first round
(3) 50 Cent, “In Da Club”
STOOD DOWN
(14) The Gossip, “Standing in the Way of Control”
113-67
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/24.
dave singleton on 50 cent’s “in da club”
In his 2004 HBO special Never Scared, Chris Rock gave us the quote, “If the beat’s all right, she’ll dance all night.” It was a central part of a routine about extremely filthy and misogynistic lyrics in rap music, and how tired Chris was of defending the merits of rap music from its detractors.
A song, though, that should not need defending in this manner is 2003’s “In da Club” by 50 Cent. Thumping bass, hand claps, funky horns and a chugging understated guitar riff propel this song about 50 being on the come up, and his plans for future fame and fortune.
It was the lead single from Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Dr. Dre’s production shone through, and the track helped propel the album to being certified as platinum nine times in the United States. “In da Club” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks. Objectively, it is one of the biggest, hottest tracks of all time.
When 50 Cent performed the song at the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show in 2022, hanging upside down for his entrance, the pop from the crowd was ridiculous (even if 50 admitted later that he thought it was a mistake).
Funnily, the song about poppin’ bottles full of bub and sippin’ Bacardi is now old enough to drink itself, having celebrated its release birthday in January of this year. I was not that much older when this song came out.
I was living in Southeast Michigan at the time. Working my first full-time job at Eastern Michigan University. In a long-distance relationship with my now wife, but essentially living a quasi-single life. Which involved (on weekends when I was not on duty as a hall director) going out from time to time. And I remember the first time I heard this song, and my mind was blown by what I was hearing. “OH! This is different.”
Around the time that this song came out, I had just bought a new car. A red 1999 Pontiac Sunfire that had a sunroof. It was sporty and zippy, and I felt kind of cool driving around town with it. The best part was it had a decent little built-in sound system, for the size of the car, that had a built-in CD player.
I felt like a baller.
We were still in peak Napster/Limewire era, so you know I was, ahem, “acquiring” music and burning songs onto CDs. However, I “acquired” a copy of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in the traditional manner and took great pleasure in driving around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor with the sunroof open and the windows down (when the weather permitted) bumping “In da Club” alone. Or throwing it onto a mix CD and popping that mix in when I was tooling around town running errands in my car or with my friend Heather.
Whether out at the club, at a wedding, or sitting at a stoplight, this song makes you want to groove. Makes you want to move. And while the lyrics to reference bisexual women and Ecstasy pills, it’s not talking about, as Chris Rock was joking about in his bit, “Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick.”
It’s not THAT dirty.
But the beat is all right.
And when “In da Club” comes on, you can best believe folks will dance all night.
In his younger days, you could find Dave Singleton "In da Club". Nowadays, you're likely to find him "on his couch" sipping on some tea. Like 50 Cent himself, Dave is also from New York City, but now resides in Las Vegas. He has won and lost on Jeopardy! and on the Game Show Network. You can follow him on Twitter/X at @dfsingleton.
joshua james amberson on the Gossip‘s “Standing in the Way of Control”
In my late teens and early twenties, the separation between dance music and rock music was a vast chasm. Or, at least that’s how it felt in my friend group. I’d come of age in a small-town punk scene in rural Washington state that shunned any and all dance or electronic music, but after high school I began finding myself more and more drawn toward electronic sounds, if only to find out what I’d been missing out on. Fully electronically composed music still wasn’t the majority of my listening and I knew that it might never be, but I thought the separation my friends made in high school had held me back as a listener and I was determined to change that.
I moved to Olympia and within a year was living in a group house of DJs and electronic music producers where I was often the sole person wanting to listen to rock or folk or really any genre that primarily used more traditional instrumentation. While most of my roommates could appreciate and even occasionally love a guitar-bass-and-drums outfit, one almost never did. Bryn was the new friend of our group and, upon moving in, had become our house’s unofficial leader and resident DJ, taking up most of the daily sonic and emotional space. Though moody, he was kind and generous and eager to be friends. But his pure dedication to electronic music felt like I’d ended up in an opposite-world version of my hometown punk scene.
Despite the different worlds we came from and our occasional musical disagreements, Bryn and I gradually became close, learning to appreciate all of the things we initially didn’t understand about each other. But it was a complicated friendship, one where the stakes constantly felt high. His moods determined how my day went and my reaction to his changing moods altered how his day went. When I tried to be cool and aloof—acting like his emotions didn’t matter, or I didn’t notice, like we were just oblivious dudes sharing space in a group house—he seemed hurt. When I tried to be soft and caring, he bristled, often trying to downplay the emotions in the room, suggesting that I’d misread things, that I was overreacting.
Since Bryn not only decided most of what we as a household listened to but also what we did as a group outside of the house, I had no one to go to non-electronic shows with and would feel his disapproval for abandoning the group each time I went out by myself. The Olympia music scene has almost always been weighted toward the various genres the town is most known for: innovative (and often brilliantly ramshackle) takes on rock, punk, and folk. Still painfully shy among people I didn’t know, I usually stood in the back of the room at these shows, not speaking to anyone, nursing a beer, witnessing some of the most curious shows I’d ever seen, holding the feelings inside my body. Then I’d walk the long way home in hopes that the pavement would absorb my internal excitement, so I didn’t come home blabbing about the perfect melding of guitars to my friend who was basically uninterested in guitars as a whole.
*
It was 2003 and the town was hosting its big biannual Arts Walk celebration. Even for those who didn’t care about the event itself, it was an excuse for bars and house venues alike to throw some of the best parties and shows of the year. Bryn had found something for all of us roommates—a secret house party with DJs that was supposed to go all night—but I’d kept hearing about a garage-rock band called The Gossip that was playing at the Lucky 7 House, a punk-house venue on the edge of downtown, directly behind the Lucky 7 convenience store, and for some reason it felt important to go.
We were all walking up the hill, away from the excitement of downtown, on the way to the all-night party, and I still hadn’t said anything about the show. Bryn was riding high, clearly so happy we were all together, that we were a single entity, a we. Since I knew each of his various states so intimately, I knew that this one—the bubbly, overjoyed state—didn’t come around very often, and I usually tried to keep it going for as long as it would last. We passed the Lucky 7 and, as much as I wanted to keep quiet, the mile marker made my insides twist up, and I interrupted the conversation that had long been going on without me, blurting out, “I think I’m going to check out a different show.” I pointed vaguely to the convenience store, as if that explained everything, and he looked at me like I’d betrayed our sacred pact. The group went silent, feeling Bryn’s mood change, and I walked away, guilty and exhilarated.
The party was huge—a truly sloppy, gathered-for-a-scene-in-a-movie-sized crowd, overflowing out of the house, onto the porch, into the street, surely an hour or two away from having the cops break it up. I went in, not recognizing anyone, finding no makeshift stage, no band. Great, I thought, I upset Bryn for nothing. Then I heard a kick drum, a guitar tuning from some distant underbelly, and I peeked around various doorways until I found stairs leading to a basement.
I secured a spot against a wall, close to the band but not too close, and The Gossip started their set. For all the people at the party, there were only a couple dozen of us along the edges of the basement, but singer Beth Ditto seemed to treat it as an opportunity. She used the whole room, charging and retreating, riding some previously unknown-to-me line between aggression and joy. By that point, at 21 years old, I’d seen and played more punk shows than I could count, been to plenty of hardcore and metal shows where the singer freaked out in superficially similar ways, but I’d never seen whatever this was. It felt like experiencing live music for the first time—it was surprising, somehow life-affirming, a little scary.
The basic scene of that basement sits crystal clear in my memory: the audience framing Ditto’s body as she moves through the space, the muffled party going on above our heads, the cheap beer cans in everyone’s hands. These few small details and my internal reactions to the performance are so tangible that I feel like the show happened a year or two ago, not 20-plus years ago. But I don’t remember the faces of anyone in the room, including the band members, and I don’t remember what it sounded like at all. I remember they were great—far better than any band playing a sparsely attended punk-house basement show should be—but I can’t connect it to any of the band’s music that I’ve heard in the years since. As far as I can remember, no one danced or slam danced or in any way rocked out; we all just watched, transfixed. The show ended, I shyly told Ditto how amazing she was, and left without talking to anyone else. Maybe I met up with my friends at the DJ party and maybe I didn’t. If I did, it was unmemorable, overshadowed.
*
As good as the show was, I didn’t seek out The Gossip’s music afterwards. I remember hearing them in record stores and in friends’ cars and houses, and I always knew it was them and enjoyed it, but I never even owned a seven inch, a burned CD, a low-bitrate folder of illegally downloaded mp3s. I think I just didn’t want to undermine what I’d seen; I didn’t want the recorded artifact to take the place of the performance in my mind. It’s perhaps why the audio file in my memory is so quiet, why most of the typical sensory details are absent: my brain didn’t want anything to get in the way of the internal emotional experience I had while in that room.
Within a few months of the show I heard that the band moved to Portland and within a couple years I started to hear a series of unexpected things: The Gossip had become a pop band, they played Letterman, they’d changed their name (though I later found out this meant simply dropping the “The”), one person even told me they had become a “disco project.” I didn’t know exactly what to make of these supposed facts. What does a band like that—raw, unapologetic, unhinged—sound like when they go pop? I had no idea. Now, doing the math, I realize these people were talking about their 2006 single “Standing in the Way of Control,” a song that—even now, 18 years after it came out—I still can’t exactly hear as pop or disco.
The funny thing is, that, in the years after this song became a hit, their sound did change—emphasizing the pop and disco elements of their music more and more—but to me “Standing in the Way of Control” is just an innovative take on blues-tinged dance-punk that arguably does what people in underground scenes typically like: referencing back to the forgotten early progenitors of a genre rather than playing into the most prevalent styles of a given moment. But underground scenes also tend to respond negatively to any sort of success that includes big stages and national television appearances, so the rumors I heard about Gossip were obviously just reactions to that—that particular time period’s version of calling a band or artist a sell-out.
Within that same period, my relationship with Bryn changed—he came out to me after falling in love with one of our other roommates, we got closer as I helped him through that unreciprocated love, then he fell in love with me in the process. I told him I was straight (an identity that within a couple years would not be true, or would at least be slightly bent), he didn’t believe me, and when I started dating a woman things came to a head and I moved out, moving into a different house with someone who would soon become Gossip’s touring bassist.
On the campaign trail, George W. Bush loudly supported a plan to constitutionally outlaw gay marriage and judicial protections for queer couples, in what his puppeteers called the “Marriage Protection Amendment.” In response to this, Gossip wrote an anthem for all the queer people who were feeling alone and scared during this time, a rallying cry about existing in opposition to the hateful powers that be, your friends beside you, these combined powers of love greater than their soulless political sway—a song that they likely never could have imagined would change the direction of their lives and careers forever.
*
While the band has had some success in the States, it’s relatively limited. After this song and its album of the same name made a splash on the Pacific Northwest indie label Kill Rock Stars in 2006, the band was swooped up by a major and released two albums on Columbia—one in 2009 and another in 2012—and are returning after a long hiatus with an album that comes out this month. Last I heard, Ditto still lives in Portland, the city where I’ve now lived for over a decade. But anytime I mention the band to a present-day Portlander who didn’t live here during the band’s 2000s reign, the name doesn’t even register. And I’d venture to guess that, if that’s the case here in the band’s home base, this is likely the case in most parts of America. But cross the pond and it’s a different story. In the UK and across Europe they’re hit-makers, with “Standing in the Way of Control” being the one that started it all, the big breakthrough. They’ve headlined festivals, their singles invariably chart, Ditto is a fashion and cultural icon who has regularly appeared on magazine covers.
In the course of writing this, I thought about reaching out to my touring bassist friend, or reaching out to the many people I know or have met who are close to Ditto or have a history with the band. Olympia is a small community and those who have spent time there tend to hold onto the friendships they made while there, so—given the fact that my time in Oly slightly crossed over with Gossip’s time there—it’s almost inevitable that our friend groups would intersect. But reaching out to any of these people, or doing research beyond reading some early interviews and doing some basic fact-checking, felt wrong. While I’m sure anyone I talked to would add an interesting perspective, it feels like it would undermine the nature of the song and my experience with the band. And if the reason I didn’t follow up with the band back in 2003 was that I was so precious about the live experience, it also felt wrong to analyze it solely as a piece of consumable recorded media.
So I pulled up every live performance of the song I could find online. Some standalone videos, many buried in full sets. Some professional, big-production recordings and some captured on grainy mid-2000s phones and digital cameras. Almost all of these are from huge festivals across Europe. The band is always on the main stage, playing to thousands—everyone singing along, hands in the air—and they claim the space. There’s never a moment where they seem like an indie band playing a stage that’s bigger than their abilities. And there’s never even a second where it’s in question whether Ditto is a star. She’s a commanding presence, a force, fully in charge. She’s the people’s diva, getting into the audience, sharing the mic, shaking hands, giving high fives, letting fans adorn her in hats and leis and makeup, receiving hugs, even giving a kiss or two.
She improvises, adds new words, slips in anti-war chants for peace, declarations of universal love, on a few versions she sings bits of “Smells Like Teens Spirit.” She invites fellow festival performers and audience members on stage. She comes out in her underwear, throws fruit into the audience, glamorous in her audaciousness. Watching through the videos is a true journey, a primer to transcendence through loud music, through dance music, through punk.
One of the final versions I watch is a ten-minute version of the song where the crowd of thousands could clearly keep it going for another ten. Watching it reminds me of an experience I’ve most often had at warehouse parties and outdoor raves, where the DJ brings the audience into a frenzied state of positivity and bliss where time becomes elastic. I think back to the one time I saw the band and consider that maybe, if I could have somehow convinced Bryn to go to that basement show back in 2003, he would have seen that rave-like fervor in their music too. Maybe the band could have served as a bridge between my musical worlds and his, even without a real audience, even without anyone dancing.
Joshua James Amberson is the author of Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes (Perfect Day Publishing), How to Forget Almost Everything: A Novel (Korza Books), a series of chapbooks on Two Plum Press, and the long-running Basic Paper Airplane zine series. He’s currently working on a novel about slight levitation and a nonfiction book about Pacific Northwest independent music of the 1990s.