first round
(11) Peaches, “Fuck the Pain Away”
turned down
(6) LMFAO, “Party Rock Anthem”
171-139
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 3/8/24.
brian oliu on lmfao’s “party rock anthem”
In March of 2012, a short documentary film by Invisible Children, Inc. was uploaded to YouTube. It was a highly dramatized and stylistically beautiful plea to the world at large: we must make Joseph Kony, a Ugandan cult leader and war criminal, go viral. The alleged purpose of this is to unify the world to dedicating themselves to capturing Joseph Kony and making sure he atones for his crimes. The reactions were swift—millions were encouraged to purchase Kony 2012 bracelets, as well as hang up posters across cities to raise awareness. Oprah herself tweeted:
Thanks tweeps for sending me info about ending #LRAviolence . I am aware. Have supported with $'s and voice and will not stop.#KONY2012
Through celebrity support, Kony 2012 became YouTube’s first video to receive over one million likes on the platform, and therefore the most liked YouTube video in history. In less than two weeks, millions of people had clicked play on the video to be greeted by the sounds of Nine Inch Nails’ “02 Ghosts I” and these words on a black background:
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come
Eighteen days later, the title of most-liked YouTube video was usurped by a different video with a similar aesthetic beginning. In dark red Impact typeface, it read:
On March 1, LMFAO’s Redfoo and Sky Blu slipped into comas after excessive party rocking.
The next morning, their new single “Party Rock Anthem” was released to the world.
In 2012, the world was ending for the last time. It was supposed to be the end of calendars—something that the Mayans predicted, apparently—or at the very least we would be spiritually awakened before earth crashed into a mythical planet, triggering the end of something and the beginning of something else.
As one would expect with the end of the world, there was simultaneously a loud and dumb reaction alongside contemplative reflection—as if this could truly be the end of things. That regrets that we carried in 2011 and those early months of 2012 would become permanent. All of those promises to become a better person would drift away the second that we got clear enough of the doomsday date—accounting for basic clerical error, the slowing down of the earth’s rotation, various gravitational pulls.
But for the most part, the end of the world in 2012 was FUN. This was the party apocalypse—apocalypse Carnivale, apocalypse Fat Tuesday. It was filled with blue iMessage bubbles wondering if this would be the last night of our lives. It was reflected in our music and dancing as well: from Britney seeing the sunlight (or incoming nuclear winter) and not stopping, to Usher Raymond telling us to down drinks like there’s no tomorrow before burning the roof of the club down, to Pitbull and Ne-Yo imploring everyone to grab someone sexy and tell them “hey,” because we might not get tomorrow. We are in on the joke and the joke is that we’re all gonna die.
What is it about wanting dance immortality you need to acknowledge your own mortality? To be fair, the 2010s were unleashing a new phase in ephemera—the concept of “going viral” was really taking form, as social media expanded its audiences: throwing plenty of material at the wall and seeing if it stuck. To that end, mortality seemed like a throw-away pick-up line in the club, and was utilized as such: how else are you going to get your love to have one more drink, one more dance, one more move to the afterparty if by not insisting that tomorrow is not promised? The threat of the end of the world can only be utilized so much until it begins to ring hollow—no one truly believed that someone like Britney, or Usher, or Mr. Worldwide were concerned with the sun not rising up the following morning. They are blessed—here to live in the moment, but also with a full awareness that the moment will be followed by other moments; a mosaic of bliss and glitter and bottle service and Dubai in the morning. As a result, the urgency rings false—the beats a little too sparkly, the crooning a little too measured.
LMFAO has no such issues.
In LMFAO’s view, the end is already here—there is no anticipatory nebulous concept of the apocalypse. Instead, it has come on swiftly, and, more importantly, they are the ones to have caused it. They have flown too close to the party rocking sun, causing both of them to collapse from exhaustion, furthered by creating a song in a lab that turns everyone into Melbourne Shufflin’ party monsters. When the duo wakes up, they are confronted with their deeds—a world where everyone is dancing in the streets, dressed in neon t-shirts, skinny jeans, and animal print sunglasses—a nightmare of their own making and their own personal apocalypse.
And isn’t that the point? All of our fears about the end of the world are typically tied dramatically to our greatest fears—some believe the world ends in fire, others in ice, but it tends to lend itself to the person experiencing the trauma. If you fear God, God is coming. Climate change. Aliens.
Instead, LMFAO appears to fear themselves—in the video, they are ultimately having to pretend to party rock rather than actually party rocking in an attempt to blend in with the brainwashed masses. It’s a prescient concept—one that predicts a future where everyone is attempting to go viral with less than organic content. We all can’t help to have a tiny British child with an affinity to bite their older brothers. Instead, the landscape gets flooded with KONYs—deliberate attempts to go viral in an attempt to raise “awareness” for its creators. LMFAO has seen the end, they have brought it upon all of us, and they are dancing through the consequences.
And so, there is an odd earnestness to their act. Make no mistake about it, Party Rock Anthem is dumb as hell. But no one would claim that partying is solely a stupid activity—there is value in dressing up in animal print vests and drinking jägerbombs, lemon drops, buttery nipples, Jell-O shots, kamikazes, and three wise men with friends and total strangers, and possibly a robot, and also a very bored blonde British lady who was in a knock-off European version of the Pussycat Dolls. There’s value to the song as well: it helped re-usher big room EDM music into the mainstream—outlandish synths, multiple hooks, and frenetic beat drops.
In November of 2011, my world ended—at least in that very specific and minute moment: Alabama had lost a football game. Not just any football game, mind you, “the game of the century,” a 9-6 slogfest against hated rivals LSU that ended in overtime on an ugly field goal. I was scheduled to DJ after the game at the delightful Tuscaloosa dive bar that just had the energy sucked out of it. I looked over at the bouncer who would be setting up the PA with a sheepish trepidation—he shrugged and said “fuck it, let’s dance.”
And we did. Not because the world was ending, or had ended, but because the world is constantly ending over and over—a constant stream of doomsdays that somehow we find our way through until the next one appears. There are days when they are layered—ends of the world strung out end over end until they eventually loop back upon themselves. We have already lost our minds, but we are willing to lose them once again as we shuffle through whatever it is the despair presents to us on any given day. In that sense, party rock can be seen as an ominous nebulous darkness—it is in the house tonight, and will be every single night—an acknowledgment of the absurdity of the potential of the end, rather than the end itself. There is little left to do but to just have a good time: just being the key word.
LMFAO had already given themselves into the end—they stopped making music in 2012, entering an indefinite hiatus. In that sense, LMFAO figured out how to be both temporary and eternal in a way that seemingly unlocks the mystery of humanity—the desire to both be here in the moment with all of our friends attempting to do the shuffle on Vodka-Red Bull soaked floors, but also above it all, peering down with all of the wisdom of the angels. The seven trumpets giving way to the voice of God, the Devil, Oprah, whomever singing “Party Rock is in the Hoooooouse Toniiiiight.”. But fear not: the end of the world can’t last forever.
Brian Oliu spent almost twenty years writing, teaching, and DJing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Recent books include Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling by University of North Carolina Press, and What Shot Did You Ever Take, a collaboration with Jason McCall, released by The Hunger Press. Gaining money. Oprah dough.
Tap Your Troubles Away: lily herman on peaches’s “fuck the pain away”
I.
My dad says, I thought it was a parody, I thought there was some original song, maybe, Dance the Pain Away, and that she was making a joke. There is a song, Tap Your Troubles Away, that I remember from seventh grade dance class. We were outfitted as flappers and worried that the wings of our menstrual pads were sticking out from our leotards. I wonder if this awkwardness, this inability to be in your own body even as you attempt to command it—shuffle ball-change—was part of Peaches’ inspiration. Those who can’t dance, fuck.
I’m in the waiting room listening to my dad clear his throat. Our dentist’s practice was acquired last year by a larger group, so this is a new building, and that’s the way things go. The small is absorbed into the behemoth. My dad explains that he has trouble swallowing once he’s in the dentist’s chair, and I can tell he’s wracked already by the phantom feeling, his throat constricting in anticipation. He is scared, he’s getting older and his health is getting worse, I drive him to appointments now instead of the other way around, and I hate it, and that’s the way things go, too.
Life is fucked and hard, you write a few weeks after you break up with me. The message tips your hand, shows me that you are missing me exactly as much as I miss you, and I don’t know what to do with the hope that this gives me except kill it. I think of other songs, the ones that we put on mixes for each other just after we met. Blue Moon, you titled yours. I sent one back called Not Musicals. We both included songs that overshot the mark—songs that swore a love up and down that we hadn’t yet spoken. We made excuses for the lyrics at the time, insisting that we didn’t intend for the other to read them literally. You were freshly out of a long marriage and we claimed we were being careful. Even as the declarations of love began, the talk of living together, maybe in this city or out of it, as we began to embark on everything together—trips, weeknights, grocery shopping—we said we were being careful. We bought plane tickets to Germany. It’s hard to say which was stronger, our romantic mania or our insistence that we were acting with clear heads. We were trying to enter a beautiful but abandoned city, built on the ruins of an old civilization, barely cold when we started up. You thought because you had done this long-term life once before, that you would be up to it again, with no breath in between.
Life is fucked and hard. Sure, but we all knew that. The dirty secret, the thing that none of us wants to admit, is that we are all subject to periods where we believe it won’t be fucked or hard anymore for us. We can suddenly listen to sad songs in these interims, appreciate them for their acumen or lyrical sinew or for a clever horn interlude, because we briefly feel exempt from their warnings. Their application to our lives is a distant memory, a house in the rearview mirror that appears much, much further behind us than it really is.
Sad songs are for happy times; goofy songs are for sad times. With Peaches, my body is parodying something, faking it till it can bear up under the unbearable. I need the surrealism, the lack of discernible definition to the lyrics. IUD, S-I-S, STAY IN SCHOOL, CAUSE IT’S THE BEST. Try and make a love story of that. I dance in the dim basement, flying outward from my joints, my hair shaking in my face. Movement belongs to people who refuse to be sad. I am sad and my dad is swollen, he moves slowly to check out at the front desk. We smile, him down one tooth. We playact at wellness for each other, insisting on the fortitude we’ll need to get through a hard time. I tell him, no, not parody, this song is real.
My roommate laughs when I tell her I’m writing about Fuck the Pain Away. Well that’s perfect, she says. The line that drives the song, the title, all of it was once what is now popular to call my lived experience. In my younger years, I gave the pain a run for its money, fucking-wise. More than once, distraught over my taxes or my crush or a stream of shitty jobs, I would sleep with people by the dozen over the course of a single month—letting them climb up my hair to the strange tower where I slept a little and should've changed the sheets more often. My therapist issued a vague threat to stop treating me until I’d gotten these benders under control. If instead of this, you were freebasing, say, she said, I’d refuse to see you again until you had stopped. She wasn’t the only one to express concern, but the impressions that I harvested from people, the reactions that this behavior elicited, more or less washed right over me.
The thing that blows my mind, apart from the fact that I don’t know if I always even see twelve people in a month now, is the very sweet misdirection of my approach, my belief that this was the way to find what I was looking for. I have woken up every day since I was a teenager wanting the same thing—to love and be loved. I just thought that if I kept inviting people over, eventually someone would arrive who would parse that desire in the web of my posturing—and reciprocate it, meet it, love it for its wetness and warmth. I assumed I would meet someone who had been preparing their heart for me, too, perhaps by similarly unconventional methods.
And maybe I also thought that needs were more complicated. I thought that people could need many things. It was only incrementally that I awoke to the realization that we all walk around as protective casings for the same six or so fears and desires that beg to be satisfied or assuaged. Protecting the heart necessitates protecting the body. One is where the other lives. It took time to see anything extraordinary in this, in the body being the heart’s home. And then I saw. I saw that these two things can’t be bifurcated, one wound irrigated while the other festers. That's when fucking fell apart for me.
II.
How many hours did I spend in these rooms, surrounded by addicts who had trickled down from other support meetings? After Herculean efforts, they had lassoed in their drinking or drugging, and could finally afford the time to address this, the less-life-threatening but equally-soul-crushing tendency to fuck the pain stratospherically far away. I was a rare breed in the meetings on two counts—first, because roughly two-thirds of people who shared my affliction were men, and second, because I didn’t experience any comorbidity. For me, the hill to die on was always, only, sex.
These fellowship organizations wage endless semantic debates—sort of like Vatican II—before they’ll approve the tiniest of edits to their guiding texts. Peaches was so much looser with her terms. For all the time she spent preaching about how she proposed to dispense with the pain, she never really told the dentist which tooth hurt, never bothered to specify what exactly the pain was.
So I’ll do it: this time the ache is straightforward. I’m not actively mourning my dead spouse, not wondering how to talk about his life without betraying either his memory or myself, not struggling to extricate my body from a lifetime of invited violence. This time, my heart is just broken.
I don’t know how to touch my body and I never really have. Before, I couldn’t be tender with it—I spent years having sex that bruised my ass, blackened my eye, dribbled spit into the open cavity from which I murmured words of love, called me names that I couldn’t repeat until I started going to the meetings and embraced the fact that there were other words, different words, one could use.
Now I arc more toward lovers who speak this second language with me, who think I am beautiful and special and find ways to make that a part of touching me. This culminated with you—smutty but sweet, expansive, never unkind. For the first time, I felt like I was in the right bed.
So now, alone, I’m terrified that if I touch myself, I’ll conjure all of it, that dynamic, those movements, your body where I learned so much about my own. For the time being, I’d rather sacrifice being touched at all. I can remember my therapist saying Don’t want to get attached to someone? Don’t sleep with them. Maybe it’s too late for us to avoid attachment, but right now, I’m not worried about that. The person whose judgment makes me uncertain, the person who most needs to prove herself trustworthy before we can proceed, the person who is not getting any from me, is me.
And so I don’t. I don’t slide my hand down my long johns at night, don’t risk gasping as I come, trying to call some of you back from the vision that I saw so clearly for the moments when desire was still being built. I don’t cling to myself, don’t compress, don’t hold anything tightly anymore, since holding on to you that way netted me exactly nothing. Instead, I let myself float away from what I’ve known, cut myself loose from what I expected. I let go of every picture of the future that your face briefly heralded. I know what to do with this kind of untethered body. I turn on the music.
III.
I am eighteen in my first dorm room, and my roommate Dana has just left for a party. Dana is the first of many friends who will have a fondness for me, but not understand why I stay home so many nights. When I do try my hand at bars or shows, it’s with a mission. I go out like a stalk-and-wait hunter, not to be with people but to be with a person, to find someone who’ll press against me and light my cigarette, or kiss me in line for the bathroom, or write I THINK YOU’RE RAD next to their phone number in my shyly proffered notebook.
IV.
If I’m going to be devastated at you not being mine anymore, then the only satisfaction I can have is not being yours, either. I make up my will to disappear from your life, your understanding. I delete your phone number, remove you from my gym membership, hide all of the pictures we took together. Every thread that could coil between us is like a warm, lethal snake, and I hold its head in place with a pitchfork, where I can observe it without being struck. Where I can test the limits of my so-called charm on the bright, hissing diamond of its head.
The night that I finally discovered the origin of a cockroach population in your kitchen, you were upstairs, hanging laundry on the clothes horse. Just beside the sink, I detected a wisp of movement in the electrical socket. When I investigated with a flashlight, there were antennae angling out of every hole. The fittings were smeared with tiny daubs of ochre shit. I called you down and we both squealed, our reactions divided between satisfaction at having solved the mystery, and disgust at its resolution. We couldn’t lure the insects out, and, not wanting to electrocute ourselves by poking in, we settled on trapping them. You grabbed a roll of electrical tape and we diligently covered all of the room’s unused sockets, trying to shore something up against invasion. On one hand we were thinking, This could really work; on the other, our case was ludicrous. We had both lived in this city for long enough to know that its houses, its barriers, its relationships, are barely held in place. Everything is devastatingly porous. None of us can keep anything out, certainly not anything that really wants to gnaw its way in.
We all have to keep calibrating the boundaries of who we are, where our houses end, where our love mutates into something new. Reinvention was what I loved about Peaches in the first place. I knew that before she started recording music and touring, before The Teaches of Peaches or Fatherfucker, she had been a school teacher. The way this tidbit was told at the time, repeated ad nauseam in blurbs and reviews and write-ups, blazes clearly now as a marketing tactic. But I, like so many of my friends, was looking for models of adult elasticity, of any alternative to what we saw as the calcification that seemed to come almost ubiquitously with age. Sexlessness, temperance, pastels, and neoliberalism—these hideous qualities destined to slow-release sometime after your thirtieth birthday. We didn’t need guardians, we needed godparents—not to keep us safe and warm and fed, but to light a freak torch and show us another way.
Peaches taught me to dance, a skill which has proved itself, time and time again, capable of narrowly but ultimately offering salvation. In those first college days, when Dana had shut the door behind her, I would turn the lock softly, lower the blinds against the rest of campus, and turn on the music. I’d had two years of semi-formal ballet training as a teenager, but I didn’t like dancing to La Bayadere and Vivaldi nearly as much as Fuck the Pain Away. The irreverent lyrics made her seem free—not just free to do as she said, but free to say anything, free to let her meaning evolve over time, to never be beholden to a single frame as frozen. The chorus exists for us to outgrow it. Just because I was yours, just because I wanted to keep being yours, just because I wrote you a poem that said I believe God wants me to love you my whole life—you showed me that even God doesn’t always get what he wants.
V.
I find ways to keep moving: all dance is experimental. Sometimes I barely know who you are, you feel so far away, swallowed up in relative smallness by my ongoing, outer life. Other times it feels like I can’t expel you, like you’ve soaked into everything I own, the way you dyed my sock indigo by mistake in a vat of pungent, pure blue.
I play with hating you. To do this, I lift you entirely out of myself, where you came to dwell in such a short time. I extrapolate you, distill my love for you into a clear liquid, tipping the vial back and forth in my fingers, confusing the color of the sunset behind it for the dram’s own character. I know that this hatred isn’t real. It’s loving you minus a place to put it. It’s just a platform from which to jump somewhere new, but I let it take me, for the moments of peace that it allows. I let the day take me, decide that all I can control is what I touch, what I reach for, how I move. You are something and somewhere else, not a shadow on my heart, not the lover that I knew, though you share so many of his qualities. You’re something else instead, something unexpected, and apart from the sheer pleasure life grants us at our continued ability to be surprised, it’s nice to know that I don’t have to love that surprise the way that I love you.
VI.
It’s been the hardest to divorce myself from thinking that the things we do are things we are still doing to each other. To realize that we’re not in some grand, ongoing conversation, made up in our mutual silence by faint but significant gestures. To retract our gentle elbows from consciously entering each other's orbits. We have ceased to share any territory where it would make sense to nudge each other toward an encounter. Eventually it is all returned, the errant sweaters and books and shampoo bottles are given back, the money returned for unused plane tickets. There is an ocean above which only one of us will fly. Eventually, you will have friends I never met and I’ll be a faceless, needless part of your history—they’ll never know my name, and I’ll never know theirs. You’ll know mine, but if you’re only going to hold onto it as a relic of some sweet and permanent past, the past as it’s always happening to us, a tooth that parents keep to remind them of the way their children once were small—then it won’t matter anymore. You may as well put it down and boogie.
Toward the end, when the symbols are crashing over and over again, it’s like the song has gotten away from Peaches, like she’s lost control of it. I try to give it up, too, like my dad tries to unclench his fists and breathe as the dentist digs out what can’t stay. One more part of the body that we don’t get back. I start at one side of the room and do piqué turns—like pirouettes that have been unwrapped at the axle, a globe unrolled; its landmasses laid flat in their new, foreign configurations. No instinct to self-contain. This may be the only chance I’ll ever get to be in this much pain over you. I think of the playwright who said: It’s dark here, but full of diamonds [1]. I don’t want to fuck it away, I don’t want to write it away, I can’t do anything with it yet. I want to twirl the kind of twirls that make ballerinas into spinning tops, dervishes whose prayer depends on our proximity to the edge. I fly out of reach, circling the stage, covering more ground in rotation, somehow, than I ever could if I simply stopped spinning and ran straight for home, for where I want to be.
[1] “The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds,” from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Lily Herman is a lot funnier in person. She’s a writer and former commercial salmon fishery crew member from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Bruiser, Across The Margin, 86 Logic, and Blue Fifth Review. Her poetry chapbook, Each Day There is a Little Love in a Book for You was published by Dryad Press. She recognizes that this essay is very barely about Peaches.