On not seeing the forest for the fox suits

by Olivia Lucas

Ylvis’ viral music video asks, “What does the Fox say?” Commentary on the video concentrates on the way the song riffs on popular culture and music in the style of Psy and The Lonely Island.[1] Indeed, the video makes liberal use of outlandish animal costumes, imaginative vocalizations (stunningly subtitled) and sarcastically exaggerated group dance moves. The first two choruses propose a series of ridiculous noises as an answer to the song’s question, voiced either by the fox-suited lead singer or an old man who seems to be reading a fox-related picture book to his grandson. Excepting the setting of the darkened and misty Norwegian pine and birch forest, the mocking attitude of “The Fox” is strongly reminiscent of “Gangam Style” and “YOLO,” with the disjointed Os of mo-o-o-orse and ho-o-o-orse particularly wagging a mocking tongue at the vocal styles of artists like Ke$ha.

“What does the Fox say?” is effective pop-parody because its subject matter is “so random,” an American colloquialism that means, “I would probably not have thought of that,” or, “I lack the imagination needed to connect this artifact to reality.” The song then inserts this “random” subject matter into a pop song that would otherwise have been about going out on Friday night and ogling a woman who is “So beautiful/Like an angel in disguise.”

I would argue, however, that the song is perhaps not entirely parodic, or at least that it’s not parodying what most commentary says it is. In the last third of the song, a strange sincerity slinks in, an earnestness that speaks to a desire to better understand nature (with the fox as a specific instantiation) and humankind’s continual failure and (often self-inflicted) frustration in this endeavor. At around 2:30, the music turns toward that melancholic, yearning sound that typifies Nordic electro-pop. The singers are now ostensibly searching for the fox with flashlights in the depths of the forest, seeking the answer to an “ancient mystery, somewhere deep in the woods.” As the singer becomes so ecstatic in his desire for knowledge that he addresses the fox directly (“What do you say?…What is your sound?”), an obviously animated fox appears just out of the humans’ view, stands up on its hind legs, and offers up a sound – some chilled out scatting – that helps to break up the tension of these earnest questions. The fox returns to all fours, secret intact, and runs off into the forest. The men remove their fox masks and exit toward the sunlight, frustrated in their longing.

American top 40 music videos don’t feature a lot of foxes, or dark forests. Norway, however, is largely covered in the same misty birch/pine forests that appear in the Ylvis video, and Foxes, both arctic and red, are abundant. Furthermore, foxes have made a recent appearance in Norwegian popular music; Susanne Sundfør’s “White Foxes” rose to number 19 in the Norwegian charts in 2012, and the official video has garnered more than 850,000 views. The video for this melancholy anthem features, among other things, a young boy tenderly carrying a deceased fox through a snowy birch and pine forest, and the surgical removal of a fox-shaped tumor from an older man’s skull. Foxes are clearly central to the song, but are never explained or given any specific meaning, just used to evoke the idea of painful memories that silently cling on. What does the fox say, indeed.

Perhaps the question of the Fox is not “so random” after all, it just seems unlikely to listeners not familiar with Norwegian landscape, culture and music. Ylvis is most assuredly mocking today’s music video tropes, but I believe their vehicle for this mockery, the red fox, is both more pointed and more broad than perhaps even they realize. There are many secrets in a deep dark forest, some more serious than others, and Ylvis invites us to examine all of them.