Snake Eats Own Tail · 7 November 2002
You will by now have heard The Ketchup Song. Those unfamiliar with the The Ketchup Song can learn the Ketchup Song dance, download Ketchup Song ringtones, participate in the Ketchup Song forum, or just stay roundly up to date at the Ketchup Song site.
It is the opinion of the author that this song – to paraphrase Glenn Gould – is twelve bars of brilliance surrounded by three and a half minutes of sticky tedium (no gimmick is left untried: from a wandering rubber-twang guitar lead on loan from ‘La Vida Loca’, to slatherings of futbol-arena organ, to a glib rhythm track so close and overproduced it might as well come in ones and zeroes). It’s the sort of instant dance hit that makes your ass move the first and second time you hear it; by the fifth you want to slice your ears off.
There is a killer hook in those twelve bars, though, albeit one pinched note-for-note from the Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’. And that song rests entirely on Bernard Edwards’ bass line from ‘Good Times’ by Chic.
So. A song based on a snatch of another song based on a snatch of another song.
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