Ylvis – The Fox

Minor internet ephemera. Yep, we’re all over that shit.

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[2.90]Iain Mew: “It is maybe the greatest thing that has ever happened to the internet” says someone on Wikipedia. The internet needs higher standards. The animal noises ruin any momentum as a song so it has to rely on comedy, but from the premise on there’s not much that works. Foxes go “yip,” surely more widely than elephants go “toot,” and Ylvis’ English is clearly too good for the mangled chorus to be anything other than a poor excuse to sing something that sounds like “what the fuck,” whatever the cost. The marks are for horse/Morse, which is irresistibly stupid.
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Jonathan Bradley: “Friday” through the looking glass: where Rebecca Black was too ridiculous to be real, this is too real to be plausibly ridiculous. No one involved believes “The Fox” is reaching for deep universal truths. They’re trying to sell ESL yuks as genuine comedy. It wouldn’t even be funny were it authentic.
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Edward Okulicz: More lols for people to share on Facebook without realising how unfunny it is and how unfunny they are for doing so. And it’s not even a good example of a song about animal noises!
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Anthony Easton: If you hear the horse talk to the fox in Morse code, make sure that it is not some kind of Clever Hans effect.
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Madeleine Lee: My initial instinct was to scan the lyrics as mondegreens from a language I don’t speak fluently, which I’m sure is half the idea – that if you weren’t paying attention, this could blend into the background at a hip Scandinavian dinner party, until the screeching, howling and ring-ding-dinging punchline in the chorus, the host’s joke on his guests. But the other half of the idea is the lyrics, and on that note, the repeated angel metaphor feels tossed-off in the wrong way; it’s either too grandiose or too directly satirical, whereas the rest of the song works because it’s simple and, beneath the merry pranking, sincere. The scenes of an old man reading to a child aren’t the parts that feel out of place.
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Brad Shoup: As a parody of EDM (I think that’s how I’m supposed to hear it), it’s as weak as the vocals, which code more Italo house than modern blisspop. The scatting bits substitute for the standard wubbery: good for a chuckle. Something this custom-fitted for absurdity needs a passable framework. Otherwise, it’s just a punky pisstake, something gleaned from The Manual‘s SparkNotes. The Lonely Island — who respect the source material, even when they forget the jokes — must be kicking themselves.
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Scott Mildenhall: Very clever, and it would be even if only for the exclamation; clearly they’ve been to the Shamen school of mondegreening, where it will no doubt be reverberating around courtesy of its younger pupils for the next week or so. The production is hardly Stargate’s best, but it’s Stargate’s, so it is redolent of contemporary pop (and the Morse gag suggests Ylvis “get” it), but purely to listen to it’s not all that amazing. The song it most resembles, at least in the verses, is “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons, and too many people know what noise they make.
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Mallory O’Donnell: Well, you can’t say they didn’t have a concept. There’s something impossible to reconcile between Ylvis’ canny summation of pop trends and their overall naivety about what actual humans enjoy listening to. Still, this really should be heard if only to give yourself acid flashbacks.
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Jer Fairall: The low-grade chintz of the production grates nearly as much as the idiotic vocals and nonsense lyrics once it is revealed that this was helped along by industry professionals. Don’t blame idiots for being idiots, in other words; do blame insiders (no matter how otherwise hack-y) for helping them along, and especially blame a meme-culture that routinely elevates the kind of garbage that would have immediately vanished into obscurity in a more selective marketplace. The Sharknado of music, essentially.
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Will Adams: Every generation gets the Crazy Frog it deserves.
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