First Hit #1: July 16, 2011
If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the 60 years of pop music, it’s that every decade needs a novelty dance. Some are good, some are bad, but every decade gets one, along with a song that goes along with the dance in question. This decade began with the “shuffle”, which was defined by a tiny part of this song. It’s barely a dance craze, though I’ll take it over the dance from Crank That, and as a result it was a strictly 2011 phenomenon, but it did explain the brief explosion of popularity that defined Party Rock Anthem. It’s also another song that is defined just as much by its ability to be broken apart into its base components, as much as it seems cobbled together from different disparate elements it also seems as though that’s deliberate, it exists for DJ sets rather than regular consumption, with the bit about shuffling being the one that I actually heard used more than anything. LMFAO is aware of how stupid their song is, they frame the whole thing as a joke for the most part, but it’s at least fun in small doses and expressly designed to be consumed in small doses. It’s also less repetitive than some of the other dance crazes, but considering the low bar that had to be cleared to make that statement – the number of things less repetitive than Crank That and the Macarena counts as a list of almost everything else in the world – I’m not sure that really means anything.
As an individual song, it’s fine, a silly dance hit, as fun and frothy as many before it on this list. But considering the ten songs that came before it here, a collection of such disco hits becomes no less tedious in 2011 than it was in 1978, and one longs for a Paul Simon or a U2 to say something that means something besides, “I am lonely” or, “Woooooooo!”