story lines that Disney would rather not dwell on — like the many liberties the studio took with the actual life of Pocahontas, including inventing a romance with John Smith. It has even endured with some Native American fans.
Alex Rose Holiday, a 27-year-old Navajo singer-songwriter and motivational speaker from Shiprock, Ariz., grew up on the Navajo reservation watching a VHS copy of “Pocahontas” her family procured at a flea market. Three years ago, she decided to translate “Colors of the Wind” into Navajo, and she often performs it in live sets. Onstage, she prefaces her version of the song by acknowledging the backlash to the film, which critics say reinforced harmful Native American stereotypes.
“I definitely did see the song as separate from the movie,” Holiday said. “That song captures a little bit of how we see nature and how we see the world.”
Singing “Colors of the Wind” in a Native language is a way to reclaim it, she said. “It’s taking something back from the people who made it and making something our own.”
Social media has also helped spread the song across the globe: In Ecuador, Raimy Salazar performed a pan flute cover in the Andes. In Australia, an Indigenous TikTok creator used “Colors of the Wind” to bring attention to discrimination against Aboriginal people with a clip that has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.
And in Canada, three friends shared an acoustic rendition in which they changed some lyrics to reflect their pro-Palestinian views, invoking imagery of Middle Eastern flora and fauna and singing, “How high does the olive tree grow? If you cut it down you will never know,” instead of the original line about a sycamore.
“Colors of the Wind” has an “interesting tone” that is “not strictly accusatory,” said one of the friends, 28-year-old Ismael Boulanger of Toronto. “It’s trying to reach the other person and communicate not only the destructiveness of the actions that are happening, but also what they’re missing — pride around the culture and resilience of the people.”
While there have also been popular comic takes, like Melissa McCarthy’s 2016 lip synced performance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the overwhelming sentiment among fans and the songwriters is that “Colors of the Wind” holds a serious urgency that is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.
“There are obviously important themes in ‘Colors of the Wind’ that made a difference, and that’s a wonderful thing,” Menken said. “Frankly, when I look at the world, I wish it had made more of a difference, but we’ll take what we can get.”
The post How ‘Colors of the Wind’ Became a Generational Rallying Cry appeared first on New York Times.
