Prepare for Brain Rot–Eurodance is Back!
Graphic by Amalia Sandine
By Sean Perry
It’s three in the morning. You’re scrolling through your Spotify, looking for a premade playlist that accurately reflects your late night delirium . You want to dance around your living room and forget about the struggles that plagued your day. You tap on a playlist entitled “Europop Mix”. You think to yourself, “Wow, this looks fun and normal! I am going to have an exceptionally regular time listening to these songs.” You press play, and a song entitled “I Am Mister Blaster” begins. You let it play. In 4 minutes and 5 seconds as you experience the strangest, most bizarre and confusing musical trip you have ever been on. You hear, for the first time, the lyrics, “I am Mr. Blaster / Go! Go! Go! / Jungle bangle wow wow! / Magic weapon oh oh! / Bad flash in the dark of night!” What does this mean? Did a human write this? How miniscule does one's comprehension of the English language have to be in order to produce this monstrosity of words? Am I having a stroke? Congratulations, you have officially been exposed to Eurodance in its mildest form! It’s no coincidence that you have only just now heard this mid-2000s bop for the first time– Eurodance is reentering the American mainstream, and it’s all thanks to a niche little app called TikTok.
Eurodance is truly Frankenstein’s monster of music . It combines, to quote Rosie Cain of Stamp the Wax, “elements of Hi-NRG, house music and euro disco, often with melodic vocals and euphoric synths.” Cain’s quote is an eloquent way of saying, it’s weird and loud. Eurodance took every preexisting genre and melted them together to create one glitter stained, synth heavy, bass boosted monster. The genre originated in the ‘80s, across Europe’s club scene. Groups such as Black Box and Technotronic spread the loud, crazy, and unhinged sound of Eurodance across the continent. People loved it, and the genre quickly grew to be the most popular type of club music of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Unfortunately, the genre died down in the late ‘90s as interest declined and the genre grew more and more commercial. Although Eurodance’s ability to fuse a million different sounds into one was a huge accomplishment, it made the genre hard to define– it’s dance, it’s synthy, poppy, and also disco? Even now, Eurodance is still hard to define, decades after its prime. After some deliberation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Eurodance is defined by its ability to be weird– the ability to throw a random rap into a power ballad, just because, or to create a song that sounds like ABBA had a baby with Daft Punk and Katy Perry. The ability to be unabashedly weird is what I suspect has finally brought upon the rise of Eurodance in western culture.
If you have TikTok, then chances are you’ve heard “Planet of the Bass”. It’s a silly, campy, TikTok parody of ‘90s Eurodance music, and the internet can’t get enough. Lyrics such as “Women are my favorite guy” and “All of the dream, how does it mean?” capture the nonsensical nature of Eurodance music. The song has amassed almost two million streams on Spotify despite only being released on the platform a month and a half ago, and has gone insanely viral on TikTok, with the original video amassing over one million likes on the platform. Gen Z in particular is eating up this parody, making videos lip syncing to the song and even creating their own music videos. Eurodance is back, friends, and it is louder than ever– prepare for the brain rot!