Hump Day Happiness: Party in the USA

Why it’s the best song about loving death metal ever written.

Party in the USA is the best song about loving death metal ever written.

Internet. Broken.

Party in the USA IS a song about loving death metal. It’s also a song about loving Detroit Techno, Grunge, Arpeggiated Ska, K-Pop and Xhosa click music. Because in its essence, Party in the USA is a song about loving songs.

It’s not picky about what kind. In the first verse, the Jay-Z song is on, in the second it’s a Britney song. The point is, insert your own choon. It’s just about A song you like coming on unexpectedly, something increasingly rare in our spotificationally shazamed worlds.

“I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream in my cardigan…”

Miley arrives in Hollywood, feeling out of her depth. Hollywood here is a metaphor for our lives, the storybook expectations we put on them and the quiet existential dread this breeds. But then…

“That’s when the taxi man turned on the radio, and a Jay Z song was on…”

Fortune’s smile falls upon us once again, the karmic wheel has turned, and as payback for every shitty song we’ve ever endured, here it is. A stone cold banger.

“So I put my hands up, they’re playing my song. The butterflies fly away.”

A two line poem on the ability of music to instantly and utterly transform and release us. The butterflies fly away. It’s a Žen coan about the zen your favourite song brings.

That’s the topic sentence. Then comes the punch.

“Nodding my head like “Yeah!”

As a comedian and someone on the spectrum who instinctually likes things to be ‘the way they’re meant to be’, it took me YEARS to learn to write my material the way I said it, rather than how I’d write it.

This is actually a really big difference and means you have to forget almost everything you’ve been taught about writing.

But it’s a verbal medium, if you don’t write this way, you end up having to translate it into something you’d say when you get on stage and say it anyway.

Eventually, I found the best way to get the wording right was to just transcribe recordings of good gigs. This worked but often yielded sentences you’d be kicked out of school for writing. My autocorrect is convinced I’m borderline illiterate.

So please believe me when I explain to you the difficulty and simple genius of lyrics like “Nodding my head like ‘Yeah!’”

A mere five words, but if there’s a better  description of that moment two seconds after you REALISE your favourite song has come out of nowhere.

You could hear it in an elevator and it would transport you to a dance floor where all of a sudden

‘Di da da di da da do da. Di da da di da da do da’

The baseline in Billie Jean kicks in.

“So I put my hands up, they’re playing my song. The butterflies fly away.”

You look up to the gods, your mouth opens in amazement before being overwhelmed by a smile from deep within from the realisation that unlike the other 10,076 minutes of the week, the next four minutes are SORTED.

Once the shock passes, for twenty points, in five words, can you describe what happens next?

“Nodding my head like “Yeah!”

Thank you ballboys.

“Moving my hips like “Yeah!”

Thank you linesmen.

The measure of these as lyrics is that I cannot listen to them without ACTUALLY nodding my head and screaming “Yeah!” As lyrics go, that’s a slam dunk.

And it IS “Yeah!”

It’s not “Yes”. That’s too formal. “Nodding my head like “Yes” doesn’t feel right. I think it’s because the s at the end of the word indicates an active and measured decision to end the word.

Dude, they’re playing Billie Jean! I’m not ending words right now. That’s why “Yeah!” is perfect. You were beginning to say “Yes” but then the the bassline unlocked your soul and opens the throttle. “Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaah!”

Yes is always three letters long. “Yeah!” is four, but actually it’s anything up to a million letters long pending just how MUCH of a tune just dropped, how long it’s been since you heard it and what it means to you.

It’s a manifestation of love. Firstly, your love for the song, and more broadly, in your willingness to splatter the walls with your voice and the floor with your feet, for life.

You don’t just SAY “Yeah!” You’re possessed by it. You ARE Yeah. Your whole body is Yeah. That’s why we jump up and down. Because sometimes one body just cannot contain all the Yeah.

I think we should take a moment to appreciate that the sequence of words that describes such depth of feeling is one which grammatically, is an absolute car crash of a thing.

It sounds like a child wrote it. And yet, the depth of the joy which it captures, almost necessitates a childlike phrase to capture it.

“I got my hands up, they're playing my song. I know I'm gonna be okay”

Repetition here immediately reinforces what you’ve just said.

YES, this is a fucking tune.

NO, I haven’t changed my mind on this in the past five seconds.

“Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah, it's a party in the U.S.A.”

Amongst a maelstrom of injustice, struggle, dignity, shame, honour, and strife, for four minutes and fifty five seconds I KNOW life has meaning, problems are for tomorrow and eventually, everything is gonna be fine.

Plus, it’s catchy as fuck.

Who would have thought a song about death metal would be so nuanced, plumb such depths.

Just another example, of joined up thinking.