Posted in: Pop Culture | Tagged: get him to the greek, hip, jackie q, mamamoo, ring around my rosie, rosie byrne, separated at birth

Separated At Birth: Mamamoo's Hip vs Jackie Q's Ring Around My Rosie

As part of my general daily life as a father of two daughters, I hear a lot of K-Pop. Obviously too much for anyone to bear. But then you also hear what you don't expect. Such as last year's release by K-Pop band Mamamoo, Hip, which sounded very familiar – but no one seems to have made the connection to the fake-song 'Ring Around My Rosie' by fake pop star Jackie Q as briefly glimpsed in the movie Get Him To Greek, a sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall?

I mean who but me would make the connection between a K-Pop song about a band's haters, with a fake film single something that's meant to be halfway between Katy Perry and Lily Allen? Hip is the lead single on Mamamoo's second full album, Reality in Black, released on November 14th, 2019, and seems to be quite popular.

While 'Ring Around My Rosie" is meant to be performed by Jackie Q, a comic creation played by Rose Byrne as the on-off girlfriend to Russell Brand's Aldous Snow. She has a number of outrageous songs, including "Ring Around My Rosie" extolling the delights of anal sex, using the children's playground rhyme. It is as disturbing as it sounds. It was released on the movie soundtrack and a full video posted on YouTube with the release of the movie, in 2010.

After the kids rhyme, the melody, beat and stuttering line seem very very familiar. Could they really have been created independently?

There is a Father Ted story about the Eurovision Song contest – itself just ripped off for Netflix's Will Farrell comedy – in which the characters discover an old pop song that everyone involved with the creation of had died, no one had heard and, oh it was the B-side – which they could steal. I wonder if the Mamamoo producers believed that no one listening to their songs would ever listen to the full version of a disturbing parody of a pop song briefly glimpsed in a movie several years previously?

Maybe not, but they were clearly forgetting about their target audience's parents who work for popular entertainment websites.

Separated At Birth used to be called Swipe File, in which we presented two or more images that resemble each other to some degree. They may be homages, parodies, ironic appropriations, coincidences, or works of the lightbox. We trusted you, the reader, to make that judgment yourself. If you were are unable to do so, we asked that you please return your eyes to their maker before any further damage is done.

The Swipe File didn't judge; it was interested more in the process of creation, how work influences other work, how new work comes from old, and sometimes how the same ideas emerge simultaneously as if their time has just come. The Swipe File was named after the advertising industry habit where writers and artist collect images and lines they admire to inspire them in their work. It was swiped from the Comic Journal, who originally ran this column, as well as the now-defunct Swipe Of The Week website.

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