first round
(8) gorillaz, “feel good, inc”
vs
(9) robbie williams, “rock dj”
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 3/2/24.
em pasek on Gorillaz, “Feel Good Inc.”
Something about this party isn’t quite right, but I think I might be the only person who notices.
The other partygoers don’t seem to have noticed anything amiss. Most of them are upstairs, where the dance floor has gotten louder and more animated with each new song. The few who have made it down to the basement are chattering in a loose cluster over by the beer pong table, oblivious to the sense of foreboding prickling at my senses. And my boyfriend, who went upstairs to grab himself another drink a few minutes ago and probably had to pause to make three new friends on the way back down to the basement, is certainly having fun, which I can tell because he’s mentioned it half a dozen times since we got here. I, on the other hand, am so anxious that I barely know what to do with myself. How can nobody else feel this?
“Everything okay down here?” someone asks, startling me.
A kid who lives in this house—a youngish twentysomething, really, but those started feeling like kids to me sometime a few years ago—has poked her head out from the stairway to the main floor behind me. I nod my assent, but the kid looks puzzled and almost worried, like she knows something is off but can’t see what it is. Her job is probably to make sure that the house isn’t getting completely destroyed and nobody is puking or passed out or anything like that, but nobody down here in the basement has gotten too rowdy, and nothing is obviously amiss. I can perhaps be forgiven, then, for imagining the worst: that the kid has decided that there’s something wrong with me. My anxiety curdles into something else: dread, maybe, with a hint of resignation. Of course that’s it. What else could it be?
Then, suddenly, the kid gives a small, thoughtful nod before crossing the room to a card table set up in the corner. I’ve been down in this basement since the beginning of the party an eternity ago, but now I notice the laptop and speaker set up over there for the first time. The cheerful pop tune that has been playing up until now must have blended in to the thump of the bass from upstairs so as to be totally indistinguishable unless I was looking for it, but the kid types something in on the laptop, and then a new sound hits my eardrums: an unmistakable laugh, then an infectious, repetitive rhythm. Something clicks.
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da-ca; feel good.
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da-ca; feel good.
*
Feel Good Inc. is a song by the virtual band Gorillaz, released in 2005 as the lead single for said band’s demonstrable-proof-that-this-is-definitely-a-real-project-and-not-a-one-off-gimmick second album Demon Days. The song can be contextualized against three narratives, each of which already spanned seven years a piece when the track was released: the fictional history of the animated characters who are the official members of Gorillaz, the overarching tales that these virtual band members are ostensibly telling via their music and videos, and the story of the real-life collection of humans who contribute to Gorillaz songs and visuals on either a permanent or temporary basis. It charted in twenty-five countries, appeared on two different Billboard year-end Hot 100 charts, and cemented Gorillaz as a legitimate artist while paving the way for a career that has spawned six additional albums packed with collaborations and a devoted fanbase that embraces the project’s music, art, and canon in equal measure.
To me, though, it’s best known as the song that was on the iPod.
There were lots of songs on the iPod, of course. Having lots of songs was, quite literally, the entire point of the iPod, and Apple promoted their product with a seemingly endless parade of fun, colorful advertisements that featured new and interesting music. But Feel Good Inc. was the iPod song among iPod songs, because not only did it get an iPod commercial, it was the song on the screen of the iPod—the fifth generation iPod, the iPod with video, the iPod Classic immediately before Apple started calling it the iPod Classic—on the product’s box. From the model’s debut in 2005 until late 2006, when Apple updated the device and inexplicably also replaced the song on the package with the less eminently danceable Dani California, every single one of the millions of people who went out into the world looking for a digital music player saw Feel Good Inc. front and center on store shelves, frozen in time with a minute and twenty seconds of the infectious tune left to play.
Looking back on the iPod era from the vantage point of 2024, when the idea of carrying around an entire little hard drive in your pocket to listen to the selection of music you’ve pre-loaded onto it feels positively quaint and even a little retro, it’s hard to explain just how large a presence the gadget had in the world twenty years ago. The ability to carry your entire music library with you in a pleasantly designed little rectangle that thrummed cheerfully in the palm of your hand as you jammed to whatever song suited your fancy changed everything about when, where, and people listened to music. The iPod also cemented the idea that the internet was the place to go for music, and in doing so it made the very concept of being Into Music something that was achievable for just about anyone who could get online. Sticking an “i” in front of just about any word became an instant shorthand for the rapidly changing technology of the first decade of the millenium, and doing so could feel either a little mocking or a little reverential depending on when and how and with whom you did it. It was the moment, and it was inescapable.
The iPod also proved to be an turning point for the decontextualization and recontextualization of music. Much has been made of the death of the album as a meaningful concept in a world where people discover music via a constantly regenerating torrent of Spotify playlists and TikTok sounds, but it was the iPod’s shuffle feature that put the first nail in the album’s coffin. Feel Good Inc., as a song situated firmly within iPod culture, is a perfect example of the kind of music that benefited from this phenomenon. An album of dark songs packed with wordy metaphors about endless nights and worldwide collapse that is performed by animated band members and accompanied by an elaborate network of multimedia tie-in features has, at best, appeal to a very specific audience, and more specifically one that has a whole lot of time on their hands. On an iPod, though, Feel Good Inc. didn’t have to be understood as a song from Demon Days, as a part of any grand statement or overarching idea, or really even as a Gorillaz song. Instead, the primary context of the song was its role in the listener’s story. And when think of the song today, I know exactly how it fits into mine.
*
The summer before I turned thirteen, I began seriously contemplating the merits of having an existential crisis, and I also discovered Feel Good Inc. for the first time.
I had learned about existentialism during a keep-the-kids-busy-until-the-end-of-the-year philosophy unit in school a month or two earlier, where it had been presented, almost in passing, as a rejection of everything that other philosophers stood for. As a kid who happened to be newly taken with the idea of rejecting everything I was supposed to be doing, I had of course immediately gotten on board with the idea without a second thought. Questioning the meaning of life in the face of the absurdity of the world felt like an especially great idea from the uniquely absurd vantage point of middle school. I thought the personal free will angle sounded cool in a sort of punk-rock way (or at least in what I imagined was a punk-rock way, based mostly on the out of context Fall Out Boy quotes that the girl who sat next to me in history class had carefully Sharpied onto all of her folders and the occasional cursory glimpse into the Hot Topic at the mall). The fact that it came with a whole kind of crisis seemed like a bonus, and as that summer crawled on I thought it might be about time to have one.
The reason an existential crisis had become necessary, despite my very tenuous grasp on what exactly that actually meant, was that I was pretty sure that all of my friends were starting to hate me and I didn’t have a single clue as to what to do about it. There had already been a few close calls during the school year where I had believed with absolute certainty that I was going to get exiled from the lunch table and cut off from our pre-class locker hangouts, only to be pulled from the brink of social ruin at the last possible second and back into the fold of the tight-knit girl group we had maintained since elementary school. Now, as the summer got hotter and the eighth grade drew closer, I knew that the people I cared the most about were getting sick of me, and there was no doubt in my mind that if something didn’t change I was going to end up alone.
Nobody seemed to want to tell me why, exactly, my personal stock had fallen so hard. “You just don’t really fit with us anymore,” a longtime pal explained to me in what I would later identify as the soft launch of our friendship breakup, almost offhandedly as we pushed through the crowded hallway between the middle school gym and the band room. “And wouldn’t you be so much happier if you didn’t have to try?” I couldn’t tell whether the statement was meant to be primarily cruel or primarily kind, and I’m not convinced that she knew it either. Before the end of the day she had dropped the subject, and just a couple of weeks later I was invited to her end-of-the-year celebration as though nothing had happened. Our friend group spent the night after the last day of school camped out in her parents’ cavernous home gym, squealing over petty drama from the past year and debating which music videos she should download onto her own brand-new iPod as entertainment for her drive to summer camp, finally landing on selections from Shakira, Rihanna, and Natasha Bedingfeld in the wee hours of the morning after intense deliberation. I spent the night nodding along and pretending to know who any of those people were, more and more certain with each song I didn’t recognize that I was failing yet another test that I ought to have been able to pass by now.
The problem with me wasn’t just that I didn’t wear the right clothes or know the right bands or read the right magazines or crush on the right boys, although all of those things were certainly true and got pointed out to me quite a lot for my trouble. It wasn’t just that my interests, which had always tended a little towards the dreamy and the dorky, hadn’t kept up with the more grown up-seeming passions and aspirations that my friends had been trying to get serious about all year long. Together, those things might have made me a square peg in a round hole, but at least that peg could probably fit with enough wiggling and some tolerance on everybody’s part for a few gaps here and there. The real problem with me, I was beginning to believe, was an existential one. There was something fundamentally wrong with me that I couldn’t identify but everyone else seemed to know. My teachers must have been able to tell, because over the past year I had started falling apart academically, floundering spectacularly in some subjects while straight-up ignoring others with no intervention from anyone. My parents knew, because their disappointment in me was so palpable that there were times I thought I would collapse under the weight of it, yet I couldn’t bring myself to do any better. And of course, my friends had seen it before anyone else had. What else was there to do now except have a big, dramatic crisis about it?
Before I managed to work out the details of exactly what a really good existential crisis entailed, though, something miraculous happened, and I thought it would change everything.
The miraculous thing arrived, more or less, in a black box with minimalist packaging, square and black and satisfyingly solid with relatively little real estate devoted to garish adornments like logos or selling points. I inspected it for a long time before opening it up, more slowly and reverentially than I had opened anything in my whole life. The box’s physical contents, a thirty gigabyte fifth generation iPod with a glossy black faceplate accompanied by a pair of bright white headphones and a matching charging cable, were beautiful, and I inspected each one carefully. Still, I knew better than to believe that they alone could solve my problems. No, it was the thing that this symbolized—not the iPod itself, but the type of person that having an iPod meant you were—that was going to be my salvation. My friends would finally understand that I was trying. I wouldn’t have to pretend to keep up with them anymore. I would understand the music and the stories and the references, I would finally fit in, round peg in round hole style, and then they might not notice the big and terrible and unknowable thing that was wrong with me at all.
After turning the iPod on and then immediately realizing that I was going to have to figure out what on Earth to put on it before it did me any good, I set it carefully aside and returned my attention to the box it had arrived in. I didn’t immediately recognize the title of the song on the box-iPod’s screen, a track called Feel Good Inc. by a band called Gorillaz, but the name immediately appealed to me. I held the printed screen up close to my face and squinted at the album artwork displayed next to the title, which featured four colorful, almost distorted-looking faces in profile. It didn’t look anything like the album covers I knew (which were mostly my mom’s old Barenaked Ladies CDs and some Entertainment Weekly compilations of the greatest hits of the ‘60s, so that was probably a point in Gorillaz’ favor). It did, however, look satisfyingly cool.
This is probably real music, I thought. This isn’t just kid stuff. It’s probably really good and really serious. And I can listen to it.
It was a start.
*
To be clear, I’m telling this story in no small part because it’s patently ridiculous. It will not come as a surprise to anybody who has ever passed through preteendom that owning an iPod and learning the names of some bands absolutely did not fix a single one of the things I imagined it would. There is no music and no music player on Earth that can make other people like you, and to be honest I probably shouldn’t have needed to learn that lesson in the first place because it’s so glaringly obvious. That being said, it’s worth pausing for a second to explore why I believed that this one might.
In contrast to the videos for most of the other mid-00s dance hits I pretended to know back in middle school, the Feel Good Inc. music video is something of an oddity, and not in the least because absolutely nobody in the video is dancing. The premise is this: three of the virtual band’s members have just woken up in a tower (helpfully labeled Feel Good Inc. in one of the opening images) after what appears, based on some early imagery of a whole bunch of beautiful semi-clothed people collapsed in a mass on the floor, to be a night of some truly over-the-top debauchery. The fourth bandmate, who looks to have missed out on whatever went down in the tower, strums a guitar and swings her legs from the edge of a floating island containing a red striped windmill, seemingly unaware that she and the island are being pursued by a pair of helicopters. The video’s focus lingers most closely on 2-D, a blue-haired guy who seems pretty frustrated at being stuck in the Feel Good Inc. tower and alternates between trying to rouse everybody else with a megaphone and pressing himself sadly against the foggy tower window to watch the windmill island drift past. Black-and-white video of De La Soul, the non-virtual hip hop group featured on the track, appears as though projected against the interior wall of the tower, adding an additional air of claustrophobia to the sense of frustration and dread that permeates the world of the video.
Without the video, the anti-conformity, anti-industrial, anti-consumerist angle of the song is fairly blatant. Even if you, the listener, are twelve years old and you aren’t thinking all that hard about the particulars of the “melancholy town where we never smile” or what, exactly, De La Soul means by the still-baffling lyric “linin' 'em up like ass cracks”, there’s something a little sinister and a little stirring about the tune that evokes both a hint of fear and a desire to push back against that fear. With the additional context of the video, the song’s message becomes inescapable. And set against the broader story of apocalypse that Gorillaz explores in Demon Days and the project’s history as a commentary on the manufactured nature of pop music (Gorillaz was formed by a musician, Damon Albarn, and an artist, Jamie Hewlett, in response to a shared frustration with the boy bands the two of them saw on MTV), it feels patently ridiculous that anyone would ever hear the song and think, “oh, this would work so well in an advertisement.”
Of course, though, it did.
The basic idea of the silhouette iPod commercial is this: a bunch of people who are extremely cool appear as black silhouettes dancing against a vividly colored background. The reason you can tell that these people are extremely cool is twofold. First, their outfits are amazing. You only ever see the outlines of the garments, plus a few judiciously placed gray highlights showcasing a stack of bangles here or a pair of striped socks there, but you can tell just by those few details that whatever they’re wearing is way ahead of any trend, and definitely ahead of anything in your closet. The second reason, and probably the more important one given the context in which they’re appearing, is that every single one of the cool dancing silhouette people in every single commercial, from Woman In Tasseled Hat And Checkerboard Vans Dancing to N.E.R.D. to Guy Inexplicably Doing A One-Armed Handstand In Time With Kool Keith, is wearing bright white headphones.
Apple, famously, chose to ship the iPod with white earbuds as a way to market a product that would rarely be seen if it was being used as intended. Since it was supposed to spend all of its time in its owner’s pocket, the headphones became the part of the setup that let everyone else on the bus or the street or the office or the school hallway know that you were part of the elite club of People Who Have iPods. They were designed to be noticed, and it worked: more than twenty years later, long after the world collectively gave up on wired earbuds and the iPod itself disappeared from the tech landscape never to return, white is still the color for headphones.
The white earbuds also seemed to have a unique ability to make every single adult I knew in the aughts go into scaremongering moral panic mode. They were going to ruin my hearing. I was going to lose the ability to talk to people like a normal person. They were another symptom of my generation’s “me, me, me” attitude, or our total lack of attention span, or our total lack of patience and need to have everything on demand. We were all going to end up falling victim to some headphone-based mind control device someday, like something out of a bad novel or a Doctor Who episode. I wasn’t a particularly deviant kid (save for the aforementioned slipping grades and an unfortunate tendency to stay up late reading Meg Cabot novels with a flashlight no matter how many times I got caught), but busting out the earbuds in public made me feel like I was getting away with something.
The actual Feel Good Inc music video is pretty bleak and ends on a note suggesting that further badness for the band is almost inevitable. The song’s iPod ad, however, is quite possibly the most joyful of the era, which is quite a feat given that every single one of its predecessors had already been perfectly calculated to invoke maximum delight. In the Feel Good Inc. iteration of the commercial, the silouhettes of cool people are wearing rollerskates. (This is an additional reason that you can tell that the silouhettes are of cool people: the rollerskates simply would not be cool if they weren’t.) They’re dancing – not skating, definitely dancing – to the song’s final chorus, and the monochromatic world behind them flashes from blue to yellow to green to red. There’s nothing in the thirty-some second clip that suggests desperation, resistance, or any of the themes that the song’s lyrics or video attempt to convey. And every one of those dancers has those bright white headphones.
The contradiction of Feel Good Inc., then, is that it’s a song where the lyrics tell you to resist conformity, but it’s also a song that, thanks to this history, is inextricably linked up with idea that buying the official MP3 player of cool people might make you a cooler person too. There’s some discomfort in the way those two ideas clash with one another, made stranger by the odd parallel between the song’s official video and the silhouette commercial. The former illustrates an ultimately fruitless attempt to rebel against vague forces of greed and conformity, while the other flaunts a symbol of “rebellion” that actually represents a very specific type of greed and conformity. It’s troubling, and there’s a part of me that feels deeply alarmed at just how well the song as a marketing tool worked on me.
Similarly, there’s some real discomfort to the weight that the iPod itself carries in my own memories and the impact that it had on who I became as a person. I’m uncomfortable with how very sentimental I am about what is essentially a very nice-looking external hard drive, and it genuinely bugs me that every now and then I get so possessed by the idea of using a click wheel again that I end up having to talk myself down from buying a refurbished one on Etsy or hunting down replacement parts to restore my beloved fifth gen model, tucked away in my desk to this day, to its former glory. But the truth is that, in a more roundabout way than I anticipated, the iPod really did mark a turning point in my life in a way that no piece of technology or moment in pop culture since has ever even approached. Though the idea feels strange now, I’ll always be thankful for that.
Getting an iPod and, as a consequence, discovering music did not make me cool. It did not help me become more mature or more esteemed in the eyes of my peers. It certainly did not fix my relationships, and indeed I got completely, fully, and irrevocably dumped by the girls I really thought would be my best friends forever in a spectacularly embarrassing fashion when I came back to school on the Monday after my thirteenth birthday. It did not give me good taste. It did not catapult me out of the insecurity pit of middle school and into the part of my life where I would no longer feel like an unforgivable disaster. It did not help me gain self respect.
What the iPod did, though, was give me a window, two and a half inches on the diagonal and with a battery that could last for fourteen hours if you turned the brightness down enough, into a world that was bigger than the one in front of me. In some ways the personal digital music player is remembered as the ultimate expression of individualism during the first decade of the millennium, with every person who had one living in a private musical experience of their own making. When I look back on it, though, I remember a means by which I could feel a connection to other people across time and space who had gone through the same things I was feeling: uncertainty, loneliness, fear of being unacceptably different. And in time, the music I discovered helped me find people who felt those things too. “Turn, forever, hand in hand” indeed.
I didn’t exactly embrace the things that made me feel like an oddball, but as time passed I found that I wasn’t so ashamed of them anymore. (It helped that nobody was pointing them out to me all of the time anymore.) I met new friends who liked me a lot more than my old friends had. My interest in actually playing music grew, and though this is not a story about how an expensive MP3 player and the transformative powers of a virtual band’s 2005 hit single led me to pursue a career as a musician or anything like that, I did join marching band in high school and stuck with it all the way through college. I listened to everything I could get my hands on: songs ripped from YouTube videos and pulled from friends’ collections and discovered in the dusty recesses of my parents’ CD collection. I listened to Shakira, Rihanna, and Natasha Bedingfeld. I listened to Gorillaz. I downloaded songs that my friends recommended, and then I recommended songs right back to them. I burned them CDs. I plugged my iPod into the aux cords of their cars. I sang along to every word.
*
The summer before my thirtieth birthday, I felt like I might be ready to finally make good on that existential crisis after all. The past year had been challenging in a set of ways that I felt totally unprepared to deal with. A temporary relocation across the country to pursue what I thought was a dream job had gone spectacularly wrong thanks to an unrelenting series of blizzards, rock slides, flash floods, and various and sundry natural disasters that left me a tense, nervous wreck of a person by the time I returned to the Midwest in defeat several months later. A series of crises had unfolded back at home during my absence, and I still hadn’t really managed to process any of them. On top of these, the specter of the end of my first real decade of adulthood, the coming of the big three-oh, and the sense that I was running out of time to do all of the things that I ought to have accomplished by now loomed large over everything I did. Mounting pressure—from my graduate program; from loved ones confused and concerned about the seemingly random series of detours I had taken away from the expected trajectory of stable career, marriage, and children; and most of all from myself—threatened to overwhelm me. I was, on the whole, not having a terribly good time.
In the middle of all of this, my boyfriend brought me along to a party. It took place in the kind of young person party house that neither of us had been anywhere near in the years since college, and I realized about five seconds after we walked through the door that I was in over my head. Between my residual under-socialization from a season spent physically trapped on the side of a mountain and an undercurrent of fear that I was going to kill the vibe of the entire event by being—gasp—slightly older and a bit more square than most of the other attendees, I probably could have cut my losses and gone home. It was important to my boyfriend that we be there, though, and at any rate adult life doesn’t offer all that many opportunities to hang out in houses where most of the entrances have been temporarily blocked off with piles of broken furniture and stolen parking barricades and signs with friendly notes that say things like “SHITTER’S BUSTED” helpfully indicate that you’ve left the boring, grown-up, conformist world of things that work like you expect. Thus, we stayed, and we tried and failed to remember the rules to beer pong, and I drank a La Croix, and I took a bunch of selfies with the graffiti on the basement walls, and I made a valiant attempt to ignore the pit of anxiety forming inside me, and it didn’t quite work at all.
And that brings me up to this moment, the one where the kid comes downstairs and asks if everything is okay, and my inner horrible preteen’s secret ugly fear of being unspeakably but undeniably incorrect rears its awful head. And I become convinced, just for a second but also for about the millionth time in my life, that there is something fundamentally wrong with me and everyone else knows it. It won’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last. I’m pretty sure that’s human nature.
That doesn’t matter right now, though, because the kid is crossing the room to the speakers in the corner, and now the opening laugh of Feel Good Inc. cuts through everything else. In my memory, I can practically feel the gentle hum of the iPod’s hard drive in my hand.
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da-ca; feel good.
Sha, sha-ba-da, sha-ba-da-ca; feel good.
In this moment, I think I understand all over again what the song is about. This feeling, and indeed this whole summer of worry and pressure and feeling like I might never fit anywhere again, is temporary, and I can win if I resist it. I got out of middle school. 2-D got out of the Feel Good Inc. tower. We did it, and we can do it again, and no ominous black helicopters appearing in the last five seconds of a music video can stop us. (Or something like that. As large a presence as the song has had in my life, I am ultimately but a tourist in the realm of Gorillaz lore.)
To be clear, I’m not having the kind of emotional breakthrough that can get me past all of the stress and fear of the last year. Thinking that your entire messed-up outlook on life can be fully repaired by a song at a party is about as naïve as believing that getting an iPod is going to fix your problems, and I am blessedly past that point in my life. I get home long before the end of the night with a pounding headache and the feeling that I really don’t ever need to go to a party like that again, and when I wake up the next morning none of the problems I had a day ago will have gone away. But something does change, because over the next couple of months I start to feel like I’m moving forward again after a long period of being stuck. I get back to work on my research, reach out to friends I hadn’t figured out how to talk to since coming home, and start making plans again. The steps are small, but I take them. I fight back against the frustration and the isolation and the absurdity little by little, and I don’t exactly win, but the fight continues anyway.
And it’s the strangest thing, but it really feels the song comes along with me. It’s blaring from a boombox strapped to the back of a bike that passes me as I walk to work, playing in the coffeeshop where I’m making up for lost time on one of neglected manuscripts, and piping from the radio as I drive to Pennsylvania for a conference on the morning after my thirtieth birthday, secure in the knowledge that for worse or for better I’m still the same person I was the day before. I have absolutely no idea why it’s playing in all of these places, when I’m quite certain I hadn’t heard it out in the world for some time. Maybe some kids on the internet have rediscovered the song, used it as a backing track to some new TikTok trend I don’t understand, and passed it along through a new generation of unmoored young people. Maybe the approaching 20th anniversary of Demon Days or the critical acclaim of Gorillaz’ most recent work got people to listen to the track again. Maybe it’s been there all along, “turned forever” just like the lyrics say. I don’t really need to know the answer. If the Feel Good Inc. really has cycled back into the mainstream, it feels like it might go a little against the spirit of the song to find out why. If it isn’t, I’m glad that the random workings of the universe have brought it back into my life again.
Still, though, I do kind of think it might be nice to hear it on an iPod again.
Em Pasek is an enigma.
katie darby mullins on Robbie Williams, Rock DJ
My friend Adam is really smart. He’s the kind of smart that pisses everyone in the room off, because sometimes he says something and suddenly it’s like the room is connected by this electrical current, where you and everyone else who is Not Adam, thinks “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that,” in private unison. One of those times for me was when I was 27 or 28—sometime after I’d gotten married, become a custodial stepmom, survived a house fire, and gotten on the tenure track, but before I was going to have a brain stem stroke—when he said that it took him a long time, as a writer, to learn that “humor was not the enemy of profundity.”
Say that out loud a few times. Roll it around on your tongue. Let it be like the first time you tasted scotch: maybe it burns, but it also feels like an essential part of being human, this experience, this all of the sudden obvious truth that humor and thoughtfulness are not mortal enemies. I love it.
Robbie Williams released “Rock DJ” in the year 2000, which was an important year for me for so many reasons—first, it was the year I started back in public school again after having been in a back brace and homeschooled; second, it was the year my parents officially got divorced; third, it would be the fall I started high school. I was terrified. I had started acting, which was a refuge—nothing says, “Don’t look at me, look anywhere else” like a spotlight that only shines on you when you’re saying someone else’s words and a straight-A report card. But when I was offstage, I had one definite feature, and it was one that I took with grave seriousness.
I was smart.
I’m not saying this to convince you, nor do I think you should even bother evaluating whether or not it was true. What I’m saying is that I wanted people to think that I was smart, and that was more my personality than any other aspect. I needed that. I took myself seriously in ways that, looking back, are absurd. I also found a way to take my favorite thing on earth—music—and turn it into homework. I’d buy a copy of Billboard, Rolling Stone, and watch MTV and VH1’s top twenty countdowns every week where I would religiously, with colorful, bubbly letters, average out a song’s chart position for my own ‘ranking’ system in a bright Lisa Frank notebook. (This was a few years before Clear Channel bought the airwaves and erased tastemaking for a more homogenous sound: it was before all the major labels were folding. It was right at the edge of music piracy, and I was, at thirteen or fourteen, still quite certain I’d grow up to be an A&R man.) I loved academia (and still do): I graduated with a full International Baccalaureate degree from Garland High School in Dallas, and then I graduated from college with two degrees in three years.
My love for academia, which has been the only work life I’ve ever known, pales in comparison to my love for rock ‘n’ roll.
That means the stakes with my musical taste are even higher than stakes that people think I’m smart, but when I was younger, I accidentally conflated intelligence with music taste. This can be complicated because I no longer believe in guilty pleasures—if you like it, it’s a pleasure. I have a really hard time finding music I don’t see value in. Once, a friend of my husband’s told him to ask me if I listened to Snow Patrol, and before I could say that “Run” was one of those triumphs that makes you feel like you’ve just won some national award, the woman started laughing and making fun of me. That was over a decade ago. This is the first time I have told anyone since then that I like Snow Patrol.
It goes without saying that even when I find a good song by a boy band, I keep my mouth shut. I had a merciless dedication to learning everything about music: I could tell you who was on what label, when; disputes over lyrics and ownership; that Maverick was Madonna’s imprint under WB; all sorts of worthless things that you’d think the stroke would have erased, but that still live inside of me. But that meant I knew Robbie Williams, British pop star, came from Take That. And I knew that was uncool.
In great news, it didn’t matter how uncool he was in 1997 when he released “Angels.” I was still homeschooled. I was a nerdy kid anyway, and when my scoliosis got bad enough to keep me in a large, plastic Boston brace, my mom was generous enough to allow me to come into myself without my fellow adolescents’ running commentary. I knew that “Angels” was uncool because it was desperately sincere, because Williams commits to it in a way that aches. If I’m being honest, I still tear up a little when his voice cracks on “where ever it may take me,” because it just feels full-bodied and powerful. I got to keep really loving Robbie Williams without anyone knowing for years. “Let Me Entertain You”? Good sir, I expect it! “Millennium”? Hell yeah, that is way better than a Willennium and I am grateful to have the option.
“Rock DJ” came out a few weeks before my freshman year of high school. In bad news, there was no way for me to pretend I didn’t love it. You may be thinking to yourself— well, just don’t tell anyone. I have a problem, though, where when I love something, I love it out loud. Maybe that’s why I’m so moved by the vocals in “Angels.”
“Rock DJ” could not be more different than “Angels.” First, by then, he was in on the joke. He had grown into a writer who knew how to use a turn of phrase that took a minute to unpack, and he had mastered my friend Adam’s edict that humor is not the enemy of profundity. Second, it is an absolute bop. I have never had this song on without dancing along, at least with my arms: it is a perfect car jam, but it’s not bad to run to, either. Also, if you’re not a good dancer, it doesn’t matter. (Are you alone right now? Do you have access to music? You should put it on and dance. You’d be shocked how much better you’ll feel after that 4:21 is up.) The beat is generously easy to follow and, to use his lyrics completely out of context, it’s easy to feel like you’re “selling it.” Before I started back in public school, I had a lot of choices to make—first, did I want to change? Be different than I was back before, when I was a nerd? When I read through lunch? Did I want to try and dress like the popular girls? Wear more makeup? Did I want to paint my nails black and pretend I was very serious all the time? (My chewed off, bloody nails: one of the early signs of my OCD. Well, that and creating my own music charts in Lisa Frank notebooks. That doesn’t strike me as a normal preteen hobby in retrospect.)
A lot of things went into my decision, but let me be clear: I knew I had a choice, and I was deliberate. My mother bought me three years to become myself, and I decided to honor her sacrifice and myself, the girl who was learning to love and just… be myself. A few things helped point me that way: mostly records. Counting Crows, Harvey Danger. Some books. But one of the deciding factors was Robbie Williams’s “Rock DJ.”
If you haven’t seen the video, nothing I can say will do it justice, but let me put it this way: on the surface, it’s hilarious. Underneath that? It’s something so much better. Even as a very young teen, I got to have this special bond with a moment in time, and I got, to bastardize the lyrics one more time, “permission to land.”
Williams has the choice, in the video, to give the women skating around him—who he seems to think will be adoring fans—either “Robbie” or “More Robbie.” He selects the first option, certainly expecting that that would be enough. He’d been a bonafide superstar for years. He is raised up to their level, and as he starts dancing, all the women… completely ignore him. It’s not like they shun him. It’s like he doesn’t exist. And for a moment, he looks confused, but then he realizes—they just need more Robbie. So he takes off his shirt.
Nothing.
Pants!
Nothing. Well, nothing from the women. He’s in an iconic black speedo with a strategically-placed tiger.
Underwear?
Yeah, he’s thrusting naked, dancing with the same commitment I can’t avoid when the song is on. His whole body is involved. He’s singing cocky lyrics like, “Give no head, no backstage passes” to women who have not even noticed he’s in the room, much less that he’s naked.
So he peels off his skin.
Literally. He peels everything down to the viscera, and then he starts pulling muscles off and tossing them to the women. Once he is literal meat, they seem interested, but only in that part of him. It ends with his skeleton finally finding a dance partner. (Don’t worry about him! At the end of the video, you are assured that “No Robbies Were Harmed During the Making of This Video.”)
The lyrics aren’t profound. The video, believe it or not, is. It’s funny. Here’s an attractive man who, in an attempt to grab attention, turns himself into bones.
OK, it’s not really funny when you put it like that. It’s almost… transcendent. Like he turns himself inside out to become something that appeals to everyone and he’s left empty, with nothing that even resembles him. He’s nothing but a sketch of himself, a frame. He could be anybody. And that’s the secret: if you’re talking to someone who is so generic that they could be anybody, they could also be nobody: you aren’t getting to know them, just a very curated version.
The chorus says, “I don’t want to rock (rock)/ DJ (DJ)/ But you’re making me feel so nice,” and I have to say, with a little bit of tweaking, it was my response to the song: I didn’t want to like “Rock DJ,” but it made me feel so nice. It was fun. It was cheeky. It was campy. It was like some of George Michael’s sillier songs. It got me up and moving, and when you’re kinetically involved with a song, it means more. It lives in your—your bones. Every time I think about this song, I remember thinking—don’t take it all off for anyone. Don’t turn yourself inside out.
I never lied and said I didn’t like a song when I was asked. I got made fun of. But one of the things I decided, watching Robbie Williams bare it all for attention from the women around him, was that he got the joke. You can’t ever take enough off for some people. You can’t ever turn yourself inside out and have anything left to give. But also? You can be vulnerable—nakedly vulnerable, pun intended—and that kind of full-frontal approach to life and art seems a hell of a lot more fulfilling than just going along.
Am I a good dancer? Definitely not. But I requested “Rock DJ” at every dance I ever went to, and you can bet that in my Dallas, Texas up-do, puffy taffeta dresses, and sparkly cubic zirconia, I was at the middle of the dance floor, my arms in the air, screaming along with the female backup parts, because I learned them to sing along with after I recorded the song off the radio the first time. I was always ready to declare that I felt nice, that this was keeping me up all night. And that full-bodied, all-dork Katie? Well, I never have to look back and wonder if I sold myself out. I may have done some embarrassing things and admitted to loves for things that were desperately uncool—and I still do (see exhibits “Coldplay” through “The Doors” through “The Eagles”). At the end of the night, though, Robbie Williams—who does explain early in the song that he has the gift and he’s gonna stick it in the goal—helped me solidify that dork into someone who was unfazed by teasing and who didn’t let anyone stop her from dancing.
“More Robbie” indeed.
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, and the music magazines The Aquarian and Paste, as well as quoted in James Campion’s recent book about “Hey Jude,” Take a Sad Song. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020. Her most recent book, Me & Phil, is out through Kelsay Books.