MUSIC / The Persistent Spirit of LMFAO / Kaylie Saidin
Ten years ago, we were naïve. We wore neon animal print clothing and said “swag” with veracity as we rebounded with optimism from a global financial crisis. In our current circumstances, it’s easy to feel a certain nostalgia for this era. We entered the 2020s near instantly stuck in our houses, a global pandemic becoming a national unwanted party guest. But we entered the 2010s partying: digital music was the new frontier, social media was blossoming, and a certain musical duo was about to release some of the most legendary party music of all time.
Before I get into this, you should know something about me––my pop culture interests often venture into the territory of camp. Campiness is something being appealing because of ironic value or bad taste. In a nutshell, I like the ostentatious and theatrical, things that are so bad they’re good. Camp often represents a smorgasbord of the present culture. The 1970s had their summer-camp-feathered-hair slasher films. The early 2010s had the electronic pop duo LMFAO.
Red Foo and Sky Blu, the nephew-uncle team that make up LMFAO, began the project in the mid 2000s. They are family to the founder of Motown Record Corporation, personal friends of will.i.am, and lifetime residents of Los Angeles. It’s safe to say they know what sells. LMFAO’s smash hit breakout single, Party Rock Anthem (currently ranked Billboard’s sixth most successful song of all time) was followed by their album Sorry for Party Rocking. After enjoying a lucrative world tour with Ke$ha and Far East Movement complete with rave lights and a shuffling giraffe, after releasing lauded music videos that celebrated debauchery in speedos, after performing with Madonna at the fucking Super Bowl––the duo announced an indefinite hiatus and dropped off the face of the earth. Sorry indeed.
We put our snapbacks on our shelves, forgot how to shuffle, and wrote off LMFAO as a passing musical fad. But all these years later, I’ve come to believe LMFAO embodies the cultural spirit of a recent zeitgeist we’ve abandoned––a spirit we’d be well-served to reignite.
Take this as proof that LMFAO were ahead of their time: curiously, the music video for Party Rock Anthem has a plot centering around a worldwide epidemic that causes everyone to shuffle uncontrollably. The video opens with a slide, informing us that Redfoo and Sky Blu fell into a coma due to excessive party rocking just one day before their single was released. In the next shot, the duo awaken in a deserted hospital with the caption 28 DAYS LATER. They run outside to find a desolate street and realize that since Party Rock Anthem has come out, everyone in the world shuffles all day long, effectively dooming society. The video pays homage to campy horror classics like Shaun of the Dead and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. In 2020, this video is an eerie example of the way a virus spreads quickly through partygoers. Did Redfoo and Sky Blu know something about virology the rest of us didn’t, all those years ago? Were they trying to warn us? And why would they, at the height of their power, holding this pertinent knowledge, retreat into the blanket of relative obscurity?
Perhaps a more answerable question is, what is it about LMFAO that prevails? Why am I awake at two a.m. thinking about their artistry? In the pre-COVID era of partying, any time a DJ decided to spin LMFAO for a throwback, I noticed the pulse of the bar changed. Moments before, the dance floor was scant, filled with only the drunkest of patrons. But suddenly, a force––the electronic shuffle intro to Party Rock Anthem filled the room, and our ears perked up like those dogs in viral videos that hear their owners returning from war. We pounded our drinks and hit the dance floor with an irony that morphed into sincere fun. We were awash in a sea of campy nostalgia.
LMFAO prevails because they were campy, unapologetically extravagant, and deeply ironic. Their namesake itself is a meme, an acronym we all use over text that almost never means what it literally does. Their music was featured in the trashiest and campiest reality shows of the era (Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, The Real World, Jersey Shore). They rocked natural hair and outrageous outfits of animal print coats, metallic pants, neon muscle tees, shutter shades. Their lyrics, which sung of nonstop partying, a pool with an underground jacuzzi, and every label of alcohol known to mankind were so absurdly lavish they bordered on satire. They were what all of us average partiers wanted to be: comfortable and confident. Deliberately ironic and critical of American party culture, yet enthralled by it just the same.
Given the butterfly effect of time and history, it is not a stretch to say that if LMFAO had not announced their indefinite hiatus, Donald Trump may never have been elected president. The COVID-19 pandemic may never have settled its jaws over our great nation. We could honestly be, rather than working from home in our sweatpants, out on the dance floor, shuffling to whatever genius music LMFAO released in this alternate timeline. But alas: the sweat of nonstop shuffling had barely dried from our brows when the news of LMFAO’s breakup spread over the airwaves. When the world needed them most, they vanished.
But is it longevity that makes something great, or is it briefness? Is the residual, persistent spirit of LMFAO still lingering in our collective consciousness precisely because they were so short-lived? The other side of the butterfly effect argument (one I don’t choose to accept, but I must concede is possible) is that had LMFAO continued to put out music, like so many of their contemporaries, their future albums would have lost their magic. But because they only put out one album, we have no way of knowing the musical path LMFAO could have taken. They put themselves in a time capsule of their own making: they came, they saw, they Party Rocked, and then they were gone. At the time, we had no way of knowing that, as we shuffled, the very music we listened to was but a fleeting shadow, a glimpse of eternal partydom that would leave us as quickly as it came.
And just one year ago, we had no way of knowing that our lives were soon to be disrupted by an unprecedented global pandemic. We had no way of knowing that, in a matter of months, we would no longer be able to party on the weekends with all our friends. Perhaps this is the message that Red Foo and Sky Blu meant to send us. That at any moment, these camaraderie- filled experiences we take for granted could go away. That the wheel of time will churn on, and it will leave our lifestyles decrepit, our impeccable shuffle technique frozen in the amber of history.
Life is impermanent as a hit pop song, and like that hit pop song, it is only as good as the memories we create. If LMFAO taught us one thing (other than how to shuffle), it’s that we must take every opportunity we can to be Party Rock in all its meanings. We must be excellent to one another, appreciate every moment that we have to dance with our loved ones, and be undauntingly extravagant and unapologetically ourselves. Above all else, we must live in the present, cast ourselves willingly into the winds of change and time, and all the while, we must party on.
Kaylie Saidin grew up in California and now lives in North Carolina, where she is an MFA candidate at UNC Wilmington. She serves as a Fiction Editor at Ecotone. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Fourteen Hills, upstreet #15, Columbia Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere.