Week #2 of Dance Central’s Fitness Challenge is an interesting one. I guess in honor of it being 2013, they’ve named it “The Unlucky 13 Challenge”. Their instructions are to pick a song from the entire Dance Central library, including DC, DC2, DC3, and all downloadable content), and create a playlist that features the same song 13 times! This actually works great for fitness, as a song that’s about 3 minutes long will give you about 39 of playing time. Even better, by playing it over and over so many times you eventually become pretty good at it. Well, I know what song I wanted to do for the Unlucky 13 Challenge right away: PSY’s “Gangnam Style”.
It’s funny, but in the last three months, “Gangnam Style” seems to have found its way into every part of my life. We played it as a gag at my wedding reception. When I visited my wife’s extended family in Taiwan, I didn’t speak much Chinese but I bonded with her 8-year old cousin who knew the steps down pat. At a friend’s wedding in Indonesia, some wedding guests were impressing everyone by doing all the steps perfectly. Of course, everyone saw PSY’s performance on Times Square. And just a few days ago at a friend’s house in New York, their 2-year old daughter was jumping up and down to it. The secretary general of the UN even called it a “force for world peace”. On YouTube, as of this writing it has 1.1 billion views. That’s billion with a B.
Like the rest of the world, I’m not sure why it’s so darned popular, but I also can’t seem to take my eyes off of it. It just seems to have that combination of being ridiculously catchy, ridiculously silly, and ridiculous, and from a dance point of view it’s easy to learn but looks impressive when mastered. Who knows how these crazes start, and who knows how long it’ll last, but we might as well enjoy it while we can.
So, I downloaded Gangnam Style for 240 Xbox Live Points (if you’re low on Xbox Live Points, you can get more from Amazon), and the video above is that of my wife and me dancing to it the first time. I was literally panting by the end of one dance…I can’t imagine myself going through 12 more, but I’ll give it my best shot! 🙂