Every Day I See My Dream
When a song, is more then, a song. it’s a Lifestyle. Geffen Records is partnering with Calvin Klein. To Bring You: Music To Laugh Your Freacking Ass Off!
Grappling with the way in which we find, share, and listen to music has changed so rapidly in the past ten, even five years that if I decide to open this up by pontificating on it, you’ll fall asleep before you even get to the part where I bring up the greatest song of at least a generation, and maybe even of all time. Yeah we get it, the consolidation of large media conglomerates, along with the advent of ubiquitous streaming services Spotify, Apple, and Youtube (along with their respective proprietary algorithms) has changed, well, everything. Eight years ago I would have never thought I’d be feeling nostalgic already for Hype Machine, PMA, or any other assortment of random blogs and message boards I’d sift through to find new music that have since basically died. Anyone else on r/mu before it turned into a Pitchfork circlejerk? I wasn’t, but I’ve heard about it. I’m sure the pendulum has swung the other way right, now that Pitchfork is owned by giant media conglomerate Conde Nast (not going to check on that).
But even back then, dudes six to eight years older than me would be whining about all the archaic ways they had to struggle to find the best new music. This list includes things like sending mail-in orders to Sub Pop, going to “real” record stores, listening to college radio stations or the worst of them all, finding shit online during a bygone era of Blogger and early Tumblr to find anything worth knowing about, scolding me and everyone like me in the comments for having this great technology at my fingertips. I once had a dude tell me he got introduced to Crystal Castles on Something Awful, which is funny to think about in retrospect, if not entirely relatable to some degree. I found John Maus aimlessly scrolling on a forum dedicated to competitive Pokemon when I was in tenth grade.
The point is, I’m not trying to sound better than any of these things. My way of finding music when I was in my early twenties is not better or worse than anyone else’s; like anyone else my methods were a product of the time they were in. A lot of it is gatekeeping in a sense, since I suppose “in theory” it was a lot harder to find obscure music before, as the saying goes now, “everything is available to everybody,” so if you found something weird that none of your friends had heard before, it was somehow a feather in your cap to how “hard” you worked for your music, some strange source of pride for you. I’d say that you could make the argument that it is actually harder now to find something different, since your music taste has basically been boiled down to a series of equations that create a never-ending feedback loop. I’d imagine one of the most common ways to find new music is through Spotify’s “Discover weekly” playlist that curates music specifically based on these equations. The more you use Spotify, the more accurate the equation gets, and before you know it, the robot has done all the work for you. Which ultimately is our common goal as a society, as written in the Constitution: to live in a world where robots cater to our every whim, need, and desire, while we stay at home and play video games.
But we’re not here to indulge in our Constitutional right to enslave robots, as that’s something that has been written about many times by our Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Instead we’re here to talk about something a robot could never understand in their cold, metallic, lifeless hearts (if they had one): the joy of finding the greatest song ever written. If a robot tried to read this it couldn’t understand, as a robot thinks screws falling on the floor is a type of music.
It’s on and popping. The party’s rocking. The cuties jocking. And there ain’t no stopping…
“Yes” off their debut titled Party Rock (2009) by LMFAO is the greatest song ever written.
By the time LMFAO released Party Rock, they were a little-known novelty act that produced a minor viral hit “Shots!” but most people probably think of that as Lil Jon’s song and don’t even know that it is LMFAO’s song. Of course, when LMFAO released 2011’s Sorry for Party Rocking, everyone knew who they were. “Party Rock Anthem” was not just the #2 song of 2011 according to Billboard, which at that time used radio play and downloads as its determinant, but the #2 song of the decade. LMFAO followed up this bonafide smash with another #1 “Sexy and I Know It.” By themselves, these two songs have sold nearly 20 million units as of 2021, which is more than any full-length album written by sacred music demigods David Bowie or Kurt Cobain…and they had decades worth of a headstart, and immense critical acclaim during and after their respective careers (Sorry for Party Rocking infamously received a 0/10 on NME’s album reviews, which is saying something considering every single album NME reviews never scores lower than a 7, clearly because they only want to take cheap shots. According to NME, music is only allowed to be serious, and having fun is strictly prohibited, and also whatever Liam and Noel Gallagher do is the most important thing that happened today, even though they haven’t created anything that even sniffs LMFAO’s success since before cell phones were invented). All of this culminated in performing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show less than a year after the album dropped, which is obviously the crowning achievement of any artist. Until you play at the Super Bowl, you haven’t “made it” man. No one for example had ever heard of U2 until they played at the Super Bowl in 2007.
It may seem difficult to feel “excited” about the success of a group that seems so transparently manufactured by a record company whose songs appear to have the intellectual depth of a bathtub. In fact, many at the time pointed to groups like LMFAO as to how out of hand and “corporate” popular music has truly gotten.
But what people don’t understand is that LMFAO were probably the greatest grifters of all-time. It’s such a great grift that you have no choice but to respect it. LMFAO took the sound of pop music at that time (lazy bass-driven beats, amateurish cornball “rapping,” the cheapest synthesizer you could buy, and lyrics exalting partying, fucking, and drinking) took it to the extreme, and became multimillionaire artists performing at Super Bowl halftime shows and lounging with A-list celebrities.
And then, in September 2012, seven months after performing at the Super Bowl, and just fifteen months after releasing Sorry for Party Rocking, at the height of their success, LMFAO broke up. The reason cited? They basically just didn’t feel like it. What have the members of LMFAO done since Sorry for Party Rocking? Nothing, and they haven’t really tried all that much either. LMFAO cynically manipulated record companies and the general public by doubling-down on a music trend, made out like bandits, and are probably retired on a beach somewhere. And we all just let them do it. This is my dream for my own life — take advantage of the system to my own gain, and then dip out and enjoy the rest of my life doing whatever the fuck pleases me instead of spending 3/4 of my life creating wealth for somebody else at the expense of my own physical and emotional health.
Once you understand the scope and context of LMFAO’s career, you can understand why this makes “Yes” the greatest song ever written: “Yes” is a foreshadowing to all of the success that LMFAO would have further down the road. “Yes” is the greatest song ever written about the greatest grift ever pulled in the music industry.
On the surface, “Yes” appears to be, like all of LMFAO’s catalogue, just another song about partying. I can’t blame anyone for thinking this, as lyrics like “There’s gonna be a party,” “The party’s rocking,” “I take the elevator to the club in my crib” seem to lay it out plainly: this is a song about partying and it would be consistent thematically with the rest of LMFAO’s work.
However, despite a few references to partying, “Yes” is one of the more lyrically absurd entries into LMFAO’s discography, and that’s saying something considering that this was coming from a band that would later write all of the lyrics to “Sexy and I Know It.” What makes it so absurd is the number of references to an imaginary reality that features fantasies that only a child would have. For example, LMFAO references having an underground tunnel in their swimming pool, a water fountain that spits soda, and having Oprah as their neighbor. These are the kinds of fantasies that I would expect if I asked a child, “If you had a billion dollars, what would you do with it?” To further drive home the childlike fantasy aspect of “Yes,” even in their fantasy LMFAO still wants their grandma to make pancakes for them in the morning.
Uncultured swine, robots, and people that still say OK Computer is the best album of all-time may assume that LMFAO may just be the laziest lyricists of all time, and that explains why the lyrics are so absurd. It borders on laughable how ridiculous the entire fantasy really is, and the lyrics smack of being thought of in about five minutes. But the reasoning as to why LMFAO carefully chooses these lyrics is twofold: to frame their fantasy as something of a dream-like sequence, which explains the absurdity; and challenging the listener to go back to a simpler time — the freedom of daydreaming when you were a kid.
Ultimately, “Yes” is not a song about partying, but a song about achieving your dreams. The hook after all is “Every day I see my dream,” and LMFAO’s dream is to party, enjoy life, and not worry about anything else. They want to keep their family close (“grandma”) and have the most lavish home to keep them in (“Walk through my mansion”). The absurdity of the lyrics is merely a reflection of the song’s central message: no dream is too big.
Threading throughout “Yes” is another aspect that makes this unique for an LMFAO song: its haunting synth line that runs in a minor key. As a band that predicates its musical and lyrical identity on partying, dancing, smacking asses, and pouring champagne everywhere, a minor key is not really the ideal musical cornerstone. You would want the song to be written in a major key, with a big booming chorus and obvious chord progressions (which is most of LMFAO’s discography). Instead, “Yes” has a low-key chorus (by their standards) driven by this buzzing synth that almost induces a sense of urgency when you listen to it. In fact, listening to “Yes” doesn’t really make you want to party — it makes you feel on edge. By utilizing this subtle musical technique, LMFAO steers the theme of the song away from partying and back towards their own internal sense of urgency, one of the rare times we actually get to see any emotion out of LMFAO besides bravado: to achieve their dreams of becoming wealthy enough to retire altogether. In a way, LMFAO also utilizes this borderline unnerving synth line to try and inspire the listener to also go out and achieve their dreams, and that these dreams are only dreams until you go out and do something about it.
In the final verse, LMFAO’s founding member Sky Blu fantasizes about checking on his album, saying, “LMFAO goes double-platinum, hey!” On June 6, 2018, “Party Rock Anthem” was certified ten-times-platinum (diamond).
