19 Thoughts on "Like a G6"
- Before we begin, here’s an exclusive picture of my Twitter followers when I announced that I’d be writing a 19 Thoughts on “Like a G6.”
- A few months ago (or was it a few weeks ago? Who knows anymore) I listened to “Like a G6” a lot for a few days. At one point, I put it on repeat for 45 minutes in the middle of the night as I was doing dishes and playing video games. Sometimes I’d let it play all the way through on a loop; sometimes I’d just hit rewind after 40 seconds, sometimes I’d hit rewind after 10. Either way, more or less 45 minutes of uninterrupted listening of “Like a G6.” We’re all doing stuff like this these days, right? Right?!?
- This brief addiction to “Like a G6” was not entirely random. Similar to Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” it seemed to me like “Like a G6” was just in the air culturally at some point this year. It popped up in the first episode of Michaela Coel’s brilliant HBO series I May Destroy You, and Conor O’Malley employed it perfectly as background music for his comedy video “SMOKING 500 CIGARETTES FOR 5G.”
- Conor O’Malley is one of the only comedians who’s been “funny” during the pandemic, and that’s because he shows an understanding of the absurdity that is living in the United States right now. It’s run through a lot of his work, like the brilliantly unhinged Howard Schulz videos he put together back when that asshole thought he might run for President. Through his all-yelling embrace of dated pop culture references and scatological Mad Libs, O’Malley channels myriad idiots in our midst, and he’s a total genius for it.
- The “500 cigarettes for 5G” video has permanently altered how I see the world around me, literally. Every time my wife and I drive over the bridge that O’Malley filmed it on, she says to me, “Are you ready to smoke 500 cigarettes?” One time, after she said that, I put on “Like a G6,” which she not only didn’t immediately recognize from the video but claimed she never heard before at all. After we parked the car, I took a walk to the store and I listened to “Like a G6” on repeat for 15 minutes.
- When “Like a G6” was released ten years ago, I hated it. I thought it sounded like a weird hangover effect from Bush II-era decadence and chauvinism—the aural equivalent of a drunk banker in his twenties in the corner of a club, passed out and covered in his own puke. (Can you tell I watched all of Industry this week?) I looped it in with obvious garbage like “Party Rock Anthem” and “I Gotta Feeling.” I still don’t like “Party Rock Anthem,” but I like “I Gotta Feeling” now—and as for “Like a G6”? Well, I love “Like a G6.”
- That line right there? The “cellar door” of EDM, what a beautiful phrase. The way it rolls off Dev’s tongue is dead-eyed and sickening, and that’s the allure. Like all of “Like a G6,” coming in contact with it is like touching molasses. How do you get this shit off of you? Will it stay there forever?
- It’s very EDM that Far East Movement essentially ripped Dev’s grossly glimmering chorus from her own “Booty Bounce” from that year. Not a genre that’s jam-packed with originality, although explicitly lifting half a verse from someone else’s song for your own chorus is, at the least, more candid than all the ghostwriting and top-lining that happens in so much mainstream dance music.
- This is where I do the thing I always do with “indie” but only this time with “EDM.” “EDM” is not a sound. It’s an economic publicity tool of phrase, as most genres are used within the music industry. (We are obviously witnessing this happen again, albeit in a more niche fashion, with Spotify’s early branding of so many artists as “hyperpop.”)
- Like “electronica” before it, “EDM” was hastily adopted to signify the industry’s awareness that dance music existed. The “EDM boom” is long gone at this point, and dissipated way before COVID-19—but all that means is that industry dickheads don’t have to pretend like they listen to Marshmello or Hardwell anymore. Those artists, however, will continue making money for the rest of their lives, just as they did before EDM, just as Dutch guys will continue to make hardstyle for the rest of their lives. (What, did you think people started listening to Tiestö because Vinny Chase played an evil DJ or something in the Entourage movie-within-a-movie?)
- Big-room dance music is like jam band music: a lot of it sucks, even the worst shit sounds amazing on the best drugs, and all of it basically prints money of any currency. Even though EDM festivals are shuttered for, I don’t know, ever? in the U.S., other countries that have gotten their shit together will be bringing the DJs in for heavy paydays sooner or later. I mean, fuck, man, Ultra just threw a huge fest in Taiwan. We’re not doing that anytime soon unless it’s, like, Pictureplane DJ’ing a maskless rave under the Tappan Zee or whatever. (I can make Pictureplane jokes again on here, all of his friends unsubscribed to the newsletter after the Twitter jokes.)
- That being said, I do like a lot of big-room dance music on a visceral level. (I’m still able to say a lot of it sucks because, as much of it as I mindlessly enjoy, there’s three or four times as much of it out there that is just too awful for me to listen to.) I’m not going to load up this installment with my faves, but maybe I’ll do an EDM special Baker’s Dozen in the future of all my favorite EDM-era songs. Here’s one for free (literally, since this installment is free, and that BD may or may not be):
- The only EDM festival I’ve ever full-throatedly attended was Electric Daisy (I think) in Vegas, for work, in 2015. It was an all-night festival for three nights, I had a great and unique time, but here’s the anecdote I’m interested in sharing: day three, I got to the grounds early, and this wasted 16-year-old with a bicycle comes up to me and asks if he knows where he can charge his phone. I’m literally drinking a beer at a charging station, so once he realizes that he asks me to help him find his friends. I tell him I can’t because, well, I don’t know what they look like. He’s okay with that, and then he asks to take a few selfies. We take selfies together and he leaves. It was sweet.
- I don’t think EDM had a culture the way that, say, house music has a culture, but there was a culture there nonetheless—and it was toxic to the core. I don’t even know why I’m speaking in past tense, since as I previously stated, this music and the parties it plays at exist with or without marketing terms. Kids get sick and die from drinks and drugs at big fests all the time, and the number of reported sexual assaults is always above “0,” which is horrible. (I don’t want to signal that I’m singling out so-called “low-culture” dance music as being vulnerable to alleged predatory behavior; like, look at fucking Derrick May!) If “things ever come back,” I’d love to see some sort of accountability on the part of the people who throw these things, but we all know how the music industry is with accountability (lousy).
- I like loud things as much as I like soft things—more, maybe, even. So I liked a lot of buzzsaw-sounding EDM as a result, and I still do. I remember seeing Skrillex at Roseland and being blown away that something could be so deafening and aggressive while still basically laying claim to a multi-hour hang. But that version of EDM is a thing of the past, especially now that the Chainsmokers have sanded down all the jagged edges until what’s left is LITE-FM tedium like Kygo and, well, one of the songs I posted last week.
- At this point, I’m less interested in pinpointing where EDM occurs and more interested in targeting the bloghouse occurrences. Bloghouse is always being revived in some form, whether the revivers know it or not; I wrote a piece on this a few years ago that was pretty good. The latest accidental bloghouse reviver is Miley Cyrus, whose excellent “Midnight Sky” (and most of her mostly-solid Plastic Hearts) would’ve lit up the Hype Machine charts with tons of Golden Filter remixes if it came out in 2008.
- Eagle-eyed followers may have noticed that I initially promised a 19 Thoughts on Plastic Hearts for today. I lost interest, is 40% of the excuse; the other 60% is that two writers I know and admire—Lindsay Zoladz and Shaad D’Souza—knocked it out of the park already. What more is for me to add?
- Of course, bloghouse and EDM and dance music in general has been rendered a little less effective since we can’t get in a dark room, get wasted, lose our minds, and dance out all of the shit that’s going on in our minds. We all want this more than ever, right? To ring up a $200 tab on overpriced Red Stripes at Good Room and get as deep in the crowd as possible, or see someone like Anthony “Shake” Shakir spin records for hours on end in a piece of shit DIY venue? At any age, we’re all dying for this at this very moment.
- I think that’s why I keep touching the hot stove that is “Like a G6.” I feel hilariously good buying seltzer while listening to it. I’m grinning like a devil under my mask as I throw it on first thing in the morning before I buy coffee. It’s a party in my fucking mind, because where else would a party be right now?
- I think that, amidst all the pain and awfulness that is living right now, we have to make our own parties right now. And that’s cool. We don’t even have to do it in some self-effacing “See, this is fun!” Instagram post type thing. Just go for a walk and listen to “Like a G6.” Maybe listen to it five times. How do you feel? Better? Worse? If the answer is “different,” maybe that’s enough.