Celebrate 25 years of the "Macarena" with this vintage clip of the DNC dancing to it en masse

Gaze into the abyss of gyrating seniors and Hillary Clinton's arrhythmic clapping

By Reid McCarter | August 4, 2021 | 5:00pm

Music Features Macarena

Studies show that two of out of every three adults have danced the “Macarena.” Screenshot: Kansaspolitics

The Bayside Boys’ remix of Los del Río’s “Macarena” was impossible to avoid in the back half of the ‘90s. It entranced the world, drawing our ears toward the irresistible sound of two middle-aged men singing about adulterous threesomes and our limbs into a series of movements burned eternally into our muscle memory.

On August 3, 1996, 25 years ago, the “Macarena” was at the height of its popularity. As noted in an article from Spin, this was the fateful day that the song reached #1 on Billboard and, circling its hips in triumph, held that spot “for three-and-a-half-months straight.” That same article also tells us that 1996 was a year that saw the entire Yankee Stadium dancing along to the track and, in an even more compelling display of “Macarena” fever, the Democratic National Convention losing their collective minds at an opportunity to bust a move.

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Here is 49 seconds of it.

And here, for those who wish to look longer into the wriggling hellmouth, is the full length version.

As soon as the song begins, something comes over the room. Two women laugh self-consciously as they start to dance, then the camera switches to a man in a suit who has no inhibitions about his love of the music. It continues this way, person after person carried away by the need to flip their palms and touch their shoulders. A man tries to do the moves while holding a Clinton sign aloft. Another, who clearly has only the faintest idea of how the dance goes, swings himself in an approximation of the choreography. Above the swaying crowd, Hillary claps along slightly out of time like an excited toddler.

This is the true spirit of the “Macarena.” It was—no, is—a song and a dance for everyone, and that everyone includes the cold dead souls atrophying inside the bodies of politicians whose stiff limbs jolt alive like Frankenstein’s monster at the sound of Spanish dance hits. 25 years later, the DNC dance-along stands as a proper tribute to the influence of the “Macarena.”

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