Caramelldansen is a Swedish dance pop song
written by Jorge Vasconcelo and Juha Myllylä. it was released by the band Caramell as part
of the album Supergott in 2001. some years after being released, the song
became an international internet sensation, and today it’s remembered as one of the
truly classic memes of the era. many who were children with internet access
in 2008, when the meme’s popularity was at its peak, have a sense of nostalgia for
this silly outdated internet joke, which is probably why relatively recently the meme
has had a minor resurgence. and likely to capitalize on that recent nostalgia
wave for Caramelldansen, last November the Caramella Girls released a new single, a cover
of Alice DeeJay’s Back In My Life. when this happened, I saw several people on
my twitter and tumblr feeds get excited about how the Caramella Girls were back. some people even described this as “Caramelldansen
2”! but uh, one question. who are the Caramella Girls? like, Caramelldansen is by Caramell, right?
but, the title of the video from 2008 says it’s a Caramella Girls song. what’s going on? I’m jan Misali, and who wrote Caramelldansen? [music] this one's for the Swedes! (Swedes!) you contribute to about 2% of my views this one's for the Swedes! (Swedes!) if you're not from Sweden, get the f___ off this webpage. this one's not for you. this isn’t actually a very difficult question to answer. by simply scrolling down to the bottom of
the video description and checking who issues a copyright claim on this video, we can determine
pretty easily whose song this is. as I said at the start of this video, Caramelldansen
is a song by Caramell, and it was written by Vasco and Millboy. the band even named the song after themselves,
that’s how much they wanted it to be clear that this was their song. while often translated as “the caramel dance”,
the Swedish word karamell is slightly broader than its English cognate, and Caramelldansen
can be more accurately translated as “the candy dance”. the other two members of Caramell were the
singers, Katia Löfgren and Malin Sundström. they’re the two voices you can hear in the
song. none of this information is even remotely
hard to find. there isn’t a secret “well technically”
answer here, it really is that simple. yet, there’s still a few curious little
missing details, and the full story of Caramelldansen is, I think, really interesting. interesting enough for me to make a full video
about it, I mean. as you might already know, the version of
Caramelldansen that was a meme in 2008 isn’t the same version that was released by Caramell
in 2001. it’s a nightcore remix, a remix created by taking the original song and speeding
it up, like playing a record back at the wrong speed. if, like me, you have the meme version of
this song carved into your subconscious where other people probably store the names of different
brands of cars, listening to the actual original feels bizarre. the term “nightcore” originates with the Norwegian
duo of the same name, who created sped-up versions of eurodance songs starting in 2001.
with the growth of youtube, Nightcore music found a new, much larger audience, eventually
leading other artists to create their own “Nightcore songs”. this style of remix
became very popular, in no small part due to the low barrier of entry for creating such
a remix. they’ve remained somewhat popular to this
day, because nightcore music is just good, and always has been. the nightcore remix of Caramelldansen was
created in early 2006 by DJ Speedycake. as the story goes, Speedycake made a mistake
while DJing, and accidentally played the song almost 20% faster. however, people liked it so much that he started
getting requests for this “new remix”, so he ended up releasing a recreation of his
error through 4chan, a version of Caramelldansen sped up exactly 19.383%. while today we can clearly label the Speedycake
version of the song as a notable early example of the nightcore genre, its origins as an
accidental remix make it less unambiguous than I’d like. the timeline is also a bit weird. Nightcore (the group) was gaining popularity
on youtube around the same time that Speedycake released his remix, and the later much more
significant spread of the meme in 2008 coincides with the early days of nightcore (the genre). so, it probably wouldn’t be accurate to
say that Caramelldansen was the first popular “nightcore remix” in the way that we use
the term today, but I also have no real way of verifying that it wasn’t. around the same time, the song Caramelldansen
became associated with a certain animated gif of two anime girls dancing. this gif comes from the animated intro from,
an adult visual novel, released in late 2002. this origin point is, frankly, completely
disconnected from how the meme spread, and I will not be saying anything else about it. this gif had been spread around in the online
anime fandom for a few years, with multiple completely separate instances of people deciding
to pair it with music for the girls to be dancing to. this was all leading up to the point when
Sven from Sweden decided to make a flash animation that paired the gif with Speedycake’s remix
of Caramelldansen, which he posted to his website. he then posted his magnum opus, plainly titled
“ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL!
ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL!”
to 4chan, and the rest is history. now, I say it was Speedycake’s remix. in
a 2008 interview with the blogger Ruakuu in what turned out to be the single most useful
resource about the early history of the meme, Sven claims that he had never heard Speedycake’s
remix before, and claims to have edited the track himself in Audacity. this is very suspicious, because, literally
just listen to it? this is very clearly the same remix. for two people to completely independently
decide to speed up the same five-year-old obscure Swedish dance song the same amount
and post it to the same website within months of each other feels way too specific to be
just a coincidence. since all of this stuff went down on 4chan
in early-to-mid 2006, there’s no real way to determine the exact order of events beyond
just what the parties involved said happened. in my opinion, the most likely explanation
is that Sven saw Speedycake’s remix of the song posted on 4chan without context, and
downloaded it, recognizing it as a song he already owned, without noticing the increased
speed. when he later decided to use the song in ANIME
LOL!, he used the mp3 of the track he had already downloaded, edited in Audacity to
trim it to just the chorus. however, this is all just speculation on my
part based on the conflicting accounts. it could just be a coincidence. I’m lucky enough to not have been active
on 4chan in 2006, so I’m just making educated guesses here. regardless of which happened first, Speedycake’s
remix and Sven’s flash loop both became inseparable from the meme as it spread in
the years to come. while ANIME LOL! saw some positive reactions,
it didn’t really “go viral”. not yet, anyway. links to and reuploads of the video were periodically
shared on 4chan and various other websites throughout the rest of 2006, with Google Trends
showing an early spike in interest in Caramelldansen that October. this corresponds both to the early spread
of the flash and the early spread of the nightcore remix. the earliest still-extant example of the song
being posted on youtube is this delightful Full Metal Alchemist slideshow, uploaded in
November 2006. this antique video doesn’t reference the gif in any way, but the fact
that it was made by an English-speaking anime fan in 2006 suggests that the creator probably
would have been introduced to Caramelldansen through the online anime fandom, as the ANIME
LOL! flash had been posted a good few times across various websites where people discussed
anime. that December is when this video was posted,
featuring the familiar dance, and what is very clearly the flash loop in the background. months later, in March 2007, the earliest
surviving upload of the ANIME LOL! flash itself was posted to youtube. a lot of people seem to believe that this
specific video is the origin for the meme, but of course, we know better. most of the earliest examples do not exist
anymore, and were not archived, making it difficult to track exactly how and where the
meme was spread. but what is clear is that this early spread
was pretty much entirely within the anime subculture. and since it was being spread
around in that community, it was really only a matter of time before someone posted it
to Nico Nico Douga. Niconico, known at the time as Nico Nico Douga,
is a Japanese video sharing platform, similar to youtube. in the mid-to-late aughts, it
was one of the biggest platforms for otakus to share content related to their relatively
niche and nerdy interests. the website is home to a treasure trove of
videos related to anime, manga, video games, and everything between, and its userbase was
a core tenet of the meme culture of the era, especially in Japan. while Niconico is still around, it isn’t
nearly as big as it was at its peak. Caramelldansen was a perfect candidate for
a Nico Nico Douga meme. a short clip of anime girls dancing to a catchy song? sure, western anime fans of the time were
pretty into it, but that exact sort of video was Nico Nico Douga’s bread and butter. this far more receptive audience is how Caramelldansen
would reach its full potential. the earliest surviving example of Caramelldansen
on Nico Nico Douga is from March 2007. the video consists of the Speedycake version
of the song played over this dance from the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which
was a big meme on Nico Nico Douga at the time. that April, the first surviving example of
a variant of the gif was posted to Niconico, a video which traced over the animation, replacing
the dancing girls with two characters from the sports anime Big Windup!. this sort of
thing would later become extremely common. while there were some examples of people altering
the gif to have different characters before its association with Caramelldansen, these
don’t appear to have been archived. and, even though these early examples show
that at least some people on Nico Nico Douga were aware of Caramelldansen, it didn’t
truly become a hit until much later that year. in November 2007, at least two people posted
the flash loop to Nico Nico Douga within days of each other. although the flash just looped endlessly,
these videos are the same length, and in fact both are the same length as the earlier upload
of the flash to youtube, meaning that either these were ripped from youtube, or that all
three of these videos were reposted from the same source. another month later, on Christmas Eve 2007,
a “full version” of the video was posted to Niconico, with the gif playing on loop
over the full version of the nightcore remix of Caramelldansen. and this is when the meme
really took off. one thing that makes Nico Nico Douga different
from other video sharing platforms is that any comment posted on the video is shown in
front of the video itself. it’s not in the subtle way where Twitch
chat comments are shown in a little side bar next to the content of the stream, it’s
extremely in-your-face, and pretty disruptive. you can disable this or make the comments
transparent in the settings if you want, but this is how everything looks by default, and
honestly, this is the true Nico Nico Douga experience. I think this format is one of the main reasons
why the meme got as big as it did on the platform. specifically, this format encouraged a Japanese
audience hearing this Swedish song to engage in the time-honored tradition of mondegreen. mondegreens are when you misinterpret some
phrase, often lyrics, as something else that sounds kinda similar. these are extremely common, especially when
people listen to music in languages that they don’t speak. and, thanks to the internet giving people
instant access to media that they otherwise never would have experienced, cross-language
mondegreens became a staple of aughties internet culture. English speakers might recognize this style
of video as “animutation”, a genre popularized by the serial one-hit-wonder Neil Cicierega
in his pre- Lemon Demon days. very interestingly, this genre of video was
also popular in Sweden. some of these Swedish cross-language mondegreen
videos predate Cicierega’s animutations by a few years. this includes the classic video Hatten är
din, which in the year two thousand was one of the very first “viral videos”. this practice of taking a song you don’t understand and misinterpreting its lyrics
in your native language is just a lot of fun, especially because since the lyrics you get
are based entirely on what it sounds like, the results tend to be nonsensical, and are
often a little bit rude. the misheard lyrics don’t need to match how the real lyrics
sound exactly. as long as they’re “close enough”, priming
someone to hear a song in a certain way will allow their brain to fill in the gaps. presenting
a mondegreen as subtitles on a video is a particularly strong way to prime people to
hear the song the way you want them to. while any individual mondegreen will be specific
to speakers of the language the fake lyrics are heard in, this in general transcends culture,
and happens pretty much whenever people have access to music in languages they don’t
understand. so, unsurprisingly, it’s a thing in Japan
too. the Japanese word for this phenomenon is “空耳”
(soramimi), literally “to think to have heard something”. and this is where the
format of Nico Nico Douga comes in. if a video contains a song with lyrics in
a language other than Japanese, a Japanese speaker could then misinterpret the lyrics
as being vaguely similar-sounding Japanese words: a mondegreen, or soramimi. and then,
here’s the fun part, they can type out the way they heard the lyrics as a comment, and
then that comment will appear over the video, priming other viewers to hear the song in
the same way. and of course, after hearing the song in that same way, those other viewers
might decide to leave the same comment, creating a feedback loop of soramimi. so, as an example, one Japanese speaker might
hear the vocalization “o-o-oa-oa” and interpret it as “ウッーウッーウマウマ”
(u-u-uma uma). this can be translated in a few different ways, but from what I can tell,
it doesn’t really mean anything. it’s just like, a sound. this specific soramimi is a major aspect of
the meme in Japan. for Japanese speakers, u-u-uma uma is the
name of the meme itself, usually stylized like this, using halfwidth katakana and this
specific emoticon. watching any moderately popular Niconico video
with Caramelldansen in it with comments turned on, you’ll invariably see people spamming
u-u-uma uma. while this is certainly the strongest association with soramimi that Caramelldansen
has in Japan, it’s far from the only one. while not as well-known outside of Japan,
other mondegreens are still a major aspect of the meme’s identity, with one in particular
standing out as the second most significant, and in my opinion, the first-most interesting. while there are plenty of different conflicting
mondegreen interpretations of Caramelldansen in Japanese, they tend to agree on two specific
things. one is u-u-uma uma, and the other is barusamikosu. the first line of the chorus, in Swedish,
is “dansa med oss / klappa era händer”. this translates as “dance with us / clap
your hands”. on Nico Nico Douga, when tens of thousands of Japanese speakers were introduced
to Caramelldansen for the first time, many of them heard “dansa med oss” as the very
similar sounding “バルサミコ酢” (barusamikosu), which means, “balsamic vinegar”. and again, those lyrics are not the only soramimi interpretation of Caramelldansen, or even
the most popular one. but pretty much every soramimi agrees that
the chorus of this song definitely starts with “balsamic vinegar”. in my opinion,
this association between Caramelldansen and balsamic vinegar is extremely funny. and like, I know why it didn’t, but dang
I wish this part of the meme had made its way out of Japan, somehow. English speakers have come up with plenty
of mondegreen lyrics for the song, which you can find pretty easily in the comments sections
of pretty much any popular video with the Swedish song, but without the format of Nico
Nico Douga presenting these comments as part of the video itself, there is no interpretation
among English speakers nearly as widespread as uma uma or barusamikosu are among Japanese
speakers. in February 2008, u-u-uma uma went viral.
as I said before, it truly was the perfect candidate for a meme on Nico Nico Douga. everything about it seems tailor made for
both the demographic and the literal user interface of that specific platform. this is when countless variations of the meme
were created, tracing over the looping animation with characters from various other media. some used the awkward loop of just the chorus
found in the flash loop, and others used the full nightcore version of the song. it was a big thing. people all across Japan were suddenly really
getting into this Swedish dance song, singing along with nonsense lyrics about balsamic
vinegar. Caramelldansen was a sensation. this newfound popularity of Caramelldansen
in Japan caught the attention of Remixed Records, the record label that owns the distribution
rights of the song. by this point, the group Caramell had been
fully broken up for years. they hadn’t been together since 2003, and
Remixed Records hadn’t put out any music at all since 2004. and now, seemingly out
of nowhere, one of their songs was extremely popular in Japan. while the exact timeline of what happened
next isn’t exactly clear, it is clear that this next part all happened pretty quickly
after the meme took off. on April 1st, 2008, the website umauma.cd
was created by the media company Exit Tunes. on April 16th, Exit Tunes obtained the distribution
rights for Caramelldansen in Japan. and it is a little weird, I think, that the
website was made before they actually had the rights to the song. my best guess for why this is the case is
that the process of legally getting the rights to the song took a few weeks. it’s likely that Remixed Records got in
contact with Exit Tunes much earlier, in fact. the day after officially gaining the rights
to the song, Exit Tunes released an official animated music video for Caramelldansen. it features a cast of anime girls, all doing
the dance from the original gif. I definitely remember having seen this specific
video as a kid, and I don’t remember how or why. I probably saw one of the youtube reuploads. the characters featured in the video include
some that were already associated with previous Exit Tunes releases, but some of them were
completely original characters. most significant is this one here. her name is, get ready, Barusa Miko. see what I mean? in Japan, balsamic vinegar
was a huge aspect of the meme. like, okay, one of the other things Exit Tunes did with
the song was release this EP that contains the nightcore version of Caramelldansen, the
instrumental for the nightcore version of Caramelldansen, five new Caramelldansen remixes,
and not the actual original version of Caramelldansen. and one of those five new remixes featured
new vocals, and uh, as the song was in the process of going viral
on Niconico, it made its way back over to the English-speaking side of the internet. while youtube didn’t have the same user
interface that made Caramelldansen a perfect fit for Nico Nico Douga, it did have a much
larger group of people using it. interestingly, while a lot was naturally lost
in translation, the meme’s presence on youtube was still very similar to its presence on
Nico Nico Douga. the most common iterations of the meme on
both platforms were videos where people traced over the dance with characters from different
media. many of these were reposts originating on
other platforms, such as 4chan, but many others were cross-posted between both youtube and
Niconico. around the same time that that collection
of Caramelldansen remixes was released by Exit Tunes, Remixed Records put out their
first new release since 2004: Supergott Speedy Mixes. this album is just, Supergott again,
the album Caramelldansen was originally released on, but with the whole thing nightcored. naturally, this album was also sold in Japan
through Exit Tunes, but under significantly different branding. every song is given a new sillier title, complete
with emoticons, in order to fit in with the general vibe of “ｳｯｰｳｯｰｳﾏｳﾏ(ﾟ∀ﾟ)”. just like how Exit Tunes released an animated
music video to go with their release of the song, Remixed Records created their own animated
music video. and this is where the Caramella Girls come
in. this music video was created in May 2008,
featuring three 3D animated characters doing the iconic dance. these are the Caramella Girls. if you look at this video now, the title indicates
that this song is Caramelldansen, by the Caramella Girls. however, the video itself very clearly features
the name “Caramell”. at some point, this video was retitled. we’ll get to that later. so, let’s meet the Caramella Girls. there’s three of them: Vera, Mindy, and
Nadine. they look similar to some characters from
the Exit Tunes video, especially Vera there, sometimes called “Verá”, but they’re
legally distinct. I have a very silly question. why are there three of them? with the other
music video, it’s this whole big cast of characters, but exactly three? that’s kinda weird! like, the memetic gif
features two girls dancing, and the song is sung by two women. by all accounts, it would have made more sense
for there to only be two Caramella Girls. I don’t have anything else to say about
that observation, it’s just something I thought was strange. moving on! in September 2008, an official English translation
for Caramelldansen was created, the first of a few different translations of the song. this is where things start to get really weird. first of all, this version was originally
released as being by Caramell, like the other versions of Caramelldansen. but remember, Caramell broke up in 2003! so
who made this version? well, that’s uh, unclear. who translated the lyrics? who are the English
vocalists? as far as I can tell, that information isn’t documented anywhere. none of those people were credited. and that’s
like, kinda messed up, right? almost as messed up is uh. okay, so this video,
Caramelldansen (Official English Version), was uploaded on September 17th 2008. super popular video, it’s got over fifty
million views. but then there’s this video, Caramelldansen
(English Version) Official, which has just slightly over one million views. these are both on the official Caramella Girls
channel, posted two days from each other. the difference between them is that (Official
English Version) is 360p and widescreen, and (English Version) Official is 480p and not
widescreen. again I don’t really have anything to say
about this. there’s just a lot of weird details surrounding
this meme, and I noticed them, so now you have to know about them too. while I’m going on only half-relevant tangents,
there’s one strange detail about this English translation that led me down, well it’s
not really a rabbit hole, it’s just a normal sized hole that I fell into then climbed back
out of then thought “huh that’s weird”. so, the second verse of this English translation
starts with uh, like, what? did they just acknowledge the
fact that this song is an internet meme in their official translation of this meme song? why did they do that? that’s such a wild decision! also, like,
they listed a bunch of places where the song is popular, but not Japan? come on, Caramelldansen was huge in Japan,
they don’t even get a shoutout? so, a while back I remembered this fact about
the English version of Caramelldansen and went to go tweet about how weird it is, then
when I went to look up the English lyrics so I could provide the exact quote, I found
this page on Genius, the top google result for “Caramelldansen English lyrics”, and
to my surprise, these lyrics don’t include the word “meme”. but no, it’s not an
alternate translation. that’s right, it’s another mondegreen!
balsamic vinegar strikes yet again! speaking of English Caramelldansen with weird
lyrics, did you know there’s a Christmas version? this song confirms very important lore information about Caramelldansen. one, their world has multiple suns, and two,
Christianity exists. anyway, what was I talking about? right, official translations of Caramelldansen.
in April 2009, the official German translation was released: “Caramelltanzen”. there’s also a Spanish version that was
made, at some point, but I’m not sure when exactly. I think it was in 2020. the Caramella Girls wiki has lyrics for two
different Spanish translations, one in Latin American Spanish and another in Castilian
Spanish, but I’m not sure if they’re both official or what their deal is in general. and, of course, since Caramelldansen was so
popular in Japan, it made perfect sense to release a Japanese version of the song as
well. even though Exit Tunes was handling the distribution
of the song in Japan, Remixed Records put out an official Japanese translation in late
2009, around the same time as the Christmas version. and by official Japanese translation, I actually
mean an “official” “Japanese” “translation”. this version of the song wasn’t created
in-house for Remixed Records like the English or German versions; it actually predates those
translations of the song significantly. this Japanese version is a cover made by the
group Fruits, and it was first posted on Nico Nico Douga in July 2008. Remixed Records would later license this cover
to release it as the “official” version of the song. as for the “translation”
itself, well, that’s right, baby! it’s inescapable. Caramelldansen, in a certain time and place,
was associated just as strongly with soramimi as Never Gonna Give You Up is with lying to
people on the internet. while we’re in late 2009, did you know there
was a Caramelldansen mobile game? from what I can tell, this iPhone app was a rhythm game
where the only songs available were different versions of Caramelldansen. it is currently lost media, which is a shame
because are you kidding me? I would absolutely love to play the garbage
Caramelldansen rhythm game. granted, I don’t have any means of running
iOS apps from 2009 even if someone did manage to uncover this thing, but I still think people
should get on that. as the aughts came to a close, the internet
moved on to other, fresher memes. “did everyone see that cool sax solo at Eurovision? that
was pretty epic, I think.” the unexpected success of Caramelldansen made
Remixed Records a lot of money, and then the meme slowly died a natural death. it was referenced in an episode of Phineas
and Ferb, and then it stopped being cool. and then, in October 2010, something weird
happened. the official Caramella Girls twitter account
announced that they’re recording a new song. no, not Caramell. that group had been broken up for years. they’ve all moved on. the Caramella Girls, the three animated characters
created for the second official music video for Caramelldansen, were going to release
their own original song, which would be released as their first single in 2011: “Boogie Bam Dance”. this song is a perfect “one-hit-wonder follow up” song, which is weird because it’s
literally the first song released by the Caramella Girls! like, to be as clear as possible here,
the Caramella Girls are not responsible for the song or the dance that they’re known
for. and yet, here they are just showing up and saying “yeah, it’s us, from Caramelldansen!” so, who are these people, exactly? Wikipedia says this song was recorded by Malin
and Katia, the singers from Caramell, but this isn’t backed up by any source. the Caramella Girls Wiki says that the Caramella
Girls consist of Racheal Alicost, Karin Ellis, and Lucky McSozzen. multiple other places say the same thing and
none of them cite a source either. regardless, almost nothing is publicly known
about the members of the Caramella Girls, but individual songs released by them do have
songwriter credits at least, and nobody who was in Caramell is credited for any of them. from what I can tell, Caramella Girls, the
group, was created in 2010 by Remixed Records in order to continue to capitalize on the
by-then-declining popularity of Caramelldansen. the singers have been kept near-anonymous
in order to prevent people from figuring out that these two groups are different. which is like, definitely a power move, I
think. much like Caramelldansen, Boogie Bam Dance
was also released in a few different languages. the English version was created alongside
a Spanish version and a German version. for some reason, the music video for the German
version of Boogie Bam Dance was never released, another example of lost Caramelldansen media. also notably absent is a Swedish version of
this song! that’s kinda weird. so, Boogie Bam Dance was released and nobody
cared. I mean, the music video got a few million
views and the song probably made Remixed Records a lot of money, but it failed to become en
sensation överallt förstås like Caramelldansen. two years later, they tried again. in October 2012, two years to the day after
the announcement that they were recording Boogie Bam Dance, it was announced to pretty
much no fanfare that they were recording another new song. they even got brand new character designs
just for the occasion, making them look even less like the dancing girls in the meme gif
that they were trying to look like in the first place. at the end of 2012, in a post-Gangnam Style
internet landscape, the Caramella Girls released their second single, “We Love to Party”. apparently, this immediately received a large
amount of negative feedback, with people complaining that the pitch of the voices was too high,
so a few days later a new version with the voices pitched down a little bit was released. this leaves the original version of We Love
to Party as yet another piece of lost media related to the Caramella Girls. almost a full year later, at the end of 2013,
their third single, “Get the Gold” was released, “dedicated to all soccer players
girls”. this time, they had a go making a sportsy sort of song, in anticipation of
the upcoming 2014 World Cup. surprisingly, this attempt to appeal to the
intersection of “people who, in late 2013, had positive feelings about Caramelldansen”
and “sports fans” didn’t turn out great. in the months between the release of the new
single and the actual World Cup, the @Caramellagirls twitter account made a couple tweets just
blatantly begging people to please go watch this music video. the Caramella Girls continued to create one
new single every year for a while after that. in 2014 they released the uncomfortably orientalist
“Tokyo” with a music video that for some reason features the flag of imperial Japan. in 2015, they put out “Candy Girl”, which
is a cover of Barbie Girl by Aqua with the lyrics changed just enough for the song to
no longer work that well. this was followed up another year later in
2016 by, are you kidding me they did another sports song? Cheerleaders has even fewer views on youtube
than Get the Gold, and like, yeah, no surprises there. who is this even for? in 2017, the song Holiday was released, which
as it turns out is a summer holiday song, which I did not expect at all, especially
since later that same year they released “Merry Christmas”, which uh, you know what, almost as good as the Christmas
version of Caramelldansen. okay, right, so in 2018 they put out “Saw
You Standin’ There”, which features this line. so that's uh,
this song was written by two writers. and then they followed this up by making
another music video for Caramelldansen. surprise! there’s a third official animated
music video for this song! this was created to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Caramelldansen,
over 16 years after the original release of the song, 12 years after the creation of the
nightcore remix, and several months short of 10 years after the release of the English
version of the song that the music video actually features. and, yes, it’s the English version. even though the Swedish version is what became
a meme in the first place, this third animated music video was only made for the English
translation, for some reason. Caramelldansen 2018 was the biggest hit for
the Caramella Girls since, well, since they started actually making music as the Caramella
Girls. one thing was clear, people did not care at
all about the Caramella Girls. they just liked Caramelldansen. after this increased success, the Caramella
Girls began making new songs and videos at a much faster rate than they had been for
the past decade. later in 2018, they made a cover of Gina G’s
Eurovision hit “Ooh Aah... Just A Little Bit”, and followed that up
with an officially licensed Spanish-language parody of Caramelldansen by youtuber Mike
Crack. I don’t speak Spanish and there’s no official
transcription for this video for me to copy into google translate so I’ll assume it’s
good. great, so then in 2019 they put out a few
more songs to lead up to the release of the album Sweet Decade. yes, after nearly ten years of releasing singles,
the Caramella Girls would finally release their “debut album” in early 2020. but before that, they released three more
original singles. the first of these was How Can You Say Goodbye,
the very first non-dance song by the Caramella Girls. so that’s cool, they’re trying something
new with this one. good for them. then their next single for 2019 was Lollipop,
and this one is, okay I have a surprising number of thoughts about Lollipop. Lollipop is the first of these songs that
actually feels like it’s trying to say something. this thing has metaphors and imagery that
you can analyze. but the thing that I’ve gotten caught up
on is this part right towards the start. so, maybe it’s just because I heard this
song for the first time in the context of doing research about the history of this group,
but opening this song with an assertion that the Caramella Girls “always were three original
girls” is like. no? they weren’t? like, the whole brand of the Caramella Girls
is built around trying to confuse people into thinking that they’re the same group responsible
for Caramelldansen. but, they aren’t. this line almost reads
like historical revisionism. and, in the context of the whole song, the
central theme here is all about originality. you should be true to yourself instead of
trying to imitate someone else. or like, “hey, don’t copy our style, just
do your own thing!” which is weird coming from the Caramella Girls, isn’t it? like,
obviously this is just me reading too far into these things, but it still feels like
a strange message for them to focus on in this fun dance song. so, the final single released by the Caramella
Girls leading up to their debut album was Wish Upon a Star, which uh. is another Christmas
song! they say “Final Fantasy” at one point in this one, which is cool because of
gaming. at some point in 2019, while the Caramella
Girls were releasing all of these new songs, something happened. the previously released remixes of Caramelldansen
were all retroactively rebranded to credit the Caramella Girls instead of Caramell. not just in the titles of youtube videos,
everywhere. if you go to purchase Caramelldansen on whatever
music platform, you’ll find it as a Caramella Girls song. not just the new translations, not even just
Caramelldansen. everything that had been released by Remixed
Records as “Caramell” from 2008 to the formation of the Caramella Girls was relabeled,
rewriting history to make it look like the Caramella Girls really were always there. so uh, what? why? how? okay, one thing at a time. to really explain how exactly this happened,
I’m going to need to jump back. in December 1985, over twenty years before
Caramelldansen became a meme, a group of Swedish DJs in Stockholm, including Dr. Alban and
Denniz Pop (yes, that Denniz Pop), got together to form “Swemix”, a loose DJ collective
which would release music under the name “Remixed Records”. this is where the story of Caramelldansen
truly begins. a few years later, in 1991, Remixed Records,
the brand, was acquired by a guy named Giovanni Sconfienza, who remains the owner of the label
to this day. cool, fast-forward to 1998, and the band Caramell
was formed, consisting of the four members we’ve already talked about. Vasco and Millboy already had a lot of production
and songwriting experience. in 99, their debut album, “Gott och blandat”,
meaning “tasty and mixed”, was released, and a couple of songs from the album ended
up being minor hits in Sweden. this was followed up in 2001 by their second,
and final album, “Supergott” (“super tasty”). of course, this album featured Caramelldansen,
as the opening track in fact, though at the time the second track, “Vad heter du?” (“what’s your name?”) was the most popular
song on the album. in 2002, Caramell put out one more single,
“Allra bästa vänner” (“the best of friends”), and then they were done. in 2003, the members of Caramell went their
separate ways. Malin Sundström became a backup singer for
Dr. Alban and Haddaway, and later started her own solo career as “Dinah Nah”. after
2004, Remixed Records completely stopped releasing music. and so, Remixed Records likely would have
just quietly faded into history if it hadn’t been for the unexpected viral success of Caramelldansen
years later. and this leaves Giovanni in an interesting
position. see, I’ve been talking this whole video
about decisions “Remixed Records” made in response to the success of Caramelldansen. the thing is, Remixed Records, the brand,
is Giovanni. well, and one other guy. but everything that happened with Caramelldansen
and the Caramella Girls? all of those decisions were made by Giovanni Caramelldansen himself. okay, just to cover myself here, we don’t
actually know for sure whose idea it was to capitalize on the success of Caramelldansen
by making a new fictional band that pretends to have written Caramelldansen. but based on the fact that Giovanni is the
owner of Remixed Records and has been since 1991 and just how few other people it possibly
could have been, I’m comfortable with assuming that yeah, Giovanni Caramelldansen is the
reason the Caramella Girls exist. in fact, if you look at the writers for Boogie
Bam Dance, the first original song the Caramella Girls released, hey look! there he is, one
of the three people it took to write that song. and, coming back to 2019, while I can’t
prove anything, I’m pretty confident that it was Giovanni’s idea to decide to go back
and relabel the previous remixes of Caramelldansen as Caramella Girls songs. so, okay, follow-up question, what about Caramell? sure, the group had been broken up for years,
but are they okay with like, everything the Caramella Girls have been doing here? well, it definitely seems like they are. I mean, first of all, I might not know much
about how the music industry works, but I’m pretty sure rebranding the nightcore remix
of Caramelldansen as a Caramella Girls song doesn’t mean that the original members of
Caramell literally don’t own the song anymore. but also, judging from what they said about
the meme itself back in the day, it definitely seems like they’re fine with this. regardless, this decision is the sole reason
why “who wrote Caramelldansen?” is a relevant question in the first place. because, yes, it was created by Caramell,
but legally speaking, the version of the song that everyone’s heard, the meme version,
is a Caramella Girls song, even though the Caramella Girls had nothing at all to do with
Caramelldansen! but I mean like, is that fair? like, maybe in a sense, the Caramella Girls
are the modern incarnation of Caramell. they’ve just been Ship-of-Theseused into
a lineup that no longer has any of their original members. except it’s not really like the Ship of
Theseus. it’s more like if you were to disassemble
a ship one piece at a time, but instead of replacing those parts as you take them out,
the ship is just left without those parts, and eventually, the ship is completely gone. but then a few years later, a song created
by the Ship of Theseus becomes a big meme in Japan, and in response, the guy who owns
the rights to the Ship of Theseus, who is not Theseus, decides to make a new ship, the
Thesea Girls, in order to appeal to this demographic that enjoys works made by this old ship that
no longer exists. and what’s strange, I mean, on top everything
else that’s strange, is that I’m not sure that many people would have really noticed
or cared about this rebranding. Caramelldansen was a dead meme in 2019. was
anyone really going to be introduced to this song at that point? in March 2020, Caramelldansen came back. this is the most significant event that happened
in March 2020, I think. it wasn’t anywhere near its former glory,
naturally, but the Great Caramelldansen Resurgence of 2020 did bring the meme back into relevance. there were now a whole bunch of videos of
people playing Caramelldansen loudly from a distance, except none of them are real and
the audio is always added in post, because everyone on tiktok is too much of a coward
to actually listen to Caramelldansen at a volume loud enough to be audible from outside. by complete coincidence, this happened shortly
after the release of Sweet Decade, and now, everyone looking up Caramelldansen to use
it in their meme videos found it listed as a Caramella Girls song. judging by Google Trends, interest in Caramelldansen
peaked in 2008, but for the Caramella Girls? they reached their peak on Google Trends in
2020. do you know what this means? Giovanni’s trick worked! nearly ten years
after the Caramella Girls were formed, Caramelldansen finally became relevant again, and that attention
got redirected towards the Caramella Girls. that’s who tiktok says made the song, after
all, so it’s gotta be right. and that’s why the Caramella Girls cover
of “Back in My Life” was the first time I had ever heard of the Caramella Girls. this wasn’t their comeback after years of
silence, it’s just the first single they had released post-Caramelldansen Resurgence. it definitely helped that this music video
was released on November 6th, 2020, a day when tumblr was just kinda freaking out about
a lot of things in general. if you were there you definitely know what
I’m talking about. okay, then at the end of 2020, the Caramella
Girls released another new version of Caramelldansen. in a very interesting move, this one is a
slow sentimental piano rendition, something which had been done before in a couple different
cover songs, except this one’s official. okay one second, I just went to go get an
example of an older sad piano cover of Caramelldansen to include in this video, so I pulled up the
pretty popular video “Caramelldansen But It’s Sad”, and this is very clearly the
same arrangement? and clicking through the link in the description
of Caramelldansen But It’s Sad, it’s actually a much older arrangement, and listening to
the original version it’s, okay yeah, they seriously just took this cover
from 2008 and added some strings to it! wow. anyway, back to the video. it’s definitely something that I think can
resonate with people who have a sense of nostalgia for this old meme if done well, and wait hold
on why is there text. hey, Giovanni? Giovanni Caramelldansen? are you sure about
this one? I don’t know, it just feels a little bit
distasteful to me. then after that they rereleased the Christmas
version of Caramelldansen. cool! and that brings us to the current year. at the time of writing, the Caramella Girls
have released three singles in 2021. they’re showing no signs of slowing down. although I gotta say uh, the new designs that
are featured in these are like. uh. wh- why are they looking at me like that. stop it. uh, okay, right, they’ve made three songs
this year. Samurai is another song “about Japan”
like Tokyo was, Valentine is, a Valentine’s Day song, and their most recent single is
Venezia, which is a dance song about Venice. having now gone through their entire discography,
I gotta say, it’s definitely not as bad as it could have been. like, don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly
some stinkers in here, but I still had a fun time listening through all of this music. none of it was boring, I’ll give them that. one thing that I find bizarre is how not a
single one of these songs is written in Swedish. it’s pretty much all exclusively in English,
outside of the translations of Boogie Bam Dance. and if they’re trying to get lightning
to strike twice and recapture the success of Caramelldansen, wouldn’t you think that
the music being written in Swedish would be one of the main things they’d try? especially since I think the English lyrics
of these songs are easily their weakest aspect. I think part of the motivation for that might
be that even though the Swedish version of Caramelldansen is what started the meme back
in 2008, judging by view count on the Caramella Girls’ channel, the English version appears
to be the most popular one, pretty consistently. earlier this year, when they made the first
official music video for the Spanish translation, they went back and reuploaded the other versions
of Caramelldansen with the new 4K render of the music video. the new Spanish version got the most attention,
but out of the reposts, the English version is still what got the most views. the difference isn’t nearly as significant
as it is for the original uploads of these music videos, but still, this kinda suggests
that despite everything, even though Caramelldansen became an international phenomenon not just
in spite of people not understanding its Swedish lyrics, but because of people not understanding
its Swedish lyrics, the version of the song that the most people are able to understand
is the most popular version. so, if you’re Giovanni Caramelldansen looking
at these analytics figures on the youtube channel you manage by yourself, yeah, maybe
it does make sense to prioritize the English speaking audience. but I don’t know, maybe that was the wrong
move. but, okay, let’s get back on track. the question we started with still remains. with all of this context and history, who
wrote Caramelldansen? well, there is a correct answer here. Caramell wrote Caramelldansen. specifically, Vasco and Millboy. but that version of Caramelldansen isn’t
the most significant version of the song, not really. who wrote Caramelldansen? it’s whatever
name is listed alongside that version on music platforms. so, the Caramella Girls wrote Caramelldansen. but they didn’t make that version of the
song, as we all know by now. who wrote Caramelldansen? it’s the artist
who made the nightcore remix of the song. so, DJ Speedycake wrote Caramelldansen. but that’s not really right either. the English version seems to be just as popular
as the Swedish version, if not more popular, so maybe that’s the “real version” of
Caramelldansen. who wrote Caramelldansen? that would be the person who made those English
lyrics, so we just don’t know! and yet, in another sense, Caramelldansen
isn’t just the song, is it? it’s an international internet sensation. who wrote Caramelldansen? it’s whoever first
heard the lyrics and decided that the song is actually about balsamic vinegar. a user of Nico Nico Douga, made anonymous
by time, wrote Caramelldansen. and really, the meme itself was written by
thousands, no, millions of authors. everyone who shared Sven from Sweden’s flash
loop with their friends on now-defunct message boards wrote Caramelldansen. every middle schooler who traced over the
gif with their favorite anime characters wrote Caramelldansen. every kid who downloaded the song to their
iPod Shuffle and listened to it with their friends during recess wrote Caramelldansen.
who wrote Caramelldansen? the song was written by Vasco and Millboy, but we wrote the meme. but then, there is one more question left. why? why did a Swedish dance song become a global
phenomenon years after its initial release? well, we’ve already examined many factors. the internet culture at the time was just
more receptive to something like Caramelldansen than it is today. its early association with the still-growing
English-speaking anime subculture led the meme to Nico Nico Douga, a platform which
structurally encouraged Caramelldansen to reach its full potential. but really, there’s one factor that’s
the most important of all. those things might explain why Caramelldansen
was popular in 2008, but this is a meme that, unlike most of its contemporaries, is still
fondly remembered to this day. even at the time, people didn’t fully understand
why they were enjoying it. “what is this? why can’t I stop watching
it?” was a very common sentiment. and yet, there is a simple explanation. the song is good, and the dance is fun. and
really, that’s all there is to it.