Hipit rautaa [English translation]

1st verse:

I’m a hippie girl, age 42,

and I haven’t seen

the world get any better

nor anyone getting mad over that fact.

The hippie ideology went flat,

my husband turned bald.

But there’s nothing with which to replace it;

the world has gone wrong.

 

2nd verse:

Even my son just keeps laughing

as his mom tries to grow some oat sprouts

“Look, Mom, ‘flower power’

was a hundred years ago ‘over’.”

My kid is drinking nothing but Coke,

and Woodstock

is something he doesn’t want to hear about

as it’s so passe.

 

Chorus:

Why is everything beautiful so naïve,

and only market forces have the drive?

Why is everything beautiful just a joke,

and happiness mere junk and kitsch?

The pipes once used to be wooden, and hippies were made of steel,1

now they’ll simply bury everything nice.

I’ll be placing a flower on that grave

in the hopes at least it will bloom.

 

(Guitar solo)

 

3rd verse:

Hubby keeps building his kites,

my son armies.

“You and your world peace,

let it be, already.”

He is only a child,

and already without illusions.

But I have nothing to replace mine with;

the world has gone wrong.

 

(Chorus × 2, fade out)

1. This is an allusion to an old Tapio Rautavaara song Laivat puuta, miehet rautaa, which tells the story of an old sailor reminiscing about bygone days. According to that song, real men (sailors) used to be made out of hardened iron (steel) and their ships were made of soft wood while now it is the other way around. The Eppu Normaali song extends this idea to pipes and hippies. Since the Finnish word piippu (pl. piiput) could mean both a pipe to smoke some substance in and a barrel of a gun, it is a bit difficult to translate this properly. The original lyricist is trying to tell us that hippies once used to be really adamant about their ideology (“made out of steel”), and being a hippie was considered cool and rad, but they have now lost it and become as soft as wood. And the hash pipes of the hippies were once carved out of wood but now the only “pipes” left are the gun barrels which the hippies opposed and which (in an ironical twist) are made out of steel. So the tables have turned, so to speak.