Catchy Beats and Crazy Dances

Sometimes my mind wanders and I wonder why successful songs are, well, successful.

Do you remember Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO back in 2011...?

You turn on the radio, start flipping through the stations... all of a sudden you hit a clear station through the static and you get blasted with LMFAO yelling 'PARTY ROCK' in your face. To put some perspective, if you lived under a rock at the time, it reached #2 on the Billboard top 100 songs of 2011 right behind Adele's Rolling in the Deep. It also made a return in 2012 making it to #29. But wait, Party Rock Anthem also reached #1 on over 26 foreign charts around the world, making it an international hit.

This song was ridiculously over-played. The reasons are simple really. It had an extremely catchy hook/phrase/melody/beat that accompanied a fun, easy, cool-looking two-step dance. I mean, they don't really say much lyrically, besides 'running through girls like Drano' and mumbling something about Led Zeppelin. Oh and 'put your hands up' that's a key part, gotta remember that.

Hmm, what does this sound like?

A catchy hook with a fun dance and indistinguishable lyrics.

Oh man the puns would have been real if I was thinking of Fun.'s We are Young. But no, it's PSY's Gangam Style. Whoever wrote the song, musically, is a genius. I imagine that it happened this way. The composer flipped through his radio and heard PARTY ROCK! He eventually went to bed that day. He woke up and turned on the radio... PARTY ROCK! Realizing how popular the song was he went to his meeting and was like, "We need a catchy synth hook, a funny dance, and some english phrases thrown in to make it fun to sing... Hey sexy lady?" Fucking genius... And I don't mean that sarcastically. He was spot on.

I mean come on, even PSY capitalizes his whole name. He's been around since 2001 in comparison to LMFAO debuting in 2006, but I feel like it was destiny.

You probably heard this song through the rock you were living under but I'll drop some facts on you anyways. Gangnam Style reached #47 in the 2012 top 100 Billboard hits and #55 in 2013. A Korean song on the US Billboard hits list... Not to mention the music video being the first to break 1 billion views on Youtube; currently past 2 billion now. The phrase"Oppan Gangam Style" was inducted into the Yale Book of Quotations... Wow... The cultural impact has been amazing.

He's basically the "Lonely Island" of Korea, parodying real life issues in his songs. Known as the 'bizarre singer' PSY really does stand for Psycho.

"What I thought was, you know, crazy about music, dancing, performance, so that kind of psycho."
- BBC Interview

So for all you musicians wanting to be internationally famous, employ LMFAO, get their composer to write a beat for you, make up a silly dance, mumble about Led Zeppelin, make money, and then proceed to drive in your solid gold limo.

It blows my mind that no one knows what PSY is saying, but yet everybody loves listening to Gangnam Style. The moral of the story is this: music will forever be the universal language. It touches the most primal emotions within us regardless of what is being lyrically said. And that is something really profound to think about.

~ Melody♫