By now, you’ve no doubt been one of the 11.2 million people who has seen The Fox, a viral video by Norwegian music duo Ylvis (The internet won’t tell me how to pronounce that, so I’m going with “Elvis” until I am corrected). Norwegian readers, feel free to get haughty — while you’ve seen almost too much of Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker’s bizarre cabaret stylings, since they’ve been superfamous in your country for the last decade, it appears that the rest of the world has just discovered them. And we’re all pretty obsessed.
Today’s lab track, however, is not about foxes. It’s a bit more…intimate than that. And of course, scientific! Those with incredibly large computer screens visible to an entire office might want to angle them away, but for most, this’ll be SFW. As suggested by fellow Labber Ryan, I give you Ylvis’s Work It.
This has been another installment of Monday Lab Tracks. Send us your musical recommendations through our contact link at the top of the page, and tell us what you think of the song in the comments below!
“Elvis” is about the closest you can get to the actual pronunciation with the phonemes available in English. You can hear the announcer saying “Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome for” (well, the Norwegian equivalent) “Vegard og Bård Ylvisåker” at 1:50 in this video of their third stageshow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnUHZoATwRU (The previous almost two minutes is a silly almost real English intro to the show.)
Thanks for that, Bjornar! So it’s kind of like “Yeelvis.” “Yilvis.” “Yuilvis.” I’ll work on it. 😉
Also, holy crap! The whole last segment of that video is a killer James Brown medley, complete with one of the brothers playing alto sax (at 1:08:30)! I can’t believe how talented they are!
It’s kind of the vowel Y would be if you loons didn’t use it as a consonant. And yeah, they’re great. Last year they also made a series of “voice controlled elevator”-prank videos filmed at a major Oslo hotel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un_oHaf798