5.21.2006

numa

(Dan, this is right up your alley.)

This little tale may prove irrevocably that Peter and I have excommunicated ourselves from being in the loop ... or that we really don't have a life anymore. But this was news to us:

While procrastinating on You Tube last night, we came upon a catchy parody (see below) of something called The Numa Dance. We found it amusing, and as parodies must come from somewhere, we started doing some serious 1am Internet Research. Apparently, in 2003 a Romanian band called O-Zone released a pop song called Dragostea din Tei. It had a catchy beat, and hangs out in the top 100 in Europe to this day. A Japanese guy heard it and posted a linguistics-minded parody video online. An American Joe, Gary Brolsma, saw the Japanese video and posted a video of himself lip-sincing the song while sitting in front of his computer. It got kinda popular.

Bored yet?

Apparently American Pop Culture was bored. Gary was picked up by ABC, NBC, VHI, and The Tonight Show ... and after getting a little freaked out by all this, he turned down the Today Show and The New York Times. Some people got together and made him a fan site. I'd be a little freaked out, too.

Falling somewhere between Intrigued and Disturbed (it *is* catchy) Peter and I typed "Numa Numa" into You Tube. We got 2,145 links to Numa Numa related parodies. I am not kidding. Some are carefully crafted and edited music videos that must have taken hundreds of hours to produce ... others are a single shot of a college kid in his bathroom flailing around like a landed fish. We even found someone who had taught their World of Warcraft characters to dance to the Numa Numa song. And after clicking it ... we saw links to ten more Warcraft Dancers.

Are *you* freaked out yet?

There are probably lots of intelligent insightful things I could say about this phenomenon, and the phenomenon of You Tube and internet video sharing in general. However, you'll probably have more fun watching Numa Numa Parodies until the music infiltrates your dreams. So to get you started ... here's the first one we stumbled on. Turn up the volume!

4 comments:

beholdhowfree said...

Yes this is an interesting thing. I did an internet blitz myself about this awhile back and came up with the same stuff you did. I even downloaded the song from iTunes! The internet is a crazy thing.

tangle said...

I figured you already knew about it. :)

At A Hen's Pace said...

"You Tube" is new to me, but we have the CD! Evan's friend Mark V. "discovered" it long before anybody else knew of it and predicted it would be a hit. It really is catchy.

It's too late at night for me to play these without waking the house, but I'll come back later with the kids!

(We use this CD for "energy music" on the way to performances!)

tangle said...

How Cool Are You?!? Now your kids can casually throw out "oh, yeah. we knew them *before* they were big." With street-cred like that, you'll be able to home-school them through highschool just fine!!