When 50 Year Old Nuns Are Doing It, It's Gone Too Far!
Written: Apr 24 '01 (Updated Apr 24 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Not bad for a pop dance song. Will have camp value some day.
Cons: The horrible line dance which became synonymous with the song
The Bottom Line: The song is not bad, but the line dance is annoying.
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| Nilo24's Full Review: Macarena [Single] by Los Del MAr |
I remember distinctly the first time I heard "Macarena." I was in law school in the spring of 1996 getting my drink on at a club in Carlisle, Pennsylvania known as Fast Eddie's. One of the best features of Fast Eddie's was, and still is, their über-hipster DJ Joe George. Unlike most club DJs in Central PA, Joe doesn't limit his play list to tired, banal dance pop a la C&C Music Factory. In a typical night back then, you might hear Black Sabbath, Juan Esquivel, Kraftwerk, Harry Bellafonte, Madness, Tony Tribe (did the original "Red, Red, Wine") and even some Abba and Gloria Gaynor thrown in for camp value.
Joe George is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to music and fashion, and consequently, any music coming from his DJ booth is lent instant hipster credibility. After Esquivel's lounge classic "Mucha Muchacha," I heard Marcarena for the first time. Suddenly, every Dickinson College sorostitute in the house was swept into a frenzy and rushed the dance floor. At this time, the Marcarena line dance had yet to emerge, and the tanned sorority girls merely frolicked with glee in their short skirts and platform shoes. I asked Joe what the all the fuss was about, and he explained every spring break spot in the Caribbean played this song, and the college girls had been requesting the song since they got back. In similar fashion, European vacationers brought the song to the rest of Europe after hearing it is Spain a few years previously. The song sounded cool at the time, and I figured if it made Joe's play list, and can't be that bad.
Thus was my first taste of the Marcarena. I figured it would just be a brief fad among rich college girls who could afford to jet off to the Caribbean for spring break. As history would bear out, I could not have been more wrong. Soon, the song would get constant airplay.
In May of 1996, my friend Jeff and I drove to Montreal for a weekend of hedonistic debauchery. The song was played on every top 40 station from Harrisburg to the Canadian border. Admittedly, Jeff and I liked the song, because the female vocalist seemed to sing a song of slut pride. She talked of sleeping around on her boyfriend and boasted of her sexual conquests. We thought this is a song of female sexual empowerment that would make Camile Paglia proud, and help guys like us get laid.
Although the song itself is not bad, a new menace would emerge on its coattail. This, of course, is the Macarena line dance. At first, I found devotees of the line dance more amusing than anything. In the first few weeks of the craze, most dancers were the same hot sorostitutes who brought the song into the US. With cult like zeal, these girls felt compelled to drag every person in the club onto the floor for the Marcarena dance. I would see a pack of drop-dead gorgeous girls accost the geekiest guys in an attempt to pull them into the Marcarena dance cult. Some of these poor boys succumbed to the seduction, unable to resist the sudden attention from girls attainable only in their masturbatory fantasies.
I do not know what drove the Macarena girls to so zealously seek out new converts. With their heard animal mentality, perhaps they felt they looked less ridiculous if everyone else was doing it. Well, it didn't take long before everyone else was doing it.
That summer, I worked for Legal Services, with a 50 year old nun, who is also an attorney. Yes, there are nun-attorneys, and they all practice poverty law or ecclesiastical law. At our office party, this 50 year old nun-attorney plopped in the Macarena CD and lead the office in the line dance. So much for our slut pride song! How could something introduced to me by an über-hipster DJ be so quickly embraced by a 50 year old nun? The Macarena craze had gone way too far.
I could never fathom the appeal of line dancing. Living in the Appalachian part of Pennsylvania, some call "Pennsyltucky," I have been exposed to country line dancing against my will on more than a few occasions. I just cannot understand why people would want to perform repetitive motions for recreation, when a high percentage of country line dancers perform repetitive motions at their factory jobs. Given the apparent proletarian love of line dancing, it was only a matter of time before the proles would embrace the first big non-country line dance since the "Electric Slide."
In the summer of 1997, the Macarena craze still had not died. It takes at least a year for certain trends to infiltrate the cultural backwaters of this country. This summer, I went to a bar near my parents' house known as Boondog's. As its name implies, this was a redneck bar. This bar had no sorostitutes in revealing Spice Girls inspired outfits. Boondog's did, however, have a fat DJ with a classic mullet playing the Macarena.
It was inevitable, I thought to myself, as I saw big haired single mothers with three kids to three different men going through the motions. Their mulleted male counterparts wore acid washed jeans with the usual circle in the back left pocket which comes from always carrying a can of chew a all times. At this point, the Macarena had reached its nadir. Soon after, the song and dance would fade away, save for its occasional resurrection at weddings.
I imagine someday, future hipsters who are in diapers today will play the song at 90's parties for kitsch value. Maybe it will even rise from the ashes 20 years from now, like the Abba revival craze in 1992-1994 and the Village People's YMCA. Only time will tell.
Recommended:
No
Great Music to Play While: Getting ready to go out
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Epinions.com ID:
Nilo24
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Member: Matt
Location: State College, PA
Reviews written: 64
Trusted by: 15 members
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