Songs To Die For
"Caramelldansen" by Caramell (2001)
I’m going to formally apologize for aiding and abetting in last week’s newsletter. In fairness, Brynn is an evil trickster figure of indeterminate origin, and I am but an Aesop protagonist in a trenchcoat waiting to happen. Anyway, time to dissect more memes.
If you don’t know this song, you probably do. The remixed, sped-up version was ubiquitous on a certain subsect of tumblr from 2008 onward. If you were unfortunate enough to somehow play the terrible game I made and uploaded to gamemaker dot com around the same time, you would have heard this song upon winning.
Though the remix achieved meteoric memesis, I’d wager most people have not heard the original. I wasn’t even aware there was an original version until recently. In 2022 the artist Caramell put out this video to help explain the song’s origins.
I can’t think of something more evocative of the Internet’s journey through the cringe 2000s than the proliferation and transformation of a Swedish Eurotrash song into this nightcore juggernaut. You don’t need to speak Swedish to get the gist—a hot synth melody and drum machine are that universal. It might as well be instrumental; Darude’s Sandstorm evokes the same unrelenting rhythm of early aughts aesthetics. Music that needs no translation, with all the strength of a pixie stick snorted straight off the school bus’s backseat.
I’m not going to debate the superiority of one version or the other. They both rule unequivocally, and to say otherwise is to put yourself beyond the reach of God’s light.
The appeal, I think, is not solely rooted in nostalgia, though the song does embody the audio equivalent of whatever in god’s name those kids are wearing on the album cover. There’s no music video, but I’m sure we can all picture it—green screen, lens flares, a bouncing ball atop singalong subtitles. If this came on in the club, you would abandon your seat and inhibitions in a heartbeat, don’t fucking lie to me, this is a safe space.
On top of the memefied remix, the many dancing anime avatars, etcetera, is the phenomenon of “songs heard from another room,” of which Caramelldansen plays no small part. I mean Lil Nas X tweeted about it.
I asked Charlie Trombadore, a former Broadway sound engineer, what was going on with these videos. His description of the technical: “The effect can be done by chopping off the higher frequencies from a song. (Since IRL, the higher frequencies are shorter sound waves that get blocked by shit like walls). Oh and adding a bit of reverb to that echo-ey feel.”
This was interesting, but doesn’t explain why people like them so much, or why all the comments rhapsodize about dying to music like this. Drizzle that with the half-speed versions oozing through the internet like molasses through Boston in 1919 and the comments say, more specifically, that this is what it sounds like to die.
Reverb, artificial or otherwise, has been making ok-at-best songs sound fucking incredible basically forever. I think it’s because there is something uncanny in the illusion of a voice multiplying or amplifying from what appears to be a single source. Our brain goes lizard mode and finds some adrenaline in sudden terror and confusion at the sonic onslaught. Holy shit what is that? But this “from another room” effect feels more relevant recently.
For one, there is the simple uncanny experience of hearing a familiar song remixed into a new shape. This is amusing to consider with Caramelldansen, a song most of us know as a 168 bpm G-flat major banger, which originally was a 138 bpm E-flat major bop. To hear the original alone invokes a misplaced uncanniness.
There is something pleasant though about hearing a song you like come from somewhere else. I have no authority or audience to which I can declare a “Song of the Summer”, but I only know it when I hear it through the window I’ve left open to catch the breeze, spilling out of someone’s car stereo at the stoplight. I’m happiest during any event I host when I go to another room to get a drink or snack or something, and I can hear my friends still chatting, laughing, spending time together. Knowing I have something good to return to.
With these other-room remixes, you need not focus on the music, it’s like a safety blanket. The assurance that someone out there has good taste too. You can bop to Mr. Brightside while doing something else, without the primal urge to rage and scream along. It’s letting your brain rest.
Or we can swaddle ourselves in the cushions of wounded exclusion, imagine we’re the main character not invited to the house party next door, or the rave in our living room from which we’ve retreated to the bathroom with the cameraman for our Oscar-worthy audition. Amplify our solitude and aloneness with the imagined soundtrack of an A24 movie we’ll never see.
These videos resurged in legion when lockdowns began. Maybe they are calming digital white noise with no deeper meaning than to quiet the cacophony in a world suddenly so much more digital than we realized. I don’t know. I still haven’t read Don DeLillo.
It probably says more about the speed of memes than it does about me to admit that I thought Drake was quoting a meme when he sang “I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” on “God’s Plan.” I first heard the song in an Uber with two strangers some night years ago and I couldn’t believe it. “Wow,” I thought. “Now memes are making music…” Obviously, I was wrong. Chicken and egg problem when I apparently didn’t know poultry from poetry.
It's the speed of things that does it though, right? The speed of life is awfully quick. As poet laureate of meme music Steve Harwell sings, “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming.” To slow down the songs of old is not to revisit the past in a funhouse mirror, but to emphasize the distance time has placed between ourselves and our pasts. This music feels like dying because we believe the past is the only thing alive in the face of oblivion. The songs allow us to imagine dying as something somewhat pleasant, something familiar.
Gerard Way envisioned death as a cherished childhood memory: “my father took me into the city, to see a marching band.”
The human mind is so good at catastrophizing. What if it all went wrong? What if it all fell apart? What if when I leave the room all my friends are laughing at me? Anxiety sings the same song every day and never gets tired. There is a sense of satisfaction in having your expectations met, even if those expectations are The End. To feel free we abdicate the future. We want to be right. We want to know what’s coming, and we’re all blessedly guaranteed a candygram from the Grim Reaper, so it soothes something in our lizard brains to picture rolling out the red carpet. Imagine he shows up wearing anime cat ears. I’d fucking die.
I’m seeing My Chemical Romance live for the first time in my life the night before this publishes, so it’s possible I will have died and gone to the great beyond by the time you read this. Would be fitting, no? If this was my last transmission? Hope not.