The Macarena: It Lives, Perhaps Improbably

noah | July 30, 2007 3:39 am
The other night I was at the New York Mets’ annual “merengue night,” which features a postgame concert, players being announced in Spanish and interstitial packages on topics like Dominican restaurants in Queens. After the playing of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch, “Macarena” came over the speakers. I laughed; my friend thought it was funny. I swung around to see if anyone was doing the dance (because I couldn’t remember its hand gestures for the life of me) and behind me was a row of eight-year-olds, all doing the dance perfectly, and being pretty serious about it to boot. Eight-year-olds! They weren’t even alive during the song’s fourteen-week reign of terror at No. 1!

I mentioned this oddness to two of my non-game-attending pals, and they both gave me the same “well, duh” response: “Yeah, it’s like the Chicken Dance of now,” by which they meant that it had achieved the sort of wedding/Sweet 16 ubiquity that allows future generations to keep the tradition alive. But I’ve thought it over, and I haven’t heard “Macarena” at a wedding/DJed gathering in a good ten years. I hadn’t even heard the song in full in at least one year, although there was a snippet of it on some VH1 “The ’90s Were Totally Absolutely Rad, Dude” special that I flipped past on a rainy day of recent days.

Anyway, this response has just befuddled me on all sides, and so I turn it over to you, Idolator readers. Is “Macarena” an already-in-place piece of the novelty-dance canon, or do we still have time? And does this mean that it’s taken the place of the Achy Breaky on your local bad DJ’s playlist, just in time for Billy Ray Cyrus to debut his new frizz-free ‘do?

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Los Del Rio – The Macarena [YouTube]

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