Thanks to posts like this and this, Wang “Rollin” Wong’s “Chick Chick” has been viewed over 11 million times in the 7 weeks since it was first posted to YouTube on October 22, 2014. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to contemplate in all of it’s bat-shit crazy glory:
Victor Mair has written about the use of animal sound in the song on Language Log and Boing Boing and others have suggested that it could become the “song of the year,” or “the next Gangnam Style.” While Wang’s success is nothing to scoff at, as a point of comparison, Psy’s hypnotic ballad clocked over 10 times as many hits in the first two months after being posted on YouTube, meaning that “Cluck Cluck” is literally an order of magnitude less viral than the Korean megahit.
Still, for China nerds, anything that gets China in the news for wackiness is a cause for celebration:
In China, however, the fact Wang Rong is appearing on the websites of Time magazine and major other American media outlets seems to be causing a certain amount of hand-wringing on the part Chinese netizens and journalists, who are seem embarrassed that a cheesy song like this is attracting so much attention. One newspaper, The Mirror, managed to track her down for an interview, which I’ve translated below:
The Mirror 11/17 The singer Wang Rong, who first rose to fame with her 2007 song “I’m not Huang Rong” but has since fallen off the radar, is attracting attention again with her latest ‘viral tune’ “Chick Chick.” The song, which is entirely made up of lines like “chicken cluck cluck day,” “little chick cluck cluck day,” “rooster whoa whoa whoa” has attracted both both attention and scorn. Yesterday, Wang Rong agreed to an interview with The Mirror in Beijing.
法制晚报11月17日讯 因《我不是黄蓉》走红的歌手王蓉，沉寂多时，最近“神曲”《小鸡小鸡》再度备受关注。全篇都是“母鸡咕咕day”、“小鸡咕咕day”、“公鸡喔喔喔”的这首歌，引来关注的同时也招来了骂声。昨日王蓉在北京接受了《法制晚报》记者的专访。
I don’t care about the critics, my ‘viral tune’ came from a dream
The Mirror: How did you come up with this song?
Wang Rong: This song originally came from a dream I had. It was a really happy dream, where kittens, chicks, and ducklings looked like they were having a meeting, talking about really trivial stuff, like oh, today I laid an egg, and then I lost something, clucking and quacking away in disagreement. It was really cute. I could understand what they were saying though, just like in fairy tales. So when I woke up I decided I wanted to turn my dream into a song.