Hatten är din

"Hatten är din" (Swedish for "The hat is yours"), was a popular internet meme from 2000. It is a flash animation featuring the music of Lebanese musician Azar Habib, the name of the song playing is "Habbeetik". The animation prominently features a hat, Swedish text, and an assortment of bizarre imagery.

Origin

In 1984, Habib recorded "Meen ma Kenty/Habbaytek" (I Loved You, or I Fell In Love With You) (in Arabic) for his "Ajbeen el Layl" album; the tape eventually made its way to Sweden. Sixteen years later, Swedes Patrik Nyberg, Johan Gröndahl and Pet Bagge noticed that the lyrics sounded like Swedish. With this in mind, they published an mp3 file and a text file with the lyrics on their website. Shortly after this, another Swede, Martin Holmström, decided to make a flash video of the song, which he published on his site http://come.to/hatten (which came back online 2008). It has since then been seen by millions of people around the world.

The meme in detail

The Swedish "subtitles" are not a translation of the Arabic, but rather an approximated phonetic transcription of the lyrics into Swedish, resulting in outlandish non sequiturs such as "Limma skinkbit, cooligt" (glue a piece of ham, cool-ish) and "Man kan knarka och hamna i TV" (You can do drugs and end up on TV). From the contents of these lyrics the deadpan site presented an allegedly popular Swedish drinking game involving the passing around of hats, which was sometimes taken at face value by viewers.

The accompanying images of the animation are, by turns, ostensibly Middle Eastern men in hats; one of those hats floating between a party of people (who appear to be dressed in traditional Turkish or Middle Eastern clothing); and visualizations of the Swedish lyrics such as "cool guy holding a soda" and "borrow the 'Hatten är din' LP".

Popularity

The song became famous all over Scandinavia and commercial copies had been made without the creators' permission. It is often played in, of course, drinking parties. The "Metro" newspaper of Stockholm even sent a journalist to get an interview with Azar Habib. Habib was apparently very surprised by this mutilation of his song and the craze that followed, but he liked the idea. [cite web | title = Featured Site Week of March 18, 2001 | publisher = ESC!Webs | url = http://www.escwebs.com/siteofweek/pastsites/sow-3-18-01.asp | accessdate = 2007-11-11 ]

While the meme was well-known in Sweden, it was also extremely popular elsewhere, particularly in the English-speaking world, where the animation was also known as Hatt-baby. To those who did not understand Swedish, the page was completely incomprehensible, and the confluence of Middle Eastern music, Swedish subtitles, and inscrutable imagery entailed a bizarre (and, by most accounts, hilarious) experience.

The propagation of the meme inspired the similar "Han teleporterar Taliban" ("He teleports the Taliban"), another Swedish-phonetic lyricization of a foreign song, in this case by Daler Mehndi.

ee also

*Animutation

References

External links

* [http://come.to/hatten/ Original site]
* [http://www.mlcsmith.com/strange/hatten/ Further background]
* [http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=948175 Everything2 Hatten är din page, includes English translation of Swedish "subtitles"]
* [http://www.escwebs.com/siteofweek/pastsites/sow-3-18-01.asp Even further background from ESC!Webs]
* [http://jeffcovey.net/tmp/hatt-baby/ Another link]