Hello, readers, and welcome back to another edition of The Short Short Review. Just as a reminder, in this column I attempt to review a short film or story in a really short number of words. This week, due to a horrid case of writer’s block and the desire not to absolutely butcher a review of Paperman (which, is an amazing film), I’ll be reviewing the song related to an incredibly short fad, the elusive “Harlem Shake” in about 300 words (see writer’s block above). Yes, I know it’s horribly cliché and overdone. Oh, look: 100 words!
Ignoring the horrible meme, fad, or whatever you want to call it for now, the actual song called “Harlem Shake” by the American DJ and producer Baauer (not sure if spin on the hockey supplier or not…) was released on May 22, 2012 to very little acclaim. The song itself contains the following words/slang in order of appearance: “Ey”, “Shake”, “Ta”, “And”, “do”, “the”, “Harlem”, “Con”, “los”, “terroristas”. As you can see, this song has some deep intellectual stuff going on here, but in all seriousness it was not actually created for its words. The song is more classified as a dance number with the typical electronic sounds and occasional growling noise that seems to be associated with most pop music these days.
The song is horrendously repetitive and is quite unpleasant to the ears. Most electronic based pop music actually resembles traditional music with chord progressions and some semblance of a normal pitch. “Harlem Shake” sounds like a cacophony of rubber gloves being rubbed onto a bathtub with a lion sounding pissed about it every so often. Also, since the meme took off after some Australian teenagers posted a video of them “doing it” on Youtube. I’m going to fully blame the Aussies for this one.
Hey look, I’ve managed to hit my word count and talk coherently for over 300 words, which means it’s time to wrap up. Overall, I’m going to give the “Harlem Shake” half a spastic person out of five only because the videos making fun of those who actually did the videos were hilarious. Next week, we’ll be back to the more regularly scheduled form of this column (or maybe even this one if people like it). Time will tell…
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