ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Macarena" by Los del Rio
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2022
- It's the most insane dance craze to ever exist. Two decades later we are still no closer to understanding the phenomenon known only as the Macarena.
Special thanks to Julio Franco Sánchez, translator and Spanish cultural advisor. Translation services here: www.linkedin.com/in/julio-fra...
Support Todd on Patreon! / toddintheshadows
Was at a heavy metal festival and between acts there was a DJ set who at one point played the macarena. Seeing 30,000 Metallica fans aged 5-75 doing the macarena was a special event
Munich Octoberfest - people in lederhosen. ( and drunk Italians)
Idk if this is horrifying or beautiful
What a majestic image.
@@bobtheball5384 definitely beautiful, there are some things all people are allowed to like without losing face, relish those things.
@@bobtheball5384
I'm going with horrifying. Sorry but this tune was pounded into my head until I couldn't take it anymore. A metal concert would seem like the one safe refuge, goddamnit.
I was there in 1996. Everything Todd says is true. You could not escape it. My sixth grade art class once danced to this an entire class for no reason at all.
It's was like the dancing plague of 1518. You really couldn't escape it.
H3ll the Macarena was still there even by the 2010s. I remember I was in kindergarten, elementary, or preschool and we have celebration for Cinco de Mayo and we did some traditional Mexican themed stuff (well traditional as Tex-Mex go) and for one the dances we did the Macarena.
No you couldn't, its one of those rare ones that all AGES knew this song. There's only like 1 or 2 of these types of song in a generation.
At least the 90s sounds like a good time compared to now.
Yep, at the time our main place for a night out was a tiny club that almost exclusively played rock and grunge... and yet Macarena wormed itself in somehow, occasionally getting played 3-4 times in one night
Honestly this is probably the most wholesome OHW ever. Los del Rio seem like a pair of pretty talented men who have a lot of pride in their culture suddenly picking up random international fame and just... going bsck home to be national celebrities. Only now they're even richer.
No drug induced spirals, no lasting resentment over no one appreciating their musical talent, just two honest artists making a charmingly cringe Christmas remix and living life.
You had me until you used the word 'cringe' as an adjective while expecting to be taken seriously.
Have you seen the Scatman one?
@@CoralCopperHead Yeah, I'm sorry, but 'charmingly cringe' is actually a perfectly apt description of the Macarena: Christmas remix. I actually prefer 'cursed,' cuz that thing is _bad,_ but kinda in a cute way.
@@CoralCopperHead kinda cringe of you, ngl
@@CoralCopperHead "eXpEcTiNg tO bE tAkEn sErIoUsLy" 🤡🤡🤡
"Oppa Gangnam Style!" is the closest we've gotten to "Heyyyyy Macarena aayyyy!" in recent times
Fair
Oh, yeah, that's not a bad comparison. It was even the first UA-cam video to hit a billion views, so it has a form of ubiquity.
Even that doesn't come close. Gangnam Style got played on radio for a little bit and reached #2. It was *popular.*
The Macarena was *inescapable.*
@@aceking_offsuit The popularity of the two can't really be compared of course, but I always thought that the energy and appeal of Gangnam Style could basically be summed up as "Macarena as done by LMFAO."
In fairness to the Macarena, part of why Gangnam Style became A Thing™️ was to stick it to Justin Bieber. Macarena just... _was._
I love that the intro has Todd using the same solemn voice he used when describing the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead-up to the War on Terror.
When did he do that?
@@Karan-Aujla Both for his Trainwreckords video on Madonna’s “American Life” and (albeit in a roundabout way) Lindsay Ellis’ video on music during the Bush administration.
@@leftofthedial1378 thank you big man!
Truly life changing moments the world will never forget. The Macarena and 9/11
Yes! I was gonna say this played out like a WWI doc leading to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand
I'm saying this as a zoomer, the Macarena has felt as eternal and omnipresent in my life as Ave Maria
Ave Macarena
Yes!! I was born in 2000. Maracarena had only been around for 4 years and yet I feel like it's been around literally forever.
@@Thedjbj2 lmfao
A what
As omniprescent in my life as the Big Mac.
In 1996 I was 6 years old, living in a remote village in the most rural part of a country that was in the middle of a WAR and I knew how to do the Macarena. We didn't even own a TV till about a year later, that's how massive this was. Out of all hit singles ever to be released, this is the only one that is truly admirable imho.
Judging by your username (forgive me if I'm wrong), would you be from somewhere in the Balkans?
@@SuperJNG18where else could they possibly be from?
@@witchflowers6942 I dunno. There was more than one land war going on in the ‘90s!
@@SuperJNG18 fair enough lol..
@@witchflowers6942 Africa was the home of several wars during the reign of the macarena.
As a wedding DJ from 1999-2013, I've heard this song thousands of times.
Everyone wanted it played, even though deep down they didn't want to hear it.
And even deeper down, they really did.
It's like those parasites that control ants or glow in snail eyes. They are possessed to do it, but the true self is inside screaming.
my dad had the band banned from playing it at my parents wedding. told them, in all seriousness, if you play it once, im not paying you.
@@ErieRosewoodI don't blame him
That horrifying summer of hell I sold peanuts in the stands at a minor league baseball stadium.
At the start of the season the opening beats of the Macarena would play a couple times during the game.
Then it was between every inning.
Then it was between every batter.
By season's end it was damn near between every pitch.
And every. single. time. the crowd would stand up and start dancing it. I wanted to puke all over their peanuts.
I hated the macarena then SO MUCH, and this episode caused severe PTSD to that horrendous summer of hell.
I'm sorry for your experience; the nineties was a relatively good decade for America.
This is like reading a recollection from a war veteran
I get that every Christmas with another song. All I want for Christmas … is to not hear it.
@@abcdefghij337 Mariah's 'All I Want For Christmas' is still used to torture dolphins worldwide...
@@marckyle5895 and retail workers.
As someone born after, I am SHOCKED that this song is from the 90s. The Macarena feels eternal. I always assumed there was some version from the 1940s without the beat.
Imo, it sounds a bit like "'Tain't What You Do", which is from 1939. It's not exactly the same, though, just a similar tune.
Oh man if you existed back then, you know when it happened 😑 lol
I think exactly the same, but what you are saying it only happened with Mambo no. 5.
@@schris3 the late 90's were wild. The amount of huge hits was just going nuts.
I think another thing that set it apart is that its "kitsch phase" lasted longer than other similar songs. Like when I was in kindergarten (~'02), we were taught the months of the year via the macarena dance. And I remember it being fairly present throughout all of my elementary school years.
The song I find most similar to it is Gangnam Style. Both are foreign hits that got big internationally partially due to the dance associated with it. And both lead to explosions of international crossover hits (the latin pop explosion and the rise of Kpop respectively). The difference is that after 2012, Gangnam Style didn't really stay with the culture. Once it reached 1B views in Dec, I never really saw it again. Once 2013 rolled around, people were now obsessed with the next viral hit ("What does the Fox Say?"). I doubt there were kindergarteners being taught with the song 6 years later in 2018.
So fun fact, The Macarena and La Vida Loca are two of the loudest (mastered with the least amount of audio headroom) songs released at the time. It's like they were designed specifically to fit on shitty digital music players before they even existed.
Ah, the loudness war.
The Loudness Wars began on late 90's FM radio
what does audio headroom mean?
@@HikariTheGardevoir All recorded sound essentially lives within a limited volume range as the base before amplification. Think of it as the percentage of the loudest possible volume from your speaker, with 0 being silence and 100 being maximum volume. Headroom is the difference between the level of your recording and that 100. The greater the difference between the volume of the recording and the 100, the more headroom there is. When you hit that 100 and start to go above it, the audio becomes distorted - similar to hitting one's head on a low ceiling, hence the term "headroom."
@@HikariTheGardevoir in addition to what they said, the smaller the audio footprint, the more they can crank it up to max volume without blowing out some parts. So a song that has very dynamic volume that is soft in some parts, and louds in others has a much bigger one than one that stays relatively the same, like the macarena.
I'm over simplifying it, but that's the relative gist.
The Macarena (and Seven Nation Army) has done this cool thing where it's transcended and became, in a literal sense, modern folk music.
I absolutely love this
I've never heard Seven nation army
@@agnessofiacastrocarvalho774 Really? You may not have recognised it, but are you sure you've never heard it?
@@agnessofiacastrocarvalho774yeah but ya heard the riff
i have genuinely never considered that the Macarena was even released. like it feels like it simply exists. i didnt even know it had a video
That’s how I feel about the Macarena too. I was born in 2003 and I’ve always felt like the Macarena is just a fact of the universe.
it might as well be the first song ever made
@@CoingamerFL Right? Put it up against some 1930s Cole Porter song and it's like "nah the Macarena's been around long than that".
Loved the presentation of tracking how much time was left until “Peak Macarena”. Felt less like a one hit wonderland episode and more like Todd tracking a viral outbreak or national tragedy.
If those two radio stations hadn’t added it to their rotation, the world may have been largely spared. Butterfly effect…
I was hoping he'd go whole hog on the Majora's Mask motif and put Los Del Rios' faces on the moon.
@@spencerwood2247 Lol!
A tonally correct choice, I think
It just reminded me of Majora's Mask, honestly. Tracking the time until the end of the world.
You know what? I think the harmonizing by the titular gentlemen is underappreciated. It has a hauntingly guttural, ageless, even primal quality. And the chorus has a nursery rhyme meter that simply makes it fun to sing along to. It‘s really quite an original package in and of itself.
You're right.
This song reminds me of Funkytown, as described by Todd: it is the most perfect, fully actualized version of itself. Every element is in harmony despite the inherent underlying contradictions of its existence, and none of them are overdone or outstay their welcome.
god, that compilation at the end is fucking hypnotic. i feel like if you left someone in a room with a screen playing nothing but videos and covers of the macarena, they’d ascend to a higher plane of existence/descend into macareninsanity
It says something about this song's success that, to someone like myself, born after its heyday, "Macarena" feels like one of those things that has always been around. You could've told me that people in Mesopotamia danced the Macarena and I would've believed you.
I bet you could do a decent version of that hook on a lyre
@BDWriter Queen Elizabeth was there _doing_ the Macarena when God created the universe.
@@Jessamine29 "Heeeyyy Mes'potamia!"
I think there are paintings of the Macarena in Ancient Egyptian tombs.
I read this comment to my 2006 child and asked if it seems true, and she said yes 😂
The Macarena was so huge 1996, I spent the entire year in hospital for children, a hospital basically cut off from all outside influences, and multiple times the nursing staff would wrangle all of the children together and we would do the Macarena.
Two dozen or so kids who were freshly burned and in a tremendous amount of pain, and we'd all succumb to the Macarena.
It was so huge that I remember my kindergarten teachers Teaching me the dance in 96
"Two dozen or so kids who were freshly burned and in a tremendous amount of pain, and we'd all succumb to the Macarena"
Jeez isn't being "freshly burned" enough of a torture 🙄🙄
I was a 4 year old girl, living on a private diplomatic compound in the United Arab Emirates, with exactly one other family. You best believe I still knew the Macarena.
That’s so awful & mindmeltingly cruel. Hope you’re thriving.
@@joshgallie1543 also considering the macarena is a very move your joints and limbs around in a jerky yet fluid motion, probably the worst song out there to dance to if you're a new burn victim!
I was traveling in Spain in 93 and can confirm it was a summer hit while I was there and the dance was already a thing. I was surprised when that "obscure" song and dance from my travel suddenly became a hit years latter.
I was born in 2002. The Macarena even slipped deep into my childhood. I distinctly remember doing the "month Macarena" in Kindergarten. The lyrics in my head are always superimposed by "January, February, Maaaarch, April, Mayyyy, June..."
Oh and of course it was at many a school dance and such, along with the Electric Slide, Cotton Eye Joe, right alongside the Harlem Shake and Gangam Style. I feel like a lot of 90s n 00s kids have much more connected childhoods than they realize.
You're definitely right about that. Also, that list of songs gave me flashbacks
i was also born in 2002, and this is 100% accurate
04 and yah
Now that you mention it, I remember doing the same thing when I was in kindergarten, and I was born in 95 so one year before Macarena madness took over. And even as a kid in the late 90s to early 2000s, I knew exactly how crazy people would get over the Macarena.
In gym class in elementary school, we had a version where we listened different bones on the human body.
Starting from your feet (Tarsals, fibia, fibula, patela...), and working the way up to " Ohhhh, my cranium! "
“Any event with three or more people was at risk of breaking out into the macarena”
This is such a good line lmao
As someone roughly Todd’s age, I felt it so severely when he says “it’s just this thing that was happening”. I don’t remember anyone teaching me the dance it just… happened
Same! It's like suddenly everybody knew how to do it. EVERYBODY...
I remember learning it in kindergarten. But I also don't remember actually being taught the moves. Just...doing them. Several times a month. Almost as often as we did head shoulders knees and toes.
yeah none of us learned. I was in highschool.
I don't remember ever learning or being taught it. I just knew it.
I would have been in kindergarten in 96, and I remember it was the other class' song at the end of the year concert.
This song JUST PLAYED at my sister's wedding. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is and literally everyone knows how to dance it, decades later
macarena christmas is the chaotic evil of christmas songs
It's surreal hearing from the Macarena at this point in life. As a Sevillian who lived through it, I can shed some light about Los del Ríos and their popularity. Basically, their main thing is that they've remained highly beloved in their hometown by virtue of being annual staples of the Sevilla's Fair, which is a regional/national celebration in which everyone dances Sevillanas, drinks rebujito (which is a cocktail made up of lime soda and white wine), eats a lot and goes to a small carnival for a week in April. During that time, the local councils erect small, private booths (we call them casetas) and dance and drink all day with family members and friends. Los del Río have mostly survived in that environment, and appropriately enough their earlier hit "Sevilla tiene un color especial" is much more popular than the Macarena at this point. Other than that, I wouldn't say they remain that popular, but it's true that Sevillanas changed a big deal after their big successes of the 80's, so they remain influential despite not being that active.
As someone who was very much sick and tired of them by the late 90's, I've been avoiding the Fair like the plague since then.
I remember “Sevilla tiene un color especial” from the movie Ocho apellidos vascos. I went to Sevilla for a weekend trip while I studied abroad in Granada so you reminded of the ferias that are common in Andalucía.
Now that you described the rebujito, I'm now interested on flying to Spain to drink it, me being raised in Northern Mexico, there's mostly hard drinks due to German influence, I only taste them but I never liked them and never really drink them, I always had an affinity on light cocktails.
Not from Sevilla, but we have a similar local festival that's frequented by local musicians that are ppopular during that time of the year, and only that time of the year, and I'm just trying to imagine one of their songs becoming as popular as the macarena. It must've been absolutely surreal.
Thank you 🙏 for your perspective
Rebujitos sounds tasty, I'm gonna try that later.
I had no clue Fangoria had part in creating the Macarena. You have to understand, the lead singer, Alaska, is very well-known in Spain and Latin America as a sort of goth-punk-new wave-electropop act and her aesthetic is purposefully out there. This is like finding out that Robert Smith had a hand in creating Barbie Girl.
wait this man is from Spain/Latin America and her name is Alaska?!
Or if Trent Reznor had been the one who remixed "Who Let the Dogs Out?" from the original version.
That had a similar arc. We really need to be aware of the tremendous potential that dance remixes of songs originally written in traditional folk styles had in the '90s. If we forget, we open ourselves to allowing it to happen again.
@@Belgand You know what he did produce and win a fucking Grammy for - Old Town Road. Trent Reznor has a fucking COUNTRY MUSIC AWARD. The Fangoria things makes me really think about how much popular music cribs from Dark Wave both old and new, a Metal and Industrial DJ friend of mine used to play Love Love by Take That to total snobs and ask them what Industrial band they think it is before showing them that it's from a british boy band.
@@CharizardMaster69 , Her real name is María Olvido (Mary of the Oblivion/Forgetfulness) Gara
This Robert Smith?
ua-cam.com/video/4rpcTB7YMs8/v-deo.html
Was a DJ in Myrtle Beach in 1997-98.
It was batshit crazy. At 22 years old I hid behind the DJ booth when I was told by the owner to mix it in.
And no, it was also 20-somethings doing it after way to many beers and Mai tais .
At the time, thank god for Return of the Mack.
That whole part where Todd starts talking about line dancing had me warping back to 1996 when I was about 12 years old and my whole gym class had to dance to this song, the Electric Slide, and the Chicken Dance. I remember feeling embarrassed but thinking, "Hey at least we aren't running the mile again."
You only had to run a mile? Michigan had a 2 mile standard. I'm jealous.
Funny story about this song for me, in elementary school we had like a Jewish history week where we were read books about Hanukkah and stuff like that, and then we had like a cake party and they played and taught us the Macarena, and for a bit of time in my life I thought it was a traditional Jewish dance
This is my favorite macarana story
…ok, now I’m imaging “If I were a rich man” but the Macarena
It’s been played at enough bar and bat mitzvahs that it practically is. I was born in 1993, so I was going to a bunch between 2004 and 2009. Already several years after Macarena fever already, but I don’t think I attended a single party where the Macarena didn’t get played.
I still remember my high school prom night in 2010. At first hardly anyone was dancing, just staying at their tables, eating, and chatting. Then Macarena came on, and suddenly everyone jumped onto the dance floor and started doing the dance. After that the dance floor was full for every following song. That’s how powerful this one song and dance is.
The sheer overwhelming kitschy lameness of the dance obliterated not only everyone's egos, but also the proverbial "ice."
Beautiful.
Similar situation happened at a party I was at a couple weeks ago. It was an afterparty for an *Irish dance competition*, and pretty much everyone on the floor (myself included) were too young to have been there when it came out. If you weren’t on the floor before the Macarena came on, then you certainly were after (or you were like me at least doing it at your seat)
Only the Souljah Boy dance came anywhere close since then.
@@pablodelsegundo9502 Hahaha
Not even close.
This tracks more than Todd's proclamation that it's "just" a novelty song post the 90s and only garners a handful of dancers at each event. I went to school in the early 2010s and it's a nostalgic favorite, I can guarantee doubters that.
Venezuelan person here. I swear the Macarena fever lasted like three or four years here because the Fangoria remix arrived here around early 1995. The dance was there already, probably, and here the dancer that inspired the song, Diana Patricia, became a small media personality and took credit for the dance steps.
The song still creeps from time on time in Horas Locas (that time at big parties like weddings and quinceañeras where the DJ play old catchy songs, most of them one hit wonders, to make people dance, do a conga line, and shake rattled and maracas). It's a small patriotic pride.
I was born and raised in the rio grande valley (that “tiny border town” paper is my home paper) and that song never went away. Any family gathering with more than a few elderly people will absolutely play the Macarena. The song is unironically on my workout playlist. Shits fire. Pure and simple
I remember seeing the Macarena happen at a frickin' metal show. That's when you know it's hit critical mass.
Wow!!!!
that would be awesome to see
I mean, Brujería covered the song (as "Marijuana"). For the curious ones...
ua-cam.com/video/7twl-ZAFKUw/v-deo.html
Metalheads are pretty open minded so I’d be delighted to see that but maybe not surprised. Then again, many wrestlers are open minded too, & I thought true critical mass would be WWF doing the Macarena in the ring. & I am almost sure that must have happened & I half-expected to see the 90s wrestlers & the immortal Undertaker doing it in the ring when Todd did clip mélange.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 Some metalheads are, although these days the metal scene is full of a lot of close-minded elitists who argue over subgenres and what is and isn't "real metal". Obviously that's not all metalheads but those types are very prevalent and vocal on the internet.
Ten years of One Hit Wonderland, and it has FINALLY come
Has it been that long? Omg we ams old!!
@@PMcGJellyP April 7, 2012 was the first episode release, yeah, it was very early in my Todd viewing
The time has come, and so am I
@@DigiRangerScott weren’t his early episodes on MySpace Video?
@@whatamisupposedtoputhere One Hit Wonderland didn’t start until the date I stated, when he was already on Blip. He seemed exclusively Pop Song Reviews before then
I grew up just after the Macarena hit, and it had permeated the cultural consciousness to such an extent I honestly thought it was a nursery rhyme like The Wheels On The Bus, something everyone was taught from their youth for centuries...
Imagine finding out that this song came from two middle aged Spaniards
As someone born and raised in Seville I am quite impressed!!!!!! This was very very good. You got the "Sevilla tiene un color especial" and I cheered when you mentioned Fangoria which is a hugeeee act still today. They are even bigger today and lgtbiq icons. Great
Yup. Specially the Fangoria bit.
Did not know that - gonna have to check them out.
Alaska from Meixco to Spain to US with La Macarena
LGBTIQ icons, being symphatizers with the right? lmaoooo Alaska and Mario stopped being "lgtbiq icons" when they started opening their mouths and showed what the La Movida really was: rich kids with enough money to form a band and feeling "transgressors".
as a spaniard I remember not understanding why americans were dancing to a 3 year old song. and hated the american remix to be honest, after hearing the original for so long, the american felt cheaply produced.
and Todd is bang on, the chorus can be translated overall to ¨shake it, macarena¨.
To this day it is the ONLY dance I've found every single person knows when the dance floor lights up. Doesn't matter the person's age, the country, the occasion - if the macarena plays, everyone knows the moves. Like it's some kind of primal muscle memory that became part of the human DNA in 1996. Just incredible.
I was a club DJ in the 90s, and yet, even with a gun to my head, I still could not give you anything near a full rendition of the Macarena dance. It is one of the few points of pride I have left.
That and el meneaito hehehe
I think the closest competitor is the Cha Cha Slide
Cha cha slide is the shy kid dance anthem
@@felixhenson9926 I would argue the Cupid Shuffle is another competetor
I'm a Zambian who was 7 years old and living in Botswana when the Macarena craze happened and yes, Todd is absolutely correct. It was insane and nothing since is even remotely comparable 😂
Anytime someone says "Oh EVERYONE knew this one fad/who this person was" I always go "I don't think kids in Africa did", but the thing about the Macarena is that even THEY knew about it!
@@credenzamostro cringe
@@keyscored3710 ok?
Was 10 years old on the Dutch country side and this song was everywhere, people forget that we listened to the radio a lot more in the 90s and unless it was a hardrock station every station was playing it multiple times a day for months and people loved it. Then the parodies came in, so this song was in the public eye for well over 2 years before it died down. Except Gangnam Style I've never seen anything like it.
@@credenzamostro may I ask why - in a world that has been globalized for over 500 years - you'd think African kids miss out on viral fads?? Especially trends that happened during the age of radio and internet??
3:54 I freaking love how well their album covers from various decades reflect so much about the decade in question. That hair, man... the 70's was a wild decade.
"no one did the macarena, the macarena did you"
speaking as a guy who lived thru this craze, accurate
I once did a 'Dances Through the Ages' session with my Brownies/Girl Scouts - basically we did all the cheesy dances for parties (Walk like a Egyptian, Oops Upside Your Head, 5678, Cotton Eye Joe, Cha Cha Slide, Gangnam Style along with a bit of Waltz and Tango). My girls were born around 2009-2010 so didn't know a lot of these dances, never even heard of Gangnam Style, BUT THEY ALL KNEW THE MACARENA. The first three notes on the speaker and they started jumping around, squealing, got into their lines and just went with it. It was insane. It became a troop dance and they demanded we danced it at my leaving party. What a song.
That is so bloody wholesome - I love it!
the kids are holding the torch!!
that is such a sweet story so let me ruin it with my twisted mind, I completely misunderstood what you meant with "brownies/girl scouts". it took me way to long to realize that this wasn't a crazy story about a racist girl scout leader, segregating her girls into colored and white. While teaching them all the corny dances from the 90's and 2000's, only for y'all to bond over flamenco pop dance mix from Sevilla. Which genuinely sounds like a plot to a crazy Disney original movie, just thought I would share how my mind works
@@HeavyDave997 That's actually hilarious, I can 100% see the reasoning! I didn't want to use just Brownies for almost that exact reason 😂
So surreal
the original version of the Macarena is actually kinda fire. fun, thumpy rhythm, and a couple pretty fierce sax riffs.
Christmas Macarena, on the other hand, is uniquely cursed.
With original do you mean the unremixed one?
@@TheStoenk yea the 93 version.
Re: "Christmas Macarena," it sounds like an incredibly cheap cash grab, but you could always do worse for Electronic Dance Christmas songs.
Growing up with "Australia's Funniest Home Video's" I've always associated the Remix with a roast chicken doing the dance. Really.
@@optiquemusic6204 wow this unlocked a 2000s aussie memory
I can confirm it's 100% true that in Spain the original sevillana version of La Macarena was the real hit. The dance version was played at the radios, but it had very small impact. It felt already old. That being said, Los del Rio are a couple of funny guys, and we are happy they had such a big success. Also, fun fact, I never danced la Macarena, and I was in my 20s when it was released.
Zoomers: “Man the 90s had real artistic music, way better than the thoughtless meaningless music of today.”
Meanwhile in the 90s:
Baaahaha
This song was a banger tho
Every generation seems to forget how much garbage was popular back in thier day.
@@seanmce8132 Yup, seldom see The Archies Sugar Sugar being fondly remembered as the biggest hit of 1969.
Some of your younger audience here! I wasn’t a twinkle in my parent’s eyes when this song was a hit, yet my entire generation knows it. For me at least it was cultural osmosis, I probably learned the dance in 2011 when in gym class when the teacher played the song and people started doing the dance. Where they learned it from I have no clue. But the Macarena played at a wedding I went to last week and everybody did the dance. This thing has serious staying power and a terrifying generational reach.
Same, I actually discovered it because my Kindergarten teacher used the dance and melody to teach us the months of the year.
same! i learned this thing at school and it was STILL an inside joke between me and the cast of the last musical i was in just a few months ago where during the serious scenes we’d always dance this just offstage while staring at the actors performing, and everyone backstage would join in. we were all born at the turn of the millennium. yet every single person knew it.
My highschool band played this song just a couple years ago, and had a whole stadium of people dancing it. Including the kids marching. Absolutely terrifying.
I first heard it as a Sesame Street version on a CD I had as a kid. It's a lot like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" in the sense that it's so omnipresent you almost can't imagine a world pre-"Macarena."
I never did the dance to the song. I HAVE done the dance without knowing it was from the Macarena. My Kindergarten teacher made us do the dance to a little song for the months of the year. Each month would be one of the motions.
My entire family danced to this in 96 around a bonfire. It was like some Pagan ritual I was too young to understand, but I was curious and willing to summon the specter of Los del Rio right there on a farm in Tennessee.
lmao if the macarena were a summoning ritual it could have summoned ANYTHING. Can you imagine that much power in the 90s?
I'm imagining the ending of The Wicker Man, but instead of singing "Summer is Icumen In" you got Christopher Lee leading everyone in the Macarena.
@@Jordan-zk2wd
That is some cursed imagery you implanted in my mind
Thank you
just glossing over the fact that 1 of their kids now bears a permanent reminder of her father's world-conquering success is crazy
as someone born in 2003, the macarena feels like something that’s been around forever, that everyone knows and everyone will forever know. one tiktok trend was to test if the macarena trend worked on other songs (it did!) which has caused my friends and i to dance the macarena on many songs at several parties. it is very much a forever trend.
I lived thru it and I cannot explain it. It was one of the strangest episodes in American history. If you look at Wikipedia there were various “dancing plagues” throughout history and I’m dead serious when I say that I think that’s what Macarena was. It was a mass hysteria event, and only a few months after it ended, ppl were already saying, “what the heck was that?”
> strangest episodes in American history
Oh, come on, it's 100% an American culture thing to take a fun thing, overuse it to death while simultaneously sucking all the fun out of it and then hate it with passion. That was the case with disco, post-grunge, hair metal, you name it. The only "strange" thing is that it's a foreign tune.
@@ChildrenOfRadiation well when you put it that way, it makes a lot more sense. I stand corrected.
@@ChildrenOfRadiation You speak the truth!
American thing? This was world wide. They would not stop playing it at night when I was stuck in Sicily while waiting to get back to my ship (I was in the Navy at the time). I don't normally listen to that type of music, but I had to learn to like it. You were going to hear it whether you wanted to or not.
It's just a fun catchy song with an easy dance it's not that crazy
As someone born in 2003, I didn’t realize Macarena was released in the 90s, and the fact that it was blows my mind. In kindergarten, we learned the months of the year to the dance. To me it’s one of those songs that feels like it’s existed since the dawn of time, with the dance having been made even earlier. You described it as akin to Pogs or Tomodachi, but I’ve thought of it as the same as rock, paper, scissors.
I’m a 2003 kid too! We did it at prom recently and at least every year in some type of school-wide event it has come on. It’s genuinely been with me for as long as I can remember haha
Tamagatchi. Apparently as a combination of "tamago" (egg) and "uotchi" (watch). Although I can't imagine that, given how common (and easy) puns and wordplay are in Japanese, they didn't recognize the similarity to tomodachi (friend). I'd long thought it was the intent with it being an "egg friend".
2004 here. this video violently forced me to consider that there was a time when the macarena DIDNT exist
2001 in NZ, we had a dance workout thing at my primary school with the macarena
I'm startled to realize this song came out within my lifetime. Only a couple years before I was in kindergarten. How?
I remember dancing the Macarena at an anime convention in the 00s, spontaneously with a bunch of other cosplayers. It was during the same session as when everyone did the Caramelldansen. I didn't know any of the other people. But for that brief moment, we were united by the shared jam that was a 90s dance pop song.
I don't go to anime conventions anymore, and that even before the pandemic hit. So I can't say if people still do the Macarena. But I like to think the song still has cultural cache even now. If only for its ability to bring people back to an earlier, happier time. You know, when the world wasn't sliding head first into multiple separate kinds of collapse.
I genuinely laughed at Macarena Christmas. I completely forgot that was a thing, and Todd's comic timing of introducing it was so spot-on.
That footage of Los del Rio playing the Macarena with Andre Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra is... insane. They were on top of the world in the late 90's!
And the wildest part was that THAT clip was over twenty years later!
Another Spaniard here. I was 10 in 1993, when the original version came out, and I remember the song being very popular in the summer of that year... But I can't say I remember if people did the dance already or not.
The song became a staple of summer festivals the next couple of years, but of course, nothing compared to it what became in 96.
As for Los del Río, they were already well known nation-wide, specially thanks to "Sevilla tiene un color especial", which became a pretty big hit. So... Yeah, while the label "one hit wonder" definitely applies to them when it comes to international audiences, when it comes to Spain at least, it's definitely a misnomer.
In any case, they've had a solid career inside the genre of Sevillanas, and people still love them to bits. Not only because of their music, but also because they are two of the most funny, down to earth and wholesome artists you can come across in Spanish media. Whenever they appear on screen, you know everyone will have a great time.
Just one warning if you learned Spanish as a second language and want to see more of them: they speak with a kind of thick Sevillian accent which, although it's endearing for native speakers, it may be a bit difficult to understand for non-natives.
Their sevillian accent is so thicc that I thought they were latinamericans when i was a kid
I'm an American who learned Spanish as a second language, having developed my language skills mainly in Mexico, where I've lived for several years. I'll have to watch an interview with the guys when I'm not busy working.
As for Sevillian accents being difficult, I visited in early 2020 just before the pandemic, and I did not find the locals hard to understand, save for the taxi driver who took us from the train station to the place where we were staying in the old town.
Do a review on Shattered Dreams by Johnny Hates Jazz
then came Las Ketchup :)
I moved to Cadiz for a year in 1997 without knowing any Spanish. It's about an hour south of Sevilla. English was growing in popularity there at the time but most places only could handle Spanish. So I was highly motived to learn to speak and I did, just the basics at least. And because I learned from natives I have a fine accent from that region. I can attest that it is a distinctive one for sure and it throws people off when I do speak Spanish now. When I speak to a spaniard they tend to assume I must know a lot more than I do because the unusual accent suggests I didn't learn if from a book or tapes. They soon learn that my spanish is like frankenstein level, but very authentically accented!
Can you imagine being the engineer who had to mix this track? We're talking hours, days even, of listening to it on repeat, actively seeking out & correcting every sonic imperfection. Don't know for sure, but I'd bet he still curls up in a fetal position whenever the track comes on.
If he was mixing it before releasing it, I guess that makes him Patient Zero
I was in England in 1995 on vacation and heard this being played in a club. I grabbed the single and brought it back as I was a mobile DJ in Pennsylvania. I spent the rest of 95 teaching people the Macarena. By early 96, it was completely blown up and I was absolutely sick of it. Lol. Good times.
You were an early superspreader then!
I never made the rather obvious connection between the Macarena and the early 90's Country music "line-dancing" fad that Todd brought up.
Everyone back then was going to country bars and line-dancing because literally anybody COULD do it.
No matter how little rythym you had or how unathletic you were, you were probably passable at line-dancing.
And even if you completely sucked at it, when there were 50 or 100 other people doing it at the same time, nobody noticed.
As a zoomer, I never knew the origin of the song, nor when I learned it. It’s endemic now, everyone my age knows how to do it (it’s a staple at proms). I don’t think of it as outdated or anything it’s just…there. Like Cotton Eye Joe and the Cupid Shuffle. It’s just what you do at dances. It’s a little cringe but it’s still very fun.
I was a little kid when it got big. Even back then, I assumed the song had always existed lol. It really feels eternal and atemporal.
...zoomers know Cotton Eye Joe? Well TIL, I thought that artefact of the 90s was now only remembered by olds and those that watch youtubers covering artefacts of the 90s.
I don’t think it’s really that cringe if anything modern whiny pop is cringe
"It's a little cringe, but is still very fun"
As a 90s kid, I'm glad zoomers think that, that's what I also feel.
@@stryke-jn3kv Yeah, when my Gym teachers hadn't thought of an actual lesson plan, they would just throw Cotton Eye Joe on over the speakers and yell at us if we stopped moving.
(And my Kindergarten teacher used a parody of the Macarena to teach us the months of the year)
I love, _love_ that the two old Macarena singers… kinda can’t manage to successfully do the Macarena, the world’s simplest dance.
They’re adorable.
Never expected to find an anarcho communist in the comment section
i cant either lol. I can do all the moves of course but im always out of sync somehow
I think The Twist is simpler.
@@AdolfStalingreetings. I'm another ancom, although I don't have the flag.
listen. i know internet comments are always lying, exaggerated, wanting attention. but let me tell you ive never had my jaw drop so hard and for so long as when todd revealed macarena christmas. im in awe. thankyou for this. this is truly. a moment in time.
"I've done a lot of episodes of this show; more than 100, I think." Exactly true, this was the 101st.
The 70 year-old singers of Macarena showing up at an André Rieu concert might be the most single-handedly boomer thing I've ever had the chance to experience.
Too true 😂
At least it's a good Boomer moment, and not...you know...what we usually think of with such...
Maybe add a Jimmy Buffet into the mix and everyone's heads might explode from Peak Boomer.
@@sweetprimrose Yes! Don't forget Dolly Parton and Englebert Humperdinck.
Seeing that was wild to me.
I distinctly remember an early moment of self-awareness when, in 1996, I attended a school fair and noticed literally everyone around me doing the Macarena, and felt completely overwhelmed and baffled by the uniform dancing. If I'd had any concept of zombies at the age of six I probably would've been terrified.
I think that's my earliest memory of it too.
Somehow it only took me a few listens and I was doing it too, even though I never really grasped *why* I was doing it.
Finally. A comment I can relate to. I'm baffled by all the positivity in this comment section. Are we the only ones left who managed to resist the line dance cult?
The Macarena will never die as long as traveling amusement parks exist.
No matter how many times I watch this video, I never get tired of that montage of out of context Macarena clips. It's glorious.
To be fair, that riff is just killer. With a dance beat behind it, it was irresistible. Yes after 15 minutes as a cute novelty it became unbelievably irritating, but on some level it was somehow perfect for what it was.
I think I remember being like 12 and that riff coming on the first time and me being amazed.
Yeah, I personally like it a lot more now that I'm not guaranteed to be hearing it every 15 minutes no matter what I do. Could say that about a LOT of the songs that annoyed me in the late 90s, really...
I love how Todd speak about macarena like it's a pandemic, that's exactly my memory of the phenomena
Heeeey, phenomena!
It's not a pandemic... it's endemic. It truly never left. Especially among school children and the elderly...just like real viruses 🥁
There was a DJ at a local radio station in Dayton Ohio who started playing the song over and over again. He insisted he wouldn't stop playing it until 1000 people showed up at a specified location doing the dance. The song played over and over again for at least a couple of hours.
The kids in the 80's had been trying to "Moonwalk", and "Break Dance" unsuccessfully for years, and this comes along. It was our time!
Congratulations, not only did you conquer your fear of covering the Macarena, you made mostly likely the best episode of One Hit Wonderland I've ever seen. Today was a good day 🙏🏼
Nah, the Scatman episode is his best, 'cause how much heart is on it, you can just feel Todd's (rare) genuine admiration for Scatman John's legacy.
I appreciate that this episode had a noticeably different presentation with the Majora's Mask countdown breaking it up. It befits an episode of this magnitude.
I don't know if I should be impressed or disappointed he made it a launching point for "millennial dance crazes done by your grandparents" without even hinting at Gangnam.
Ken Burns couldn’t have done a better job of documenting that strange, terrible time in pop culture. (takes hat off and holds it close to chest)
As a spanish person, it's incredibly funny to hear you talk of Los del Rio like they're two mysterious old men
In Spain everyone knows they're actually an extremely popular crime-fighting duo
How was his pronunciation of Spanish words?
@@decepticonmecha Good enough to understand for a man who clearly doesn't talk Spanish regularly.
@@decepticonmecha I'll say as a Mexican that Todd's spanish pronunciation is strangely charming despite being definitely an American speaking it.
Cool. As someone who's only language is English: sounded good to me. LOL
I cannot overstate how much I love this video. I'm 42 years old so i was in my mid-teens when we hit peak Macarena. Like most people I grew sick of hearing it literally everywhere I went and watching this initially brought back all of those feelings of resentment. But by the end of this video I had a new found respect and appreciation for it that I never had before. Whatever you think of the song it did something that very few songs have ever accomplished, it was universal. It broke down barriers of age, culture, race, class and gender. It was something everyone could understand.
Do they deserve better?
They have a song that will live on for another millennium. They're aiight.
I only played Final Fantasy X for the first time pretty recently, and I don't think I've gotten more cultural whiplash in my entire life than the moment where Tidus references the Macarena. This song was literally everywhere lmao.
Still one of my favorite gags in that game.
The "AYY?" is what sells it for me.
I confirm that this was my first wooleyism.
There's breaking the fourth wall, and then there's jumping out of the TV and smacking the audience in the face. XD
That line is always what I think of when it comes to this song. It's just so out of nowhere.
"HEY SINARENA! *city gets destroyed*"
I remember the first time I heard Yaz(oo)'s "Situation", I said "hey, that's the Macarena laugh!" That's where the Bayside Boys got the sample from -- it was singer Alison Moyet laughing in an outtake during a recording session with her bandmate Vince Clarke in 1982.
I think that laugh made it to madonnas angel. And Samantha foxes i wanna have some fun also
Wow, I had no idea Yazoo had a connection to this song as well
Lol I’m so old I thought of the reverse.
you are really a walking library full of trivia! I am always stunned how you dig up such infos from your memories and being able to add another cherry of information on top like this, nice find!
Her eerie laugh has reverberated over decades on its own volition. She better have gotten residuals.
It would be a surreal experience to be in Costa Del Sol, Madrid, or Barcelona back in the early 90s hearing this at the beach or club then forget about it for a few years and then be confused as heck when it blows up in popularity across the world.
In 1996 I was a 19 year old Metalhead living in a very small town. It was certenly a lonely life. This video made so much memmories bubble up that I think I'm now suffering from full on PTSD.
I get the impression that these guys are kinda like the Spanish Scatman John: respected niche genre veterans that somehow stumbled into a dancefloor hit that briefly made them pop stars. I'm happy for them, even if the song is an insidious earworm that threatens to destroy the fabric of reality every time you hear it.
I never thought of that parallel between them both, but it makes a lot of sense...
Los Del Rio,Scatman John,Chumbawumba,Loreena McKinnet and Everything But The Girl the 5 horsemen of the respected niche artists who had a random dance hit apocalypse.
@@Chelaxim That you forgot Bob McFerrin is inforgivable.
@@Chelaxim OK but I have been laughing at 'random dance hit apocalypse' for 15 minutes straight now
@@MaybeitsmeJulia Same! ...and now Random Dance Hit Apocalypse needs to be either the name of @This Ain't A Scene It's A Gah Dah Arh Rah! 's new band name, debut album, or hit song. 😃
True story: a couple weeks ago, a bunch of college kids came to the karaoke bar I frequent...and they tried to sing this song. They were so drunk that they completely messed it up if we're talking from a technical standpoint, but it was an amazingly fun few minutes throughout the whole bar.
We call that a successful karaoke event.
The Macarena actually is kinda deceptively hard to sing! Sure, the verses are pretty manageable, but the chorus? You know the shape of it, but if you actually try to sing it and haven't actively learned the words, you're gonna bomb out.
I was 14 or 15 at the time and can say that this song was huge. Bigger than anything that catches on today. It was everywhere and everybody was doing it. Massive radio airplay. Anybody that was too young to remember, or wasn't born yet will probably never see something this big again.
Weird point on the bluegrass version. There's actually quite a long history of bluegrass taking up contemporary hits and playing them, similar to jazz so it's not exactly unusual
I was obsessed with the American Girls at the time, being 8 years old. I was really into Felicity and begged my parents to stop at Colonial Williamsburg on the way to our vacation in Hilton Head, SC. I have a vivid memory of this song playing in the streets of colonial Williamsburg and tourists dropping everything and dancing
I'm not even kidding, if aliens ever show up, this is the song we have to show them first. It will tell them everything they need to know about our culture, and they would probably also do the dance.
Don't worry, if there's one radio broadcast that aliens are most likely to pick up, it's every radio station on the planet playing the Macarena simultaneously on repeat for four years straight in the mid 90s.
@@SavageGreywolf Imagine being alien conspiracy theorists, trying desperately to decode the human transmission that, for a brief time, seemed to dominate Earth's output. Other aliens correctly guess that it was just a particularly popular bit of music. But you know they're fools.
@@Bluecho4 saving this for later
I bet they would be the ones blasting it as they come down thinking it is some kind of world anthem for us.
next up on the alien arrival playlist: "Gangnam Style"
When you previously said that you would eventually cover all of Europe, I wasn't expecting this to be the Spanish rep. So so far, this is all the non-British European nations you have done:
Austria:
Falco
Denmark:
Aqua
Germany:
Lou Bega
Nena
Italy:
Corona
Eiffel 65
Norway:
a-ha
Spain:
Los del Rio
Sweden:
The Cardigans
Rednex
Switzerland:
Yello
Thanks for keeping up.
Wait, in Spain we still have el Aserejé.
@@jal051 I know it was a hit all over Europe, but I'm pretty sure Todd chooses songs that were hits in the US, and that one didn't get big here (only got as high as 54 on the Hot 100 charts). I have a vague memory of once maybe seeing a music video for it on US TV, and thinking they were ripping off the Sugar Hill Gang, but the only reason I'm conscious of the song is because my wife is Spanish, and she mentioned it and was surprised I didn't know the song.
It did come off as someone trying to recapture the lightning in a bottle that Los Del Rio did with Macarena.
@@notworthyourtime9799 I honestly thought they had a hit everywhere. Not as big as the Macarena, of course, because pretty much nothing is, but I thought it was big. And yes, they definitely were trying to repeat what Los del Río did. Although (you can ask your wife this) in Spain there used to be the "song of the summer" phenomenon where every summer you'd get a bunch of songs of that type and the one that succeeded was everywhere during the summer ^_^'
Spain had a US hit with "Black is Black" by Los Bravos in 1966. Most Americans think it's a Gene Pitney record though.
Such a harmless song. I love harmless hits like that. This video more than any other made me sad. The nostalgia is too strong. I miss being 7 years old in the 90s.
Not only harmless, but with a story with a fairly happy ending.
I miss it to brotha the nostalgia is strong in this one
We've reached the Magnum Opus of One Hit Wonderland. And yeah, the Macarena was THE viral sensation before the term was even known. Animaniacs did a parody of it over a year after it came out and the song was STILL insanely popular that everyone got it.
What's more, since Warner Bros. bought the publishing, that parody was able to use the original tune and not a sound-alike.
I 'm pretty sure Macarena wasn't popular in 1994.
@@zygbeee8563 the episode came out in 1997, the Macarena was still huge then
He was saying a year after the Macarena got huge not a year after the show was released
@@zygbeee8563 It was popular in Hispanic America and then Brazil by 1994, the second version, the one I'd say is the superior version, was widely known in those regions
oh god, i've been bingewatching the orginal animaniacs for a week, it's gonna be wild seeing that after this video lmao
instead of asking "did they deserve better" you should've asked "could they _possibly_ have done _any_ better"
i can't believe this only came out in the mid-90s, i was born only a few years afterward and it felt like this song and dance were like a hundred years old
but then i come back here and listen to those first few notes and it sounds like the epitome of a random 90s hit song
In Germany, the Macarena is still well and alive at least till the start of the 2020's. We've had this song on when I graduated and let me tell you, everyone of us 2000's kids knows the song, knows the dance and are ready to burst into dance everytime it plays. I'd even go so far as to call it a cultural icon, at least for everyone I know. (As well as Achy Breaky Heart, which nobody really knows how to dance to, so there are slightly different versions floating around.)
But it's literally just those two songs I can remeber that were that widespread in different generations even, not like Gangnam Style, that was more of a young people thing, which also might be due to it being released a lot later and the moves not being as accessible. Still intriguing to thing about as a part of cultural history.
I find it fascinating to watch you videos and consider how similar yet different the reception of music is from the US to here. Great video, as always!
It's maybe not quite this popular in the U.S, but it's still very well known to most people older than 12. It actually played at my senior prom earlier this year.
id say its still well known, i remember doing it in elementary school in the early 2010s lmao
That ending montage. Stunning. Absolutely perfect visualisation of the total lunacy of this phenomina. Perfect.
In case you're wondering, after 1996 they were already a hugely beloved duo in Spain and they settled to just run on their success. Recorded about an album a year and kept playing their biggest hits around Spain and also latin America
Both Sevilla tiene un color especial and la macarena (the original version) are regarded as a quirky slightly cringey national pride here.
This 1996 version is hated with passion.
One of these day's I'd like to see Todd in the Shadows do a "No Hit Wonder" series where he covers artists who were super influential but never had a hit.
Yeah, I'd watch the hell out of that.
He's already covered Alien Ant Farm
Did John Prine ever have a hit song?
Well the problem is most of these bands that would fit into this would make for a boring video. Like my bloody valentine or bjork, they have no hits but are very well known
@123ev456 I'm think of people like Delia Derbyshire.
Man this just unlocked all my memories of the line dancing fad which was weirdly big in England even though barely any country music was.
People who you thought were perfectly normal would go line dance in barns once a week/month. My school used to make more money hiring their hall out for line dancing than anything else.
Los del Rio deserve everything they achieved. Its still so catchy.
the thing about macarena, and something i haven't seen with ANY song or cultural phenomenon since, is that it was universal. it doesn't happen often, and i can't think of it happening since the macarena, certainly not within the lifetimes of anyone who's a teen or 20-something right now. it's like if every TV show, every event you went to was playing old town road, and everyone was singing along - not just you and your friends, but your parents, your grandparents, random old people, all belting out the words. absolutely nothing like it.
I'm 24, and the macarena was definitely omnipresent when I was a little kid. I recall it distinctly as being everywhere, even then.
That said, we had brief moment where the horse riding gangnam style dance was everywhere. Thag was pretty close.
Not even Gangnam Style?
@@WobblesandBean not even close
Gangnam Style is as big
@@b0gster hahahahahaha no.
Gen1 Poke-mania is legitimately the only thing I can think of that's on the same scale.
If Todd ended this series after this episode, I'd still be pretty sad, but my God, would it be the perfect one to go out on. From the excellent coverage of this song and these groups' full and wild histories to that genuinely incredible Christmas remix reveal circling all the way back to the It's Raining Men episode, every aspect of this was nothing short of golden.
Congratulations man, you have beaten the final boss of OHW's with flying colors.
He's still got to do "In the Year 2525" by Zagers and Evans. I can't think of a number one pop hit quite that ominous and bleak, even Eve of Destruction only ever got to #3.
Indeed, Macerena is basically the final boss of One Hit Wonder
@@NecessaryTruths In the Year 2525 can't be terrible! It inspired a great Futurama episode - The Late Philip J Fry. And was #1 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon
@@usuallyangry So what you're saying is that, every subsequent episode is going to be an optional sidequest to reach 100% completion?
I love the macarena!!! They played it at EVERY school dance, it was such a highlight. As someone who's not good at dancing, it's so great to have a relatively easy dance to join in on lol.
I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. I remember hearing the actual los del rio song on the radio and later, the bayside remix. It’s hard to explain how massive this song was back then. “The Hustle was a big fad… Macarena was a true phenomenon.
Hearing that the Macarena is one of the 10 biggest hits of all time is like hearing that Happy Birthday is one of the 10 biggest hits of all time, it feels like it goes against the spirit of the rules...
ikr.
I got married in September of 1996, so yeah, I was at ground zero. (As you mentioned, The Electric Slide was still super popular too.) We had the predictable wedding where people decades older than me and my wife were nailing the Macarena as if their life depended on it. And we’ve done it at EVERY FREAKING WEDDING SINCE. It will never die. At least it’s better than the hokey pokey.
My Bar Mitzvah was in 1996, and my relatives got excited over a "Jewish" version of it called the "Macatena". I hate to say it....the whole thing is something I look back on, and facepalm over, while I shake my head. I mean....the song isn't bad, but....to be that entranced by a fucking dance craze. As an Autistic male, people make so little sense to me...
I don't think there's any dance craze that has or ever will compare to the Macarena. I think it’s the only dance from before my lifetime that I vividly remember still being everywhere in my childhood back in the 2000s, even 10 years after its time.
But if there's any song from my generation that came close to it, it’s the White Stripes' “Seven Nation Army.” It pretty much is to sports chants what the Macarena is to dance crazes. Both songs’ histories have a lot of parallels: each started off as a big hit in its home country and took about 3-4 years to transcend cultural boundaries and take over the world. Macarena did it as a dance craze, Seven Nation Army did it as a sports chant. Their appeal is very similar, too: both are very easy to learn and sing/do out in a huge crowd. You can bet there are just as many people around the world today who can sing that main riff from Seven Nation Army as there are people who can do the Macarena.
There’s a really good quote from Jack White, back at his song’s peak, explaining why it got so popular in the stadiums: “I love that most people who are chanting it have no idea where it came from. That’s folk music.” I think the same rules apply to the Macarena. So many kids born after its peak have known how to do it without knowing where it originally came from. It’s a folk dance.
I went to watch the clip of the Macarena with the Johann Strauss Orchestra. Everyone's faces lit up SO MUCH when they realized what was about to happen. Even today, it's still got power!