Spex weighed in on “Hey Ya!” a while ago, having seen the making of the video on the television. Sam, I’m here to tell you that I’ve since seen the video multiple times and have already listened to the song ten times in a row this evening. This has been a pretty damn good summer in the world of popular hip-hop. We had the Neptunes drop the Clones record, which provided us with the filthy Busta Rhymes vehicle “Light Your Ass on Fire” as well as the nearly sublime Jay-Z/Pharell work “Frontin’,” which on top of a startling bridge provides the great line “I call you Phareal ’cause you’re the truth.” In fact, “Frontin’” almost ended up as being a ringtone on my phone today. Though I don’t want to sit here and talk about all the songs I’ve downloaded, I like “Frontin’” a lot since it reminds me of (for obvious reasons) Snoop’s “Beautiful” and, well, Justin Timberlake’s “Senorita,” another great little tune from the summer (though not as great as “Rock Your Body” or “Crazy in Love”).
Now, ok. Blah blah, some good songs I see on MTV Hits all the time. Great. “Hey Ya!,” however, is better. First, as my friends on #lietuva would say, “nu veža bliat.” The beat isn’t quite deadly, and trying to imagine playing it at a dance without having everyone drift into the swim-move like the women in the video is a little tricky. But it still moves rather aggressively (unlike most of the songs mentioned above, especially both Pharell songs, which almost seem passively inviting the listener to make the effort to engage), and what it lacks in bass bombs it makes up in over-the-top catchiness. This is, of course, nothing new in the OutKast genre, but I’m not certain if I’ve heard it work as well before.
Also nothing new is the wild quotability of the song. Sarah’s already changed her “Who I Want to Meet”[sic] in Friendster to “Anyone who can shake it like a Polaroid picture,” and that’s just the beginning. In fact, this specific expression seems to be conquering America. Some lazy googling shows four blogs’ already referring to it as a title, and Stasys told me that he heard a perp on the radio in Florida call in and express to the DJ that he doesn’t fully understand what it’s all about (Chris asked me the same thing when he first saw the video, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to the music to answer coherently). Kids, just watch the video! So I see big things coming for “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.” And big things for “What’s cooler than bein’ cool?”
Then there’s “We get together / Oh we get together / But separate’s always better / When there’s feelings involved…” And that, I think, is what I like most about the song. The narrator’s clearly having some issues trying to figure out what’s going on between him and his baby. This is familiar territory–the interstitial space where there’s still strong feelings but something stepping in and demanding a change in policy. It’s devilishly difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on here, since there’s so much doubletalk going on, both in the song and in the usual version of this event. There’s people convincing themselves of things they don’t believe, on both sides, and neither narrator nor baby is able to break through. Is breaking up the best thing to do?
Like I said, pretty familiar territory. But what breaks this song into the realm of the cripplingly sad is the narrator’s response. “Ya’ll dont wanna hear me you just wanna dance,” he announces, and the song explodes into the groovefest that we all love. The narrator decides to follow his own advice. He drops the emotional anguish of breaking up and turns it around–the clown crying on the inside, if you will. He even veers into an attempt to purge. The specific loved individual is dropped, and he addresses women as a group–”Now all Beyoncés and Lucy Lius / And baby dolls get on the floor / You know what to do.” From what seemed to be an intimate and touching space of hurt and pain comes first the desire to just stuff the emotions deep into some place where they can’t be reached. Then, on top of that, within the emotional void that remains, the narrator pursues a resolution veering on misogyny, which makes the whole enterprise even sadder. Crushing, I tell you.
The video carries this through, too. The polo gear bedecked backing vocals are introduced as “The Love Haters” just as they sing, “nothing lasts forever.” Furthermore, it’s just as the twist comes about not wanting to hear about breaking up that the women really start flipping out. A woman runs up onstage just after Andre 3000 is done assuming that everyone just wants to dance. Once he’s ready to pretend to move on, there’s plenty to take his mind off it. But whether or not it works, of course…
ICE COLD!
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