Yatta

The cover of the Yatta! CD single.

Yatta is a song by a Japanese group called Happa-tai (literally "Leaf Squad" in Japanese, but they called themselves "Green Leaves" in English). The song was first performed as a sketch on the Japanese sketch comedy show Warau Inu No Boken (Adventures of a Laughing Dog) by some of Japan's most well known comedians. It became extremely popular on the Internet through the distribution of its music video and also a Flash animation called Irrational Exuberance which used the song (this was a so-called Animutation).

The video features its members singing in a mixture of Japanese and English, and dancing exuberantly while wearing only underwear with a large green leaf on the front. Yatta literally means "We did it," but an equivalent exclamation in English might be "All right!" The song is in the style of an upbeat, motivational pop song, mimicking the style of Japanese corporate anthems, and the five band members' synchronized dancing and personalized poses for the camera skewer the boy band craze.

The sketch appears to at least partly be ironic commentary on attempts by the Japanese government and others to maintain optimism in the face of Japan's severe economic troubles, depicting men impoverished to the degree of having no clothing but the figurative fig leaf (though in this case the leaves are attached to white briefs) yet maintaining an irrational, irrepressible belief in their own potential for success. The sketch skewers many of the stereotypes of Japanese pop culture, including such tropes as a romantic interlude during the song's bridge that takes place on a city street filled with floating sakura blossoms.

The song went triple-platinum in Japan within a number of weeks. While the song was intended to be humorous, the Internet audience in the United States generally assumed it to be earnest, probably due to the obvious work that went into the special effects in the video. The incomprehensibility of such an elaborate video enhanced its popularity among Western audiences who could not understand the words.

The song and video have since been used as a web culture in-joke on many different websites, akin to All Your Base, and the amount of independent video of various kinds that has referenced or used it is quite prolific. The actors who performed as Happa-tai were even brought to perform "Yatta" in the United States on Jimmy Kimmel Live; host Jimmy Kimmel compared himself to Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles' first American appearance.

Irrational Exuberance

Irrational Exuberance is a Flash Cartoon by the Internet artist Veloso in which many pop culture images are subverted to a sound track provided by the Japanese song Yatta by Green Leaves (Happa-Tai in Japanese). The cartoon is possibly one of the most famous and popular examples of animutation, an intentionally primitive but frequently humorous style of flash animation. The title comes from a phrase used by Alan Greenspan to describe the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s; Greenspan himself features prominently in the images used, and the theme of the piece is consumerism: it begins by flashing a series of words like "buy", "spend", "shop", "consume", "collect" and "acquire", which recur throughout the animation. The piece contains many well-known American consumer goods and advertising logos and repeatedly exhorts the viewer with ironic exhortations to spend money (such as having Dr. Ruth tell him that buying an SUV will help him compensate for his small penis). The piece implies that it is some kind of bizarre commercial intended to restore consumer confidence after Greenspan's comments caused the post-dotcom recession, and ends with a plea to "support AOL-Time Warner, Sony, Disney, Johnson & Johnson and Philip Morris". (This may possibly be inspired by the original "Yatta" lyrics, which feature upbeat optimism in the face of economic collapse.)

As with most animutations several products are Photoshopped so that their names are replaced with the word "Yatta". This is done so that the brand styling of the product is maintained throughout, creating an odd effect. This was first done for the All Your Base phenomenon to create the illusion of a sinister, surreal worldwide conspiracy; here "Yatta!" appears to be some sort of universal corporation or brand name, parodying the widespread propagation of branding in modern culture. Also, as in many animutations, Irrational Exuberance attempts to force the viewer to hear lyrics in a foreign language (in this case Japanese) in English by juxtaposing them with similar-sounding nonsense English phrases. Irrational Exuberance extends this technique much further than other animutations, consciously "mishearing" the lyrics to the point of absurdity (poking fun at the original singers' accents by rendering Green Leaves' spelling of their own name as "G-I-E-E-F Lives", for example). The fake lyrics sections are very prolonged, and often mix images with words or replace words with rebus images in order to create multilayered visual puns.

Irrational Exuberance is an example of a short-lived Internet fad (colloquially referred to as a meme). Like similar such fads, it primarily gained popularity via a link posted on various blogs and shared among friends by e-mail.

External links

• yatta! (http://www.mit.edu/people/patil/yatta.html): Information and variants based on the Yatta videos, including the original video.
• A short history of Yatta (http://www.syberpunk.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?page=yatta)
• Irrational Exuberance (http://www.verylowsodium.com/fanimutation/exuberance.php), an animutation by Veloso using Yatta as the music.