We received this video in the mail today.
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.
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