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.)

Harry and Meghan: "Florid, banal psycho-babble reeking of opportunism"

 

Florid, banal psycho-babble reeking of opportunism - Harry and Meghan are riding other people's grief like trams

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:24 EST, 1 February 2024 | Updated: 04:09 EST, 2 February 2024

Veteran Sussex watchers were ­yesterday in their power-showers, trying to scrub clean after the latest hosing of treacle from Meghan and Harry.

The couple had issued another of their press statements, this time about child safety on the internet.

Such announcements have become a regular part of the Sussexes’ modus operandi, linking them to a topical issue on which they can parade their empathy.

Their statement, not for the first time, was peppered with American emotionalism, tear-stained platitude mixed with a certain self-serving preachiness. Florid, banal, breathy, reeking of opportunism, it is an art form the exiled royals are fast making their own.

Commenting on a US Senate hearing into dreadful instances of internet child abuse, the duo applauded the ‘bravery and determination’ (one noun alone will never do) of parents whose children had suffered.

As they clawed their way into the circle of virtue – outta the way, people, this is about us –the Sussexes boasted that ‘over the past few years we have spent time with many of these families, listening to their heartache and their hopes for the urgent change that is needed’.

This was ‘an issue that transcends division and party lines’. They also disclosed that one father had told them ‘if love could have saved them, all of our children would still be here’.

Journalistic scepticism may seem harsh given the sensitivity of the issue at hand; yet when an issue is this delicate, would it not be seemly for minor royals to keep their self-promotional psycho-babble to themselves?

This is not the first time that Prince Harry and his actress wife have contributed their unremarkable thoughts on a raw area of public debate.

If they did so spontaneously after, for example, having a microphone thrust into their faces at some public event, it might feel all right.

But the Sussexes come out with sentimental saws on the level of low-grade greetings cards, and they do so by placing them under the ‘news’ section of their personal website. Sorry, but this is pure PR puffery. ‘Turn pain into purpose,’ said Harry at a World Mental Health Day event in New York in October. As it happens, he was talking about how those who suffer misfortune can sometimes become stronger as a result.

‘Days are long but years are short,’ added his consort at the same event.

Eh? It’s the sort of inscrutable gibberish guru Master Po used to say to Grasshopper in the 1970s TV show Kung Fu.

Or take this corker. ‘I’m confident,’ said Meghan, again on mental health, ‘that with more ears and awareness and visibility of what is really happening, we can make some significant change together.’ More ears? Are two not enough for anyone?

As part of her payback to Netflix, from which she and her husband received millions of dollars, the Duchess disclosed that in her wedding speech she spoke of ‘the everlasting knowing that, above all, love wins’.

If you said that at most English county weddings there would be a ripple of mirth and a teasing forest of fingers down throats. Heaven knows what Harry’s old muckers made of his bride’s claim.

Guy Pelly must have almost done the nose trick.

But Meghan appears impervious to British taste. She is immune to the most diabetic-high levels of rhetorical saccharine.

Along with the unfortunate, droopy-tailed Harry, the duchess is a devotee of California psycho-babble and of anxieties being worn as social and political badges.

Look at me, these say, I’m sensitive, I’m not a viciously ambitious, multi-millionaire, West Coast actress cynically adopting positions for career purposes. I’m a genuinely humble, vulnerable, touchy-feely soul. And if you suggest otherwise my attorneys will bust your ass.

If British politicians issued the sort of emetic press releases that Harry and Meghan do, they would be swiftly denounced for gross misjudgement and for trying to surf on other people’s misery. Again, you may think this a harsh comment.

You may say ‘but Harry and Meghan are not politicians’.

I am afraid I would disagree with you. They are behaving in an intensely political manner, beating their breasts for public consumption. Note, too, the repeated calls for ‘change’. These smack of political campaigning.

The Sussexes may think that their press releases are powerful and poetic. To British tastes they will, possibly, more likely look manipulative and opportunistic.

Merely as literary ventures, they are cloyingly mawkish, viscous in their sentimentality.

Whoever writes them has the prose style of a schoolgirl diarist. It is sad that the prince has lost sight of the British virtue of understatement. When it comes to expressions of sympathy, less is always more.

Instead, we are subjected to this mush and gush. On Planet Sussex, ‘light’ is always being ‘shined’, be it on empowerment or inequality. Trite stylistic doubles are deployed.

Writing in Elle magazine, Meghan said that women should ‘focus less on glass slippers and more on pushing through glass ceilings’. And then there was ‘a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change’ – a phrase the couple pinched off the late Robert Kennedy and used at some humanitarian awards in 2022.

There is much ‘focusing on wellbeing’ and ‘relating to shared experiences and challenges’ and ‘discovering of opportunities for growth’.

‘Mentoring’ is a must-have, both for mentors and, dreadful word, ‘mentees’. And ‘hearts’ are invariably ‘heavy’.

Other people’s disaster and grief are ridden like trams.