I have a soft spot for absurdism, especially when it tosses together disparate cultural references willy-nilly. This week I discovered Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, who represented Spain in the 2008 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, a major international performance competition.
The song he won on, “Baila el Chiki Chiki”, is reggaetón, according to people who might know (not me), but the lyrics are a mish-mash of slightly off braggadocio and specific cultural citations. The main rhetorical thrust of the song is that a lot of people dance the Chiki Chiki, but the list of enthusiasts he claims is impossibly broad, including Hugo Chavez, his mother and grandmother, metal heads, and the Chinese. I can’t help myself – I’m a sucker for the wacko juxtaposition of pop culture crap (dance pop) with just about anything as banal as dictators and family members. But it gets better: in the international version of the song, he suggests (in case, I guess, none of the above are available) doing the dance with Pau Gasol of the L.A. Lakers or Pedro Almodóvar (although presumably only as a last resort). Then, near the end, he makes reference, for no particular reason, to an infamous incident where Spain’s King Juan Carlos I told Hugo Chavez to shut up. I don’t know why exactly, but this kind of allusion-heavy stuff is like manna to me.
The dance itself is four extremely abbreviated steps that are really just an incredibly simplified recombination of existing moves, so dumbed-down that you suspect the joke is partly that they couldn’t be more basic. Anyway, the steps include “el miquelyason” (say it aloud) and “el robocop”, which is really just the “robot” being trotted out again in the most water-down imitative form possible.
His appearance is also somehow strangely satisfying. Chikilicuatre was a character played by David Fernández, and in all the appearances I’ve seen, he’s always wearing the same slightly geeky disco outfit, a massive pompadour and a tiny plastic toy guitar. His voice is so nasal that it’s practically a musical tone, and oddly pleasant to listen to.
In the interviews I’ve watched, there’s a really dry absurdity that Chikilicuatre never really acknowledges or seems to get, one of the hallmarks of good absurdism. In one talk show appearance they show a clip submitted by a fan in which the guy sings and jumps back and forth in time to the song with the signature unprofessional quality of all similar videos. The only difference is, the video inexplicably cuts to unidentifiable furry house pets, which Chikilicuatre takes in without betraying any hint that there’s anything wrong. By the end of the show, the host is fed up with Chikilicuatre, but the audience roots for him, and Chikilicuatre responds by playing “Old McDonald” on his toy guitar, which is as unlikely a response as I can think of.
I watched the music video below several times before I realized that there was something strangely familiar about the dance: Chikilicuatre moves almost exactly as though he were a character in a video game, with the same awkward abbreviated approximation of real dancing. Also, the back-up dancers are actually worth paying attention to, since one of them is off enough to be noticeable but not so much that you’d realize it the first time you see it. (According to Wikipedia, the back-up dancers even have their own character names and traits.)
(Notes: This video is a later version of the Chiki Chiki and thus omitted some references mentioned above. Also, there are subtitles in English.)
