It’s sort of my fault Plugged In’s astute and studied music critic Adam Holz got dragged into reviewing such a silly song about a fox.
Actually, it’s my 8th-grade daughter’s fault. Her middle school drama class was looking for a dippy dance tune to include in its fall production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Yes, you read that right: dippy dance tune and Shakespeare in the same sentence.) The students struck upon Ylvis’ viral track “The Fox.”
She came home to ask me if I’d heard of the song. And I subsequently turned to Adam the next day and asked him about it. The next thing you know, we were publishing his slightly wary take on the track.
It was a very thorough and accurate take, as far as we knew … us not knowing much about what foxes actually say, of course. But then Adam found out that the Brothers Ylvisåker, Bård and Vegard had been on Ellen, and had blithely opened the door to a whole new interpretation of the song.
And this particular interpretation wasn’t silly at all.
Here’s the addendum we’ve now published at the bottom of Adam’s review:
The review you’ve just read was written in good faith that a silly song about a fox saying even sillier things might, even in the jaded, sarcastic age of the 2010s, still be just that. And for anyone innocently stumbling upon the sounds of “The Fox,” as I did, everything you’ve just read may well still be (or at least seem to be) appropriate and true.
But it was also written before I stumbled upon something Bård and Vegard revealed on Ellen Degeneres’ daytime talk show when they came to the U.S. to promote their music and comedy shtick. And the lads’ casual little revelation means something significant just might have gotten lost in translation when Americans started frantically dancing to the beat of a certain furry fox. Something that may skew the way one looks at the song.
Here’s what they said:
“The fun fact is that marijuana, you know, is actually called, in Norwegian, it’s the Norwegian word for fox. So if you take, like, a smoke, that’s called taking a fox, actually.”
“Now it makes sense. Now it all makes sense.” Ellen replied.
So should my daughter’s class reconsider its pick? Is this the kind of song budding middle school thespians should sing and dance to? She and her classmates and teacher have to figure that out, I guess. And your help would be appreciated, I’m sure!
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