Just Hear Me Out: No Song Has Slapped, Or Will Ever Slap, As Hard As LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’
Picture this: It’s 2011 and a song by little known dance duo LMFAO drops. It’s titled ‘Party Rock Anthem’ and irreversibly changes the world forever.
This week, the song celebrated 10 years since it was released. Back in January 2011, LMFAO (comprised of Redfoo and his nephew Sky Blu) were relatively unknown outside of dance music circles, but soon they would be everywhere.
Ten years ago today LMFAO dropped Party Rock Anthem completely obliterating the boundaries of what can be accomplished by a nephew and his uncle.
— luke oneil (@lukeoneil47) January 25, 2021
Happy ten year anniversary of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem release for those who celebrate
— Matthew Bisner (he/they) (@M_Bisner) January 26, 2021
It’s hard to explain just how huge this song was in Australia when released. The track still sits in the top five best-selling singles of all time in Australia, ranking higher than Elton John’s ‘Candle In The Wind’, and Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’.
So, why the hell did a song about “party rocking” become such a phenomenon? Before we discuss, you must rewatch the video.
The whole premise of the video is chilling, opening with: “On March 1, LMFAO’s Red Foo and Sky Blu slipped into comas after excessive party rocking. The next morning, their new single ‘Party Rock Anthem’ was released to the world.”
The video is a 28 Days Later parody, but instead of our protagonists fighting off zombies, they’re battling party rockers: people who simply cannot stop shuffling. Every day. They are shuffling. The premise might be farfetched, but it’s also kind of accurate. It’s impossible to listen to this song without your body bending along to the beat, as your feet shuffle along to the sound.
Like the video’s plot, the song had an infectious quality. It gets in your head and it won’t leave. The track stayed at number one on the ARIA charts for 10 weeks and was inescapable. It was on the radio on your commute to work, it was playing in shopping centres on the weekend, and it was calling people to the dance floor in clubs and pubs by night.
ten years of party rock anthem. every day i have been shuffling. please let me lay my weary bones to rest. release the curse from me
— ANDROID NYAH :3 (@licecock) January 25, 2021
While LMFAO weren’t one-hit wonders, releasing popular followup singles ‘I’m Sexy And I Know It’ and ‘Champagne Showers’, they ended up disbanding the following year. Redfoo went on to find surprise success here in Australia of all places — seriously, between 2011 and 2014, we were weirdly low-key obsessed with the rapper.
Redfoo was cast as a judge on the Australian series of The X-Factor in 2013 and 2014, and during this time he released solo tracks like ‘Let’s Get Ridiculous’ and ‘New Thang’. Both songs charted high in Australia, but failed to break the top 40 in the US.
For a short time, it felt like Redfoo was a born-again Aussie. Like US singer P!nk, he ended up finding that a disproportionate percentage of his fanbase was Australian. But unlike P!nk, this fanfare came to a crashing halt at the end of 2014, when Redfoo released a misogynistic song called ‘Literally I Can’t’ with Lil Jon and Enertia McFly. To say the song and video were offensive would be an understatement. To summarise, the song is about women rejecting men and in return being told to “shut the fuck up”.
Following a petition to fire him, Redfoo did not return to The X-Factor and despite releasing an album in 2015, his music career has never recovered. While Redfoo’s career might be dead (for now), ‘Party Rock Anthem’ will live on forever.
Never stop shuffling.