The Macarena: or, what the hell happened?

WOLFVILLE, N.S. (CUP) — You remember it, I remember it, we all do. And, yes, I know you would like to forget it and never have to think about how you and everyone you know used to do it in unison at weddings/bar mitzvahs/school dances, but I am absolutely refusing to go on living another minute before we all pull a chair up to the table and have a discussion about the Macarena.

So, you're pretending that you forget, eh? Let me refresh your memory. The year was 1996. Most of us were impressionable youngsters, playing in the parks during recess and curiously chasing after the opposite sex. We were old enough to appreciate the Simpsons, but still young enough to watch YTV. And every single social event would necessarily culminate at some point into a giant orgy of idiotic dancing and Spanish gibberish.

Picture it. You'd be at your elementary school dance and those new age-y electric piano chords would start blasting from the speakers over a simple THUMP-THUMP of an electronic bass drum. Then all you could hear was the screaming of recognition. You'd look around you, and all you could see was your friends and teachers — every last one of them — transform into unconscious zombies possessed by the music. Their one objective: dancing as hard and rigorous as they could.

Chances are, even you couldn't help resisting when the vocals came in. “Dale a tu cuerpo Macarena/ Que tu cuerpo es pa'darle alegria y cosa buena…”. Along with everyone else, you did the dance. You probably still remember how to do it: right hand, left hand, right palm, left palm, left elbow, right elbow, right temple, left temple, right hip, left hip, right butt, left butt, wiggle to the left, wiggle to the right, “Heyyyy Macarana! AIIGHT!?!”, complete with the 90 degree turn and a celebratory hand clap.

What the hell happened? How could we as a society have allowed this unfathomably embarrassing dance to become a SOCIAL PHENOMENON on such a massive scale!?

I know every decade has their dance craze. The 60s had the twist, which to this day is still pretty cool; the 70s can blame the Hustle on the overuse of romantic disco strings combining with copious amounts of cocaine; the 80s were a decade that celebrated how nothing needed to make sense in pop culture, so what better dance to adopt than the Electric Slide? But how can we even attempt to justify the Maca-friggin'-rena? Seriously, how the hell did this happen?

Well, I'll let the online encyclopedia Wikipedia try to explain how this travesty could take place. Originally released in 1993 by the Spanish band Los Del Rio as a “new flamenco rumba pop” fusion, the song had significant success in Spain. It wasn't until 1996 when American producers the Bayside Boys made a dance-club remix and released it worldwide. It then ascended to sit atop the American U.S. Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for fourteen weeks (most of the summer and part of the fall), selling four million copies along the way.

The funny thing is the dance originated from a Venezuelan Flamenco instructor who invented it for her class. From there, somehow, it spread like a cancer through the rest of the world, poisoning radios and social gatherings of all class, race, and creed —talk about inauspicious beginnings.

Nowadays, people barely talk about it as though it was some sort of scarring trauma which our unconscious suppresses so that we can manage to go on living our lives. Maybe that's rightly so: is there any rational explanation we, as former perpetrators of this terrible fad, can offer? Well, I can't think of any, and this is exactly why I want to address this issue here and now.

Fads can be an incredibly dangerous thing. If we've learned anything from the Macarena, this is exactly it. However, they can also be a source of great fun: why else would anyone have learned the stupid dance to begin with if it wasn't in some way rewarding? Assuming one wants to play the fad game, the goal ought to be to try and balance one's own personality with the constantly changing trends of pop culture. You don't want to get suckered in to another Macarena, but at the same time, abstaining from all new forms of expression for fear of being labeled doesn't seem wise either.

So, in a few words, I implore you to use discretion, boys and girls. Maybe that tattoo you're planning of getting across your chest saying “Get Rich or Die Tryin'”, or your XXXL jeans that barely go above your knees, or that Von Dutch/aviator combo you rock so proudly on Friday nights may not just be totally seen as bizarre ten years from now, but in fact a subject of ridicule (if it isn't already). Feel free to enjoy and partake in fads when they crop up, but remember, in the end, it's just a fad.

After all, when everyone else has already stopped, you don't want to be the last one doing the Macarena. Aight?