Tunak Tunak Tun

By the late 1990s Daler Mehndi was the biggest pop star in India, and, by his own account, he was tired of hearing critics say his music only sold because of the beautiful dancing women in his videos. So for his 1998 single he made a video with nobody in it but himself. Four of himself, in fact: four Mehndis representing earth, fire, wind and water, each in lavish Indian clothing in a different colour, who arrive as comets, take turns singing, dancing and pointing at one another, and finally merge into one giant Mehndi dressed in gold and emerald. It was the first music video in India made with bluescreen technology, which let him place himself in front of computer-generated deserts, mountains and even St. Basil's Cathedral. The budget was 2.5 crore rupees. The title itself is not really a phrase but an imitation of the sound of the tumbi, the single-string instrument of Punjab. One magazine panned it, but it became the biggest Indi-pop hit of its time. Then it escaped India. By 1999 it had a cult following in the South Asian diaspora in Britain and the United States and in Japan, and in China listeners heard its Punjabi as a nonsense phrase about playing with mud. In the 2000s it became one of the internet's first great viral videos, and Blizzard gave its dance to a character in World of Warcraft. A defiant answer to critics turned into a global joke that everyone was in on.