first round
(2) Nelly, “Hot in Herre”
stripped
(15) A+D (Missy/Le Tigre), “Decepta-Freak-on”
417-255
and will play on 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 3/9/24.
The Middle of Everywherre: katie moulton on How Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” Defines Millennial Dance Pop
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed, intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.—T.S. Eliot
I was like—
Good gracious!—Nelly
Start with the hook, in pieces. A kick-boom, a couple of frisky organ notes, a heraldic hi-hat. A half-phrase shouted from somewhere in the back: HOT in! For a breath, it’s the sound of a band assembling on stage, but the shambolic stance is a facade—this outfit tightens up so fast it’ll snap your neck. The guy on the mic clarifies—So hot in HURR!—but what is that? A complaint, maybe, but not a thesis. This is the loudmouth in the bleachers, establishing the call that requires a response. This is Sam Cooke, if Cooke had a tenor like sandpaper, warming the crowd at the Harlem Square Club—somebody already sweating and ready to touch the ceiling. The sharp snare and funky top-line kick in, and the guy on the mic wants you to taste that. From the first perk of ah, ah—your shoulders: shrugging, your hips: twitching, upper lip: curling—just a little bit —because oh! that is tasty, and it’s just beginning to boil.
Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is a bridge. It’s a bridge from the humble middle to points in all directions. It’s a bridge in hip-hop, between late-90s throwback tunefulness and the suburban hip-pop that would define mainstream music for the rest of the 2000s. It’s a bridge in youth-pop itself, spanning the retrograde Britney-boy-band era of 1998-2001 and launching us beyond it. It’s a bounce from the belly, shooting into every tip of nerve. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what’s on the other side of the bridge, just that we get there.
“Hot in Herre” is the double-platinum first single from St. Louis rapper Nelly’s second album, Nellyville, and arguably his most enduring and influential hit. Released in early May 2002, the track quickly dominated across platforms—radio (remember radio?), sales charts, and nascent downloading and streaming services. The record garnered Nelly the inaugural Grammy for Best Male Rap Solo Performance, its general unassailability proven by the Recording Academy’s simultaneous ghettoization of the song and inability to ignore it. Nelly was not the first melodious or singing rapper (not even from the first from the Midwest, shout out Bone Thugs-N-Harmony), but we can draw a line connecting Nelly’s popularity to the rise of iconic, non-coastal emcees who incorporated singing (hello, Kanye, Chance, Drake), as well as the pop interpolations (howdy, Jack Harlow) that dominate across genres today. He even preempted hip-hop-inflected “bro country,” Lil Nas X, and Beyonce’s current conquest of country.
The song may have been aiming for pop dominance, but its creation was the product of risk, timing, and a willingness to be offbeat. As on Nelly’s 2000 breakout debut, Country Grammar, most of Nellyville was produced by fellow St. Louisans. But just before release, the team felt something was still missing; they didn’t “have the fuse for the bomb,” Nelly said. He had just featured on NSYNC’s final single, “Girlfriend,” which was produced by the hottest rising duo, The Neptunes. Nelly sought to harness his momentum to that of the man who would be crowned the most influential producer of 2000s dance pop: Pharrell Williams.
Pharrell offered that tasty, space-funk groove—a track built around a re-working of 1979’s “Bustin’ Loose” by Chuck Brown. Brown was a DMV-based musician known as the “Godfather of Go-Go.” Go-go is a profoundly regional subgenre of funk, characterized by its syncopated bass, snare and hi-hat, and audience call and response. In an interview with The FADER, Nelly said that once they were in the studio, he caught the vibe off the beat and riffed the hook first—It’s getting hot in herre— Pharrell offered two pieces of advice: First, “You gotta have the girls answer, ‘I am, getting so hot—‘,” and second, “Whatever the verses, that first line’s gotta be something everybody’s gonna wanna say.”
And what did Nelly say, for that all-important first line?
“Good gracious—ass is bodacious!”
Somehow, in 2002, one of the biggest rappers in the world combined the least-cool exclamations of my Midwestern grandma and Bill and Ted. Nobody, I mean nobody, who takes themselves too seriously can write a line like that. And nobody can take themselves too seriously once they’ve shouted it aloud on a crowded dancefloor. It’s a cure for pretension, for self-consciousness. It’s the enactment of that Midwestern commandment: Thou shalt get off thy high horse.
“Me and Pharrell...we both think there’s no such thing as a ‘dumb’ record,” Nelly told Maxim in 2017. “We created a moment for people.”
That moment arises from a half-baked pickup line that sounds like it was cooked up by adolescents: “It’s getting hot in herre...so take off all your clothes!” He’s talking to a potential paramour, but he’s also talking to the whole room, his crew, himself. What unfurls from that brilliantly silly opening is a swift pile-up of rhymes and jokes, which Nelly delivers with color and a singsong sideline holler:
I’m waitin’ for the right time to shoot my steez
Waitin’ for the right time to flash them keys
Then, uh, I’m leavin’, please believin’,
Me and the rest of my heathens
Check it, got it locked at the top of the Four Seasons
Penthouse, rooftop, birds I’m feedin’
No deceivin’, nothin’ up my sleeve and
No teasin’, I need ya...
He can’t help himself! But he’s also trying. He’s your clever uncle, the class clown, the courtside cut-up; he wants you laughing with him. He may have a twang, and the stakes may not be dire, but there’s nothing slow here. And despite the sexual innuendo, the language is naughty but technically clean, toeing the line.
“It’s more the story of a party record,” Nelly said. “People can relate to the process of the club...as opposed to the typical ‘everybody throw your hands up,’ and that’s why it lasts longer.” I buy this conception of the song because of the fleeting but careful frame Nelly gives at the top of the song. The first line is not, in fact, “Good gracious!” but rather, “I was like—” Hearing this for the first time, as a suburban St. Louis fifteen-year-old, I’m struck and reassured that Nelly told stories with the same language that me and my friends did. In this “story-song,” we start mid-conversation, mid-party, and our pal Nelly is about to regale us. The narration then is separated ever so slightly from the action. Incident becomes practice, becomes ritual and community—and awareness of a memory even as it’s being made.
“Hot in Herre” became the quintessential “song of summer” for a summer that has stretched on now for two decades. The song aimed straight for an inclusive middle and landed a bullseye, proven by its ubiquity across demos, genres, and time. Fans have spun “Hot in Herre” everywherre, from actual hip-hop clubs to middle-school dances to warehouse noise shows. For a kind of mainstream culture, the song’s absurd refrain defined its moment and its era. (In 2019, our ruler Taylor Swift told Jimmy Fallon it was her “favorite song.”) Like any canonical text, it lives on—loudly—in our multi-generational ritual spaces: sports arenas and wedding-reception dancefloors. Today, the foremost nationally touring DJ club night celebrating the “hits of the first decade of the millennium” is called—that’s right—“Hot In Herre.”
What is danceness, after all, but a song that people actually dance to? Why does pop ubiquity matter? Because, despite all the super-worthy subcultural entries in this tourney, what’s critical about 2000s dance-pop is that it represents the last gasp of whatever we called “monoculture.” “Hot in Herre” is one of the last mass-shared hits before our irreconcilable fragmentation: pre-algorithm, pre-streaming, back when the feds still busted college kids for using Limewire and the industry relied on focus groups, radio deejays and random A&R reps—you know, good old-fashioned market manipulation!
Nelly’s success is exceptional not only because of its universality but because of his regionality. In 2000, he broke massively with “Country Grammar (Hot Shit),” a record that repped his own beloved backwater so hard and so specifically. The album Country Grammar could have been a novelty (and would have been, based on his major label’s level of attention/funding), but it blew up and just. kept. selling. Universal strove to capitalize on that organic rise, releasing hit singles from the debut for more than a year—“E.I.,” “Ride Wit Me,” “Batter Up”—then rushing the next album. In theory, that sophomore effort, Nellyville, targeted (rapid and relatively cheap) mainstream dominance—which is typically a recipe for banal disaster.
On May 7, 2002, I’m red-faced in the blaze of 4 p.m. sun, peeling myself off my high school’s flaking rubber track after practice. The Mississippi is two miles dead east. In St. Louis, you always know where the river is, even if you can't see it or feel a breeze off the bluffs. The night before, I’d seen my heroes Green Day and Jimmy Eat World at Riverport Amphitheatre, where security made me leave my CDs on the gravel outside the fence. I’m fifteen for a few more weeks. The bridge into true teenagehood is rushing fast under my feet. I’ve been waiting for more Nelly. And I’m bracing myself for the kind of disappointment that can only be delivered by your hometown.
In 1999 and 2000, we’d passed around middle-school hallways a burned copy of the “Country Grammar” single as it hit local, then regional, then national radio. We lived in a redlined metro defined by City and County, North and South, and here was somebody named Nelly saying we were all Country. We spent the summer before high school memorizing every lyric from Nelly and the St. Lunatics, catching every reference. So many references were already our own: STL, 314, M-I-crooked-letter-crooked-letter-O-U-R-I. We, too, loved the Cardinals, the Blues, the Rams. Some kids we knew, the only clothes they owned, that were never out of style, were bootleg-sports-branded jerseys. We passed all the same exits Nelly called out: Jennings, Hanley, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge. The malls that Nelly name-checks in his upward mobility—“Face and body Frontenac, don’t know how to act, without no vouchers on her boots, she bringin’ nothing back”—as in Plaza Frontenac, the shopping center in the wealthy suburb named for a colonial French governor of Canada—those were the same faraway fancy places where we could afford to walk around but never buy anything.
Me and my friends were white from South County. Nelly and the ‘Tics were Black from University City (U. City), which was actually Mid-County. Their suburb was more urban than ours, older, first accessible by streetcar in the last century. The old streetcar line is Delmar Boulevard, running east-west through an entertainment district called the Loop, anchored by Blueberry Hill, the landmark restaurant where, up until he died in 2017, Chuck Berry—Father of Rock and Roll—still played the basement club once a month. Delmar Boulevard is also a long-standing racial dividing line of the city between the white south and the Black north. On the other hand, my suburb sprung up around the old telegraph line running north-south along the river, and by our time, there was no way to get there but by car. And nothing to draw anybody who wasn’t just heading home.
Still, Nelly was technically a suburban kid, too, and we could hear it—not like us, but also, like us. More specifically than anything else we’d seen or heard. We felt immediate affinity. In a hollowed-out city like St. Louis, there’s a tendency to claim both your particular pocket and the whole metro area. We know kids at every Catholic high school in town. We gather in large crowds in the same places, and we have to travel a ways to get there. I ran track against the U. City team, often lost to them in the 400. Even his name—Nelly, short for Cornell—wasn’t tough but diminutive, familiar, belying deep-seated confidence. When Nelly landed a record deal, his friends and collaborators were working at the airport, the barbershop, McDonald’s, and Office Max. Nelly had been a serious high-school athlete and low-grade dealer, who’d considered three paths to adulthood: ball, streets, or music. Soon enough, I would sit on gym bleachers as a guidance counselor told us to divide ourselves into our post-grad plans: state school, community college, military, or job.
In the music video for “Country Grammar,” the setting is a block party, the street between humble red-brick houses near Natural Bridge and Kingshighway jam-packed with tricked-out Cutlasses and revelers in booty shorts and Cardinals jerseys. The lighting is a little gray, made to look “real,” and there’s no question this street and the people in it, if not the level of festivity, are real. The video opens and ends with the camera on the ground, aimed up at a lone Nelly against a clear blue sky, standing framed by the Gateway Arch monument above his head.
In St. Louis, we talk a lot about the Arch. We talk about the river below and measure floods by how many steps the brown water rose to lap at its great steel feet. We talk a lot about 1904. Our public park is bigger than Central Park; our museums are world-class and they’re free—all built for the World’s Fair in 1904. Constructed as a temporary pageant for outside visitors, to welcome the world to the river city. Once the Fair was over, it was all meant to be torn down. Instead, we kept it. Kept the limestone buffed, certain avenues shaded with trees. We mention that we were once bigger than Chicago, but they bet on the railroads, and we bet on the river. We always bet on the river.
I was a kid who loved St. Louis and hated my suburb, who dreamed of leaving because I believed there was more for me someplace else. We were a gateway, after all. St. Louis may be a place to return to, but first it was a place to leave. To stay meant to be concentrated in your smallness, to be doomed to asking, “Where’d you go to high school?” for the rest of your life. The artists left as soon as they could or when they couldn’t take it anymore: T.S. Eliot, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker (“Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear, humiliation, misery, and terror”), Tennessee Williams, who called the city “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid, and provincial.”
But Nelly didn’t just represent St. Louis; Nelly claimed St. Louis. As Nelly burst onto the national stage, it was precisely this uncategorizable “Midwest Swing” that was being celebrated. Uncategorizable and idiosyncratic, perhaps not because it was outside dominant culture but because in the middle, we have to take a little bit from everything flowing through. We have to study the maps. We have to know about you, elsewhere. But we figured that elsewhere, people must not have a damn clue what Nelly was talking about.
Yet in the early years of the Millennium, the mainstream did seem to care. Cameras and airwaves seemed interested in spotlighting Nelly, thereby spotlighting our spot. Coming of age at precisely that moment likely gave me and my friends a miscalculation of our centrality to the larger world. We considered ourselves to be the truest of Millennials—those who came into adolescent consciousness right at the flip of the year 2000. And suddenly, everybody had heard of our city. When we met kids in other places (leadership camp, newspaper conferences—yes, hometown escape velocity takes many forms), they always said, “St. Louis? Oh, do you know Nelly?” Our answer was always: Of course. Later, when I get to college on the East Coast, my roommates from Queens say, “Missouri? That’s one of those square states that votes for Bush, right?”—and then, “Do you know Nelly?” Studying abroad in England, I flirted with a bartender who called me “Nelly” rather than my name, and asked if I owned a gun back home.
Because even though Nelly rarely rapped about violence or even carrying weapons (with the notable exception of “Country Grammar” where “street sweeper, baby, cocked” was edited to “boom, boom, baby, uh, uh” for radio), this was another thing people heard about St. Louis: It was dangerous. People got shot there. According to U.S. News & World Report, St. Louis was the “Most Dangerous City in America,” based on the FBI analysis of violent- and property-crime rates from 2003 to 2009—another dominant statistic of the decade. And that’s where the lie—I know Nelly—breaks down. The median income isn’t that different between U. City and my suburb, but the crime rate is unfathomably higher. Same county, different planets.
It seemed possible in those years that our STL culture could be respected and influential on culture at large. That in so doing, our local culture could be shared among us at home too. That the city’s longstanding inferiority complex, “glorious potential,” racial injustice, and provincial terror could be brought into the light because it mattered. That all the industry, civilizations and people who had been lost and who remained mattered. Mattered and spoke. And when they spoke, sometimes they lilted and purred not quite like anyplace else.
So in 2002, when I listen to “Hot in Herre” for the first time, I’m anxious whether the hometown hero will deliver or melt in the glare. Or worse—abandon us. But there are reasons to be optimistic: The album is titled Nellyville, which we assume is another elevation of this city, sharing his crown. And the first single insists on its peculiar accent.
He stuck the accent right in the title: “Herre,” meaning “here,” is pronounced HURR, a kind of drawl punctuated by a hard R. For Black St. Louisans, other words that may rhyme closely with here include her, there (as in the Chingy hit “Right Thurr”), hair, year, and even mayor. “Everything collides linguistically in St. Louis,” says Dr. John Baugh, a Washington University (WUSTL) professor specializing in social stratification of linguistic behavior, and linguistic variation among African Americans. “It’s where the South meets the North. It’s where the East meets the West.” The ”urr” sound likely traveled north along the more rural Mississippi, where it collided with the Inland North Vowel Shift of people moving south from Chicago. Within this national crossroads, St. Louis’s history of extreme racial segregation likely isolated the dialect. That’s what happens in our “once-great,” long-overlooked American cities, cities like Nelly’s St. Louis, like Chuck Brown’s Baltimore. If you don’t leave, you become more and more yourself.
In 2002, the sound feels new—or rather, old, more organic, warmer. But sure enough, there’s Nelly’s voice—a stringent, friendly, party-starting rasp, linking go-go and Midwest swing, bridging the underestimated in-betweens. Nelly still shouts out “the Lou” once and his own Vokal-brand tank top. The language is a translation, another kind of bridge between Nelly, his roots, and the rest.
“Hot in Herre” both echoes and subverts Nelly’s first hit, “Country Grammar,” from the emphasis on local linguistics to the opening shout of Hot--! and edgy hooks cloaked in playground chants. Both songs are eternal turn-up anthems, and the music videos depict fantastical parties for the ages. Instead of a derrty-summer block party, “Hot in Herre” is a club scene, highly stylized, shot in glossy oranges and blues, featuring immaculately sweaty women who are distinctly no longer the same girls from the neighborhood. Still, everybody is elbow-to-elbow, getting down, and all the women just happen to be wearing bikinis under their halter tops. At one point, the ceiling billows with actual flames, but the clubgoers mistake the DJ’s warnings as a party-starting tactic, chanting back, “We don’t need no water—let the motherf*cker burn!”
In the video, Nelly is wearing what became his trademark—a white Band-Aid on his cheek, which people loved to poke fun at as an absurd fashion affectation. The story goes that Nelly used the bandage to cover a basketball injury, but kept wearing it in tribute to City Spud, his friend, producer, and fellow St. Lunatic who has a show-stealing verse on “Ride Wit Me” and who was incarcerated just as their careers were about to blow up. (City, or Lavell Webb, would not be released from prison until 2008, just in time for the wane of Nelly’s imperial period and the decade.)
Listening to “Hot in Herre,” I can tell right away that Nelly is now talking to more than just “us”—whoever he imagines as his home-team crowd—that he’s spreading his arms, goading everyone to peel off their defenses. We can dance to it; we can repeat the jokes. The jokes are so corny we’ll still be telling them in twenty years. And I think, briefly, that maybe he’s figured out a way to make it out and make it home.
It turns out, we were wrong about “Nellyville.” The title track does not proclaim a lush homecoming. Instead, it’s a conception of utopia—“where all newborns get a half-a-mill’” and “nobody livin’ savage, errybody got change” and “ain’t nobody shot, so ain’t no news that day.” The bridge, in true country songwriting fashion, punctures the dream, as Nelly keens, “I just want to go and look/Won’t you please take me on in.” “Nellyville” is definitively not St. Louis. It’s not where Nelly is, or where he can even get to.
The official “Hot in Herre” video was not the first.
The original, rarely seen video, is another club scene. But this party is happening inside the Arch. The link is literal: The world’s first image of Nelly is him tapping on the camera from the ground below the Arch, and now he’s at the very top of the symbol of his city. That room, of course, doesn’t exist as such. As St. Louis schoolchildren, who get bussed there on a field trip every single year, know: Once you ride the glowing-egg elevator up a click at a time up one grand leg of the Arch, the “top” is a narrow hallway covered in industrial carpet. There’s nothing to do but peer down from cloudy windows to see just how puny our city looks from up there. (As one KMOX reporter put it, “Something great happened here, but it’s over now.”) But that scene, of a club full of real bodies draped in recognizable glamor, at the top of our small world, is a powerful fantasy of belonging.
I was like—“Hot in Herre,” then, is both a bridge and a compromise. We from the middle know about these things. We can’t make you know us, how it feels to grow up with a river above your head, watchful of how it rises and falls. We can’t stick you in the wild heat of the downtown fair on the Landing, sweat stains on the concrete, fire rocketing from the barges in the dark. You can’t be with me all those summers, driving the highways from South County to my job in Ferguson off Natural Bridge, windows down because the AC busted again in my inherited 2002 PT Cruiser, hot wind buffeting you in the face as we speed under the Arch’s gleaming shadow, under and around without stopping the neighborhoods where kids still get shot, meaninglessly, all the time, the river on our right in the morning, and on the left headed back again.
But Nelly proved he could create a moment for folks to step into, shake their ass inside, return to. He proved that if you mix a little bit of (ah, ah) unabashed particularity with a little bit of (ah, ah) joyful dexterity, you can pack the dancefloor with goofy, indiscriminate sweat, across geographies and generations. That a song, somehow, can be for all and for us, and maybe that the flow between can expand our definitions of both.
Katie Moulton is the author of Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty (Audible 2022). You can find links to more of her work at katiemoulton.com. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA. She makes her home in Baltimore, but she remains, forever, so St. Louis (ask my tattooist).
trying for joy: ander monson on a+d's Decepta-freak-on
I’ve been trying, really trying to write this essay from a place of joy. That’s where the best dance music—and the best art—comes from.
But it’s been hard.
Maybe you feel like the best art comes from pain. I like dance-pain too. I love dance-love, but no one truly loves a dance love song (dance is about liberation and becoming, not love). We love a pain dance song too but only when it becomes something else. (You can go to March Sadness for that.)
Around 20 years ago I read somewhere that in order to write a great love poem the poet must love the poem more than the beloved.
It really annoys me that I didn’t write down the source because I think about it pretty often.
I’m definitely not sure that this is true. Some days I do. It kind of pisses me off as a past and current beloved but as a poet I get it.
What is definitely true, though, is this: to write a great dance song you must love the song more than its subject. You must commit to the song more than the meaning or the lyrics or the place the song came from. You must find some delight in it and follow it as far as it will take you.
It’s the song that ensorcels. It’s the song that transports. It’s the sound that casts the spell. It’s what you’re in until you’re not in it anymore, and thank god for the extended remix that keeps you there longer, as long as you can take it.
That’s my theory of a great dance song: something not afraid to commit to its bit, to recognize and build on the power of where it comes from but to know enough to move away from pain and anger and loneliness and to become something transcendent, something only about itself.
Only then is it good enough for you, the listener, the dancer, the reader.
*
A lot about my life has sucked this past year. I lost a close friend. I lost a former student a week later. My work has become extremely dumb and has gotten predictably dumber (shout out to my friends and colleagues for wading through it). I don’t even have to zoom out to get into even bigger events to see catastrophe, though that’s there too.
All to say tt’s been a rough ride to this March.
I’ve been waiting for this month to begin. Not necessarily to write about A+D, in this case Adriana A, the A in the A+D, the DJ who made this and it turns out most of the other mashups I love, past and present. Not necessarily to write about the mashup as the definitive form of the 00s (but it is). But to be here on this dancefloor with you all, shaking whatever we brought here off.
*
Gimme some new shit.
The 00s didn’t invent the mashup. That goes way back in DJ culture, and anyone who’s ever played two songs on top of each other knows the glee that can bring. But the 00s was the decade when the technology to really make them work trickled down to the people, and, even more importantly, the decade of the mp3 and the decade of Limewire and the like, where music got pulled permanently loose from CDs and vinyl and the unbeloved tech of the cassette tape and became digital and available kind of everywhere, for better and for worse.
As a result music and meaning also became more amateur, at least for a while. Stuff started circulating further beyond radio and video, not that in the 00s MTV still played videos (shout out to MTV2 and even VH1 for carrying it forward). I don’t know that the 00s democratized music, but they sure made it vastly easier for me to re-buy or re-find the 400 CDs I had stolen out of my storage unit in college. Some of those, those Tori Amos obscurities, are impossible to find anyway, and if I could just grab a download of them I’d be good henceforth, which luckily I 100% can thank you Internet.
I suppose it was also the decade of the 128k bit rate and lossy compression which is not to be mourned, but whatever. The decade where many of us forgot about depth and quality of sound and just collected as much as we could, more than we could even listen to in some cases. The decade where we got used to no longer paying for music (which has a lot of bad effects: go buy albums from bands you love, my dudes).
One of those mp3s I collected and most coveted in this era, created around 2004, according to Adriana, who made the mashup, was “Decepta-freak-on” by A+D, a mashup of Missy Elliott and Le Tigre that blew my fucking MIND the first time I heard it. Let’s embed it here again if you missed it the first time, or if you listened to it once, listen to it again:
I mean I seriously lost my shit.
How gloriously it works! How seamless it seems!
People here I come.
I put it on so many mix CDs that year—and after.
I’d heard some mashups before. This was before Girl Talk (for me, and Girl Talk is something else entirely, more collage than mashup). I liked to fuck with the few listeners to my late-night college radio show by playing two tracks on top of each other that turned in different ways. A friend in grad school (shout out to Rob Hartzell) made me a whole CD of mashups I think he’d made of a favorite shared band, the Sisters of Mercy, spliced with artists like Whitney Houston. It wasn’t great but it was fucking cool and it was even cooler that he did it and that he could do it.
Decepta-freak-on, however, is both fucking cool and fucking great.
You know how I can tell it’s great? Because it has subsumed both Get Ur Freak On and Deceptacon in my mind. It ate them both! And they are both great. But Decepta-freak-on is better.
I can’t overemphasize this point enough. It’s the key takeaway of this entire essay.
After you hear Decepta-Freak-On you, or I, anyway, cannot hear Missy without wanting Le Tigre, and you/I can’t hear Le Tigre without feeling like it’s clearly missing Missy. “Decepta-freak-on” has fused and completely obviated the two. It’s that good. It transcends. It’s the hottest round.
I hope you have the same experience. Maybe you won’t today, or tomorrow, but it lodges itself in you, and you’ll find yourself wanting to hear this, the ultimate version of both songs.
I know you’re not going to be able to hear this anywhere on the music streaming services, those poor substitutes for infinities.
But you can hear it here thanks to Adriana, who put it up on Youtube again for us.
You can also hear it at the Bootie dance parties, which Adriana and her partner the Mysterious D have been throwing in major cities and also Cleveland since the 00s. They sound like an absolute BLAST. Come to Tucson, Adriana!
*
Because of the difficulty of this past year I’ve been carrying a lot more latent anger than I am accustomed to. I should probably go tell this to a therapist or something, as some of my friends have gently suggested, but I’m not doing that. That anger is probably seeping out of me in ways not obvious to me, like an unnoticed undertone in an email or a quickness to respond to a slight.
I’m not sure these are bad uses of anger, though. I’m pretty conflict avoidant by nature. But this year I’ve felt a lot less conflict avoidant, and maybe that’s a win. Or maybe I’m just pissed off that my friend is dead and assholes are ruining my joy I mean my job. Maybe I also mean my country. This fucking world. I like to hold my anger like a staff. I want to hit some shit with it.
But really I don’t care for the feeling, that heat that welling up, that lose control. It’s not useful for me. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t help me make anything, or not usually it doesn’t. It doesn’t help me build anything or make spaces for others to make something or show something off.
The real question, the only question for me in this tournament: How can I transform my anger into joy?
How do others do this?
Maybe that’s the actual pull quote from the essay.
You know what does this? Deceptacon, and so does Get Ur Freak On.
Deceptacon is resounding from a pissed off place (theories abound but, see the comments, it’s more of a diss track for a specific, dude, shocking/true) but ascends from its initial anger to incandescent, silly-lyriced fun. It’s kind of a collage of a song to begin with, glossing a line from 1961’s profoundly unserious “Who Put the Bomp” by Barry Mann and throwing it together into a shouty/chanty jam, arguably more interested in language than its own anger. Yes it’s pissed, but more importantly, it pisses itself off into being fun. It’s leveled up. It’s something else now, beholden not to the dissed but to itself and I guess also, by extension, to us.
Get Ur Freak On is super obviously all strut and stuff, the debut of the new, big big talk, big big style, big big fun, big big video and moves, from the meek: the ascendance of the freak. It’s not as shocking that it’s about fun, the pose, the rhymes, the shape it makes when you sing it.
Then come on get me now. Is you with me now?
(And holy shit making this little research move into the lyrics I only now found out 23 years later that Timbaland’s real name is Timothy Z. Mosley?)
I’ve actually never thought about the lyrics (this is very me, and as a white dude rapping the lyrics I have to gloss my way past the n word, a little blip of discomfort and accommodation every time, but I do it), but it’s not just Missy telling us about Her Freak. It’s Missy telling Us to get Our Freak On!
Copywritten so don’t copy me, I know but I hear her asking us to freak her track.
And so Adriana did. Someone had to!
You take and mash together these two strutting tracks—indie dance punk and hip hop—and you get strutting squared at least. Cubed, really.
Because there’s an audacity to mashing up songs and there’s a real audacity to mashing up these songs: like who thought these two songs could work together and who made them work together? Adriana, A+D, that’s who.
She and I talked about mashups and 00s dance culture and Decepta-freak-on on Zoom (we’ll publish the whole interview midmonth), and she told me that this was only her third mashup in a long career of them [links], and it was the one that spread, kind of mini-viral before viral was viral, and it got to Le Tigre, and they liked it, and she heard it even got to Missy, and she liked it, and thought about trying to put it out. How could she not?
One of Adriana’s secret powers, as a former indie kid who also promiscuously listened to other genres when that was complicated to do given the genre-groupthink of the era, was that she loved all of it, and thought all of it worked, and maybe it could work together in ways that surprised. It didn’t work on the radio together. But in the club, well, that was something else, a third space, not work not home, not self not not-self, a place for being other, for becoming.
When I hear Decepta-Freak-On in 2004 and again in 2024 I hear sheer delight. I hear audacity. Maybe Audacity too. That’s the thing Adriana is after, she tells me: delight, surprise, the moment where you hear something you didn’t expect to hear mashed up and mixed into something you did. Something you didn’t know and something you do. Something borrowed, something blue. It brings the Gen Zers to the floor and the Gen Xers to the floor. (It brings me to the floor.) It might also bring the Boys to the Yard. It overlaps two worlds and punches a hole through both, permanently anchoring them together and throwing away the unused parts.
Y’all can’t stop me now. I’m lasting twenty rounds. But I’ll take one.
I'm outta fuckin time I'm a gasoline girl with a vaseline mind.
So here we are. This is your only opportunity to vote for Missy, queen of the dancefloor, in this tournament. This is also your only opportunity to vote for Le Tigre in this tournament. This is one of your opportunities to vote for mp3s and Limewire in this tournament. To vote for joy and surprise and emergence in this tournament. To vote for the ascendance of the amateur in the tournament and the flattening of technology in this tournament. Whatever. My opponent kicks ass [links to last year’s bangers] here too but let’s give this thing an upset, blow up the apple cart and the established order! Let’s put a bomb in the bomp-a-lomp-a-lomp. Let’s sw-sw-switch our style and let it make the boom go boom and let it fill the room. I think there’ll be something sparkly/sparky left.
Ander Monson is lasting twenty rounds. Y’all can’t stop him now lasted one round. Moulton stopped him now.