My name is ба́бушка, and if you study with my eight-week program you will learn a system of dancing that I learned over two seasons of of going to the best underground house music shows that Voronezh has to offer. It’s called ба́бушка Kwon Do! After one week with me in my eight-week program, you’ll be prepared to dance with the strength of a grizzly, the reflexes of a puma, and the wisdom of a man.
To be completely honest, he has much better dance moves than anyone else in a one-mile radius. The best they can muster is jumping in place and pointing. They don’t feel it. They’re not movin, groovin, and bumpin. I, too, dance like a dad, so I know a thing or two about busting a move. You’ve gotta get your whole spirit in it. You gotta put your hands in the air like you don’t care. You need to embarrass someone.
Japanese, Korean, Chinese; who’s keeping track? I don’t know where this is from, and I’m far too lazy to Google translate the title. If I had to wager, I’d say that it couldn’t be Japanese, but I’ve been wrong before. There’s not enough tentacles, curiously sexual robots, or manic schoolgirls for this to be Japanese. Or maybe it is, and they’re taking a much more subtle approach to presenting their bizarre sense of everything. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.
I can narrow it down a bit further by absolutely guaranteeing that it is not Chinese. The Chinese get weird, but they never incorporate anything this sophisticated into their pseudo-propaganda footage. There’s not enough happy workers or red backdrops, so that’s a dead giveaway. It can’t be Korean because there aren’t nearly enough people playing Starcraft while girls dressed like a Dollar Store Madonna feed them peeled grapes. There would also be banner ads for computer gaming equipment covering every inch of the screen, so Koreans are completely out. This brings us back to the Japanese.
At first it didn’t seem strange enough to be Japanese, but now that we’ve eliminated every other possibility we can conclusively say that the video is from Japan. I’m mildly disappointed, because this marks a low point in their weirdness, but it’s still pretty far out. It would have been a lot easier to just Google translate the title and see what language comes up, but categorizing the video tendencies of the three most prominent Asian countries was viscerally satisfying for me — minus Russia.
Don’t even get me started on the Russians.
(Many thanks to our good friend Charles Schneider for sending this one our way)
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I can’t tell if he’s the best dancer I’ve ever seen or the worst. They’re pretty much the same things when you get right down to it. A total lack of control over your appendages can be misconstrued as great dancing. I will admit that dancing requires some skill, but don’t let it get to your head. I can’t dance so I have no idea if this is good, bad, or a mixture of the two. It’s weird enough to merit me talking about it, so it must have some good qualities. If we have any dancers in the house feel free to correct me on this.
Busting a move is an obtuse art form. It has many schools of thought, and many stoic practitioners who make everyone around them miserable by doing a bunch of obtuse nonsense instead of being entertaining. I find the aforementioned video to be very entertaining because he doesn’t seem to be taking himself too seriously. On the other hand, if that display is him taking himself seriously then I really don’t know what to say. Taking serious artistic license with the absurd is like remaking Casablanca with cats. People aren’t exactly gonna watch it for the riveting plot, now are they?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter how you feel about dance. What truly matters is we all agree that Napoleon Dynamite has the best dance sequence of any movie that has ever been made, or ever will be made.