The Hampter Tango (a mystery solved!)

OKAAAAAY, you may ask, and rightly so, what am I doing posting all these YouTube videos today? What I'm doing is finally connecting the dots on something that has been driving me crazy.

For some inane reason, very late at night, maybe just to ease the wear and the tear on my mind, I began to watch hamster videos - no, HAMPTER videos, which are a completely separate genre and generally last no more than a few seconds. Hampters falling down, hampters spinning in wheels, hampters stuffing their cheeks. I was confused at first, but soon saw the light. Either the creators can't spell worth a damn, or - more likely - this is the new, cool, internet/social media way to spell "hamster".

But the hampter I'm talking about - it wasn't even the hampter itself, but the music that came with it. It was just a few bars of a very familiar melody, but played on what sounded like mariachi trumpets, with a loud sort of synthesized percussion and somebody yelling hip-hop-ish things in the background.

BUT THE SONG! What was the name of that song?

I became transfixed by the melody, mainly because it was both so familiar and so impossible to pin down. Surely it was one of the most familiar tangos of all? For it HAD to be a tango, in spite of the mariachi-style inflections added by whatever group was playing it.

So what did I have to go on? I HAD to find out what this was called so I could track down a decent version of it. But did you think I could? 

So I listened to the goddamned "angry hampter" one over and over again, while I scrolled and played and searched, and kept finding those other two classics, La Cumparsita and Jalousy (which is the only tango I ever attempted to play on the violin). But nothing would match up. It was so frustrating I finally had to just give up.

But just now, in the last half-hour or so, I decided to give it another shot. 

AND THEN.

To my astonishment, BINGO, here it was, sounding nearly identical to my beloved Hampter Tango. Not only that, I easily found three different versions of it by three brass ensembles, but thought this had that extra little sassy edge. It sounded more Mexican, though the original piece is Argentinian.

But the weird thing is, now I realize I DID listen to the HampterTango (El Choclo, which makes me wonder if it means "chocolate tango") and just could not make the match. Tangos have an irritating habit of long, ornate introductions, I suppose to get the dancers out on the dance floor. Maybe I never got past that?

But, oh, then! THEN I had the actual title of the piece and could go wild. There were hundreds, if not thousands of arrangements for this piece, but when I hit on this one I went into raptures. I'm not a big accordion fan - I always thought of them as cooling devices - but in this case, as a purveyor of tango passion, it sounded just right. So I was about to hang it up, satisfied I'd made my match with the hampter video. 

But of course, there was more. 

This string ensemble version is simply exquisite, and the music video that goes along with it is charming - though are those women really that gorgeous, that sexy? How many serious musicians actually look like that? Never mind. The three versions - brass, accordion and strings - rounded out the tastiness of the piece very nicely.

But then this one came to mind. . . one of the very first YouTube videos EVER, and one that I listened to endlessly when the grandkids came over in about 2008. 

This is the root, the original, the ur-video, the Hamster Dance (sorry, "Hampter") which took YouTube by storm in the early '00s and never quite left. Who knows, it may even have inspired the Angry Hampter video that started this whole mad chase. 

THE KICKER! I simply had to look up El Choclo, to see what it actually meant - just assuming it had something to do with chocolate - rich, dark, flowing chocolate with a bittersweet edge, sensuous, luscious, just like the tango itself! 

Here's what it means.

"El Choclo" (Spanish: meaning "The Corn Cob") is a popular song written by Ángel Villoldo, an Argentine musician. Allegedly written in honour of and taking its title from the nickname of the proprietor of a nightclub, who was known as "El Choclo". It is one of the most popular tangos in Argentina.

(I'm going to bed now.)