Global craze for Tamil "nonsense" song

GlobalPost
The World

Those of you poor souls without a Hot Tamil Wife (HTW) may not have heard of this one, so here's a heads up:

A Tamil "nonsense" song by a debut artist has become a global sensation on Youtube. 

 Be forewarned, though.  It's catchy, writes the Indian Express.

If you don’t know the song in question, you’ve missed possibly the most tweeted, most “liked”, most viewed song in the recent past. “Kolaveri di” flashed on YouTube in the second week of November, less than 10 days later it was watched 7,119,008 times. More than seven lakh people have shared it on Facebook. The YouTube map reveals the song’s international fan base. India, the Gulf countries, the US and Australia blaze in bright green. South America and China stay pale in comparison. Gujarati DJs have spun a popular version of it. You can even watch women in Japan dancing to the song, complete with rhythmic hip shake and head nods.

I got my first taste of it late in the game, after HTW broke it out on the iPad.  According to the official HTW translation, the key word in the song, "kolaveri," means "killer rage."  So the idea is the song is the dude has just gotten dumped by his girl and he's wondering, "Why this killer rage?"

Tamil actor Dhanush, who wrote the lyrics, calls it "absolute nonsense."  But there's a clever acknowledgement of the new mingling of languages in hip India in there somewhere, as well as a little social commentary.

Dhanush, big of smile and scruffy of beard, mocks the “Only English” world of the “white-skinned” and the “black-hearted”. Instead, he sings his own English song where the moon is a rounder “moon-u” and the night a blacker “night-u”. It shows that language need not be “pure”, and how words arrive at meanings through contexts.

Sign up for our daily newsletter

Sign up for The Top of the World, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.