Club music doesn't have to be dumb as a rock. There was a time not so long ago when dance-floor favorites such as Neneh Cherry, New Order and Pet Shop Boys attempted to stimulate the mind as well as the booty. Pet Shop Boys are still hard at it — "Electric," the pair's latest album, is simultaneously one of the smartest and the most danceable of the year.
But this summer, PSB's Neil Tennant has been the sole intellectual under the mirror ball, surrounded there by thumpmeisters who don't give their words a second thought. Many current club hits are larded with earnest, self-important vocals and placeholder lyrics that do not withstand the slightest scrutiny. This makes the style ripe for parody.
The satirists in the Lonely Island have occasionally put club music in their crosshairs. But no matter how popular it's gotten, dance music still does not score the daydreams of most Americans, and Andy Samberg's funniest spoofs have usually sent up hip-hop instead. In Europe, synthpop is ubiquitous. This job belongs to Old World pranksters.
Enter Ylvis, the trade name of two brothers from Bergen, Norway's second city and one of Scandinavia's centers of cultural dissent. Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker are to Norway as the Lonely Island are to the United States — they're goofballs with a theater background who became famous as contributors to a television variety show. Moreover, they're talented mimics: Both brothers have smooth, supple, adaptable voices, and probably could have been pop singers if they weren't natural cut-ups. Norway's "I Kveld Med Ylvis" ("Tonight With Ylvis") doesn't have the international reach that "Saturday Night Live" does, but if you're Norwegian, chances are you've got a working knowledge of their sketches.
Now, "The Fox," a parody of the excesses and absurdities of contemporary club music, has become a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Its ridiculous but undeniably amusing promotional clip, which has been viewed zillions of times on YouTube, has earned Ylvis comparisons to PSY, another act that leapt from national to international recognition on the strength of a satirical electropop single.
Like the Lonely Island — and "Weird Al" Yankovic — Ylvis has internalized the lesson that verisimilitude is essential to parody. "The Fox" was produced by Stargate, the Norwegian hitmaking team that has crafted music for many of the same artists that Ylvis is making fun of.
While the Ylvisåker brothers probably love dance music as much as Samberg loves hip-hop, "The Fox" is pretty vicious. Over typically vainglorious synthpop, the two parodists take turns singing preposterous lyrics about animal noises. Verses could have been lifted straight from a pre-school primer — "Ducks say quack/And fish go blub/And the seal goes ow ow ow" — and lead to a chorus of hypothetical fox sounds that mimic the car-alarm synthesizers of contemporary dubstep.
Ylvis has made fun of dubstep — a style that has gone from abrasive and fresh to woefully clichéd in a little less than three years — before. The very funny "Someone Like Me" satirized the awful trend, now thankfully bygone, of dropping dubstep breaks into the middle of pop songs that needed no adornment.
The Ylvisåkers have made it clear that "The Fox" was designed for their television show and that they're as surprised as anybody by how large an audience it has found. It's likely that contemporary club music is a big, bloated piñata waiting to be thwacked and that it's been satisfying for millions to see it happen. The alternative — that oblivious clubgoers are mistaking "The Fox" for a genuine attempt at a floor-burner — is too upsetting to entertain.
Basically a Scandinavian Saturday Night Live: Ylvis
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