"Tunak Tunak Tun", often referred to solely as "Tunak", is a bhangra/pop love song created by Indian artist Daler Mehndi and released in 1998. It has become an internet meme because of its catchy tune and the amusing dance in its music video, inspiring numerous spin-offs and parodies. The music video was the first made in India to use bluescreen technology,[1] which allowed the singer to superimpose his image over various computer-generated backgrounds, one featuring St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.
The "strange" dancing and presence of only the singer in this video was a response to criticism from the world of Bhangra pop. Many critics at the time complained that his music was popular due to his videos which featured beautiful women dancing; his response was to create a video that featured only himself. As he predicted, the song was still a huge success, but the phenomenon of foreign language and unusual dancing made the video a cult hit in other countries as well.
In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, the Draenei race's dance cycle is the dance cycle from the music video of the song.
The song was the official theme song of Concordia Language Villages' International Day in 2005.
The song is also popular in DCinside, a Korean digital camera community, because of its foreign lyrics and dancing style. In Korean, the song's title is written as 뚫훓뚫훓뚫(읗), pronounced similarly to its native pronunciation. A TV program called 웃찾사 ("ut-chat-sa", roughly translated as "people who search for laughter") used this song as theme song for a character called 만사마 ("man-sa-ma"). He dances in a manner similar to the dance in the music video for "Tunak Tunak Tun", and this made the song popular in Korea.
References
- ^ "Biography - Insight". dalermehndi.com (2006). Retrieved on 2006-07-06.
External links
|
