It’s a guy performing “YMCA” in the Finnish. We’ve all heard the song a million times. It doesn’t matter that it’s not in English — we know all the words. But the backup dancers transformed this video from mildly amusing to a laugh riot.
It reminded us of Tommy Seebach’s “Apache” that was going around a few years ago. The song is some weird disco relic, but the backup dancers turn it into pure YouTube gold.
Then we asked ourselves, “What do we really know about the Village People?” We knew they wore costumes. We knew that they were an iconic concept band manufactured to showcase music they didn’t write themselves. We assumed they were gay and the “village” in question was the Greenwich Village, but we did not know they starred in a semi-biographical movie, Can’t Stop the Music, much like The Beatles before them and The Spice Girls after them
This video is just one unitard short of being an American Apparel ad when you consider all those short shorts, velour tracksuits, and striped socks. Except instead of showcasing nearly-naked women in suggestive positions, it showcases copious amounts of half-naked men in many suggestive positions. Cheese and rice, it opens with a dude in a middrift t-shirt. Can’t Stop the Music was the first film to win a Razzie for Worst Picture. We salute you.
So what’s the moral of the story? No, not that everyone in the 70s wore leather fringe and short shorts or that insensitive Native American stereotypes were rampant. Dudes, the moral is everything is better when there are backup dancers performing choreography that can stop traffic.
Okkervil River’s latest album, The Stage Names, is a beautiful album. In “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” the guys build this rolling, crashing wave of sound to scream lyrics like “It was your heart hurting, but not for long, kid.” implying the big moments in life, like heartache, are maudlin and ordinary. The contrast of the lyrics and the music creates a delicious irony. The entire album explores similar themes of the success and the disappointment of living a normal life. The Stage Names reminds us of The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America; both albums contrast the ordinary and the epic, the broken and the transfigured.
Their songs seem to be written and performed completely without irony — raw, unfiltered emotion jumps out of every chorus. It appears that the Shout Out Louds sing what they mean. They certainly say it.
The rest of the article presented the band as kind and sweet. We were intrigued and downloaded Howl Howl Gaff Gaff and enjoyed it. That album was overshadowed by our other musical interests, but we always had a soft-spot for the Shouts.
Tuesday the Shout Out Louds released Our Ill Wills. We expected more of the same, but we feel confident that this album will go into heavy rotation on our iPod. The album has the same energy as their performance at Luna Lounge a few months ago. It’s jumpy, fun, vulnerable, and beautiful. It’s a refreshing sophomore album and portends a bright future for the Shout Out Louds.
