#but in retrospect the way they embraced irony with such an... ironic... sincerity

[britneyshakespeare]

i don’t see what the point is in remaking the room

#like the thing that's so funny about it is the sincerity #the commitment and surreality of how bad the writing is #it's also just completely silly #you can't make something like the room on purpose #but props to tommy wiseau for managing to profit so hard off of irony cringe movie bros #i hope he's sittin cozy #text post #i like the room i think it's fun but i once knew some guys who were. just a little too into it. if you know what i mean #no you probably don't. they had worse personalities than just innocently enjoying a meme movie a lot #but in retrospect the way they embraced irony with such an... ironic... sincerity #it was reflected in other ways that they just could not be genuine in their interactions w people unless they thought they could play it off #as a joke. and i mean. in situations that were far far far worse than enjoying a movie. #okay yeah ive said enough #there's nothing toxic inherently about the room i like the room #i hate fateful findings though. neil breen isn't funny to me at all. #i have this whole thesis on how the room is a good bad movie and fateful findings is a bad bad movie #i'll save it for another day

[popscenery]

LMFAO, »Party Rock Anthem«

by Jake Cleland

‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t the best song of the decade, it is the song of this decade. The rotten nucleotides that comprise its DNA and its video’s captured everything that would define the 2010s even before the decade had properly started. JJ Abrams’ franchise dominance, cinema’s sequelitis, Malcolm Goodwin’s role in iZombie — seen in retrospect, ‘Party Rock Anthem’ makes LMFAO seem downright prescient. But as an early decade phenomenon, it’s also an epitaph to a brutally missed 2000s. The Cobrasnake-via-Dim Mak-via-Ed Banger-via-Mad Decent street party fashion makes the post-#mensfashionadvice 2010s look hopelessly conservative. 

So much of art and politics was deastheticised by the project of fundamentally reorganising how art and politics meet and whether that casualty was necessary has yet to be reckoned, although it was probably inevitable. But ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out when hipster irony (a phrase, kids, that folks used to use with a straight face) was only uncertainly dead, with poptimism still holding the gun cautiously to its chest. The ensuing cultural/political schism ultimately wasn’t drawn on the line between left and right, but overwrought exegeses on the meme of any given week (sup) vs. pleading to just like what you like (aka Like Everything). Two fronts battling basically for the same humiliated cause of pop supremacy made the previously delicious sport of music snobbery just not very fun. The only available rebellion was to [extremely Big Sean voice] go stupid.

(This also meant the only space left for sincere irony was, like, /mu/ and /r/indieheads and Fantano’s comments section. (Pass.))

If ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out a few years later, it might’ve been wilfully embraced, although its pariah status also left the life in it, so we take small blessings with gratitude. After all, it’s a safe song to like: it is exclusively about the unifying force of The Party. Lyrically it even reifies the previous paragraph: “Stop: hatin’ is bad.” Where it missed a trick was not predicting the trickle down stanonomics of K-Pop’s influence, but it was a utopian vision. Superficially, it’s apocalypse-pop but if so, it’s the only example that doesn’t sound hopeless or lifeless (James Murphy arrived five years late to this, but succinctly, at least, with LCD Soundsystem’s ‘tonite’.) You watch Redfoo - convincingly scared while two-stepping through a sea of Air Jordans and lame - finally succumb to The Party and tell me that the alleged zombies aren’t the good guys. NB: the only other guy afraid of them is wearing a shirt and tie. 

He’s also the only one pushing a product in the whole clip. For all the zombies-as-consumerism metaphors, who’s really a conformist consumer here? Let’s not stretch this too far, but hand-on-heart finger-tapping-forehead: makes you think.

A month before ‘Party Rock Anthem’, Tom Ewing wrote a piece for The Guardian I still think about a lot. Riffing on Girl Talk’s pointillistic reference dropping, Ewing laments the deficiency of celebrating Moments in songs/albums/patchwork sample monster mixtapes which get lost in the holistic approach. In that spirit, the Beats product placement in the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ clip created a Moment which gummed up my brain creases all through this decade almost more than the song itself. The lone survivor tells LMFAO to use their earbuds. “You got ‘em in?” he says. And Skyblu says:

“What? Vitamins?” 

No matter which way you interrogate this moment, it is downright hilarious. To research for this piece, I watched over 100 music videos. I watch a lot of music videos, so the research for this piece consisted of a lot + 100 music videos. That’s more than a lot of music videos. I also watched the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ video more than 100 times, just to make sure I was awarding this Moment the appropriate gravity. So I can say with scientific credibility that not only is ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of this decade, but that this moment is the Moment of every decade. It is a non-sequitur nonpareil. Was this scripted or improvised? And either way, in that moment, why would someone say to them, “Vitamins”?

The story of LMFAO concluded in another particularly 2010s way. Another victim of the neverending Scam Season, Redfoo allegedly ripped Skyblu off of all LMFAO royalties. Karma rewarded Redfoo a couple years later when he was hit with a glass in Sydney. In this, we may see ourselves, inevitably disgraced by time.

There are ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ predicted the zeitgeist and ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ created the zeitgeist and I was present for plenty of the latter. At least in Melbourne, LMFAO’s recycling of the Melbourne Shuffle filtered back to nightclubs in a way Klein et al. warned was already happening generally. Happy to have our culture regifted if it was also represented, it was less impossible than you might imagine to find yourself inside your own LMFAO music video. But it’s what I came home to after those nights that makes ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of the decade, which was: inbox notifications, gchat alerts, dashboards full of posts and replies wringing meaning from meaninglessness in the most seriously unserious way. Epitaphed plenty elsewhere, Music Tumblr doesn’t need another bouquet laid here, but ‘Party Rock Anthem’ is prominent on the playlist of associations I have with the first definitive part of the decade (other triggers: ‘Video Games’, ‘Gucci Gucci’, ‘Bangarang’, ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, ‘Furisodeshon’, ‘Hey QT’, SSSSSSSSOME NIGHTS I STAYYYYYYYY UP...)  

Coming from the Gawker/Defamer/Idolator readership to find a group of mostly-communal-but-sometimes-adversarial-but-for-the-better (via “Iron sharpens iron” - Coach Wade) weirdoes eager to unwrap celebrity looms large, I have no doubt, in the definitions of this decade for the people involved. Most have since left music writing or been pushed out and found fulfilling lives elsewhere, but although the pop of the era trended towards the annhilistic, let’s not cave. When I first started writing about music on Tumblr, old heads were quick to say the jobs were gone. Defiant and determined to prove them wrong, I made a pretty good go of it, and others are still doing as much. All the pieces are there for anyone with a willingness to be wrong to pick up. 

That’s enough navel gazing for a time long ago. Put it to bed. The revelation of ‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t that you should never leave The Party, it’s that the whole world is The Party. “Dancing all night isn’t legendary, only dancing all night is.” The only thing to do in the decade ahead is to keep listening attentively. Let music fill you up. It’ll get in your bones.

#lmfao #party rock anthem #vitamins