Nonsense or not irony? How Eurodance becomes an all-purpose weapon.
Perhaps, people still thought in August, this summer would come to an end without the one, the big, the summer hit that outshone everything, and that wouldn’t have been surprising. One might think that summer hits are chronically stupid and annoying, but basically the genre is a supreme discipline: summer hits function as social glue in times of lack of news and boredom, they have to entertain and connect, but above all they must not overwhelm anyone. The honor of the summer hit, the hit to end all hits, finally came – from a man who is familiar with things that look easy but are actually extremely difficult: a comedian.
Just one day after its release, the Eurodance parody “Planet Of The Bass” by New Yorker Kyle Gordon had been viewed by almost a million people on YouTube. As the Duracell bunny “DJ Crazy Times” with ski goggles, Gordon shouts all sorts of motivational things in wonderful fake English in the music video: “Life, it never die / Women are my favorite guy,” for example. A singer named Biljana Electronica rhymes “All of the dream” with “How does it mean” in the chorus while she dances with an alien and gloriously goofy sequences of rocket launches alternate with images of Bill Clinton and flying modems.
Back in July, when the first teaser of the song was published, it quickly reached 100 million views on TikTok. The excitement became even greater when Gordon shortly afterwards published further teasers in which he had simply swapped the singer: a small swipe at the common Eurodance practice of having the melodic parts sung by (often poorly paid) singers and dancing ones for the presentation Putting models on stage. Why this nonsense is so successful is obvious: Gordon’s parody works both with an audience old enough to be socialized with real Eurodance or Smurf techno, and with younger listeners who are just into rave fashion and sped-up – have discovered techno for themselves – and may even unironically like this meta summer hit.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 10/2023.