Come back, Mr. Jaws, all is forgiven

A few years ago, I was at an anniversary party in Belgium (I lead an impossibly rich and varied life). The event was rather advanced, culturally, from the "Brueghel table"--food such as one would see in a painting by the Flemish painter--to the fact that we had to drag the elderly couple with whom we were staying off the dancefloor at 4 a.m.

But the thing I remember most about this party is the music. The DJ played novelty song after novelty song, classics like "Macarena" complemented by newcomers like Las Ketchup's "The Ketchup Song" and the Euro campfire sing-along that I only know by lyrics, not title: "The Pizza Hut / The Pizza Hut / Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Pizza Hut / McDoooonalds / McDooooonalds / Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Pizza Hut."

All of these songs had an accompanying dance, and everyone present (besides me) seemed to know them, whether line-dancing for "Achy Breaky Heart" or flapping their tucked arms and wiggling their bums for the "Chicken Dance." I was deeply impressed by the way these tunes seemed to cut across class and age lines, and how my wife's British relatives knew most of them (the ones in English, anyway) as well as their continental cousins.

In this week's Washington City Paper, Dave Nuttycombe asks a question that desperately needed asking: Whatever became of the American novelty hit? In it he talks to Dr. Demento, ponders whether Afroman's "Because I Got High" counts and arrives at an interesting theory:

The loss of the novelty song that everyone can simply, unironically love is but one more example of the vanishing common ground in our common culture. Even if much of that commonality was in fact illusory, it was still a worthy goal—e pluribus unum and all that. Today, separated into our various niches and special-interest groups, everybody’s laughing at; few are laughing with. An intentionally stupid novelty ditty could be a real uniter, even if we all agree to hate it passionately.

I think there's something to this; every time I go to Europe (see: impossibly rich and varied life, above), I'm struck by the common sensiblity that runs through even incredibly striated societies such as, say, Britain's, when it comes to pop culture. But Britain's culture bears very little resemblance to Sweden's or France's or Poland's or Germany's, and yet Crazy Frog's "Axel F" (which began life as a mobile phone ringtone) was a No. 1 hit in all those countries this year. It sold bupkus here.

Maybe Nuttycombe's right, and novelty songs serve as rare nexuses of taste even across that splintered landscape, where people don't even speak the same language. Perhaps the Cheeky Girls unlock a European sensibility that transcends those barriers and reminds everyone that the EU has a future after all. What that says about the U.S., though, is sort of depressing.