Chart Position at Time of Writing: 3 (Peak Position: #1, for 3 weeks)
Link to the waste of celluloid: You shouldn't click this.
Somewhat less idiotic lyric video: Honestly, you shouldn't click this, either.
Review: Sorry for the delay folks. What with tennis, work, and being
Plenty of things to say about this one, so let's end this intro and get to the disgusting entertainment of the bourgeois capitalist pigs:
[Kesha:] It's going down,
I'm yelling timber.
Alright, stop. A timber call is a reference to something falling that could possibly kill you. Lumberjacks use it when chopping down trees, the better to not accidentally snuff their coworkers with 6 tons of future table. Prior to the release of this song, the only time I'd heard a timber call was in cartoons (go to the 2:50 mark for your payoff.). This song isn't trying to raise a dead phrase, it's trying to resurrect a phrase that hasn't been used by non-lumberjacks since my parents were children. All this line means is that, when I show my students a Looney Tunes cartoon with a character shouting "Timber!" at least one will now assume that the line was stolen from this song. In a cartoon made 50 years before the song's release. I did not say all my students were smart.
Unrelated, but this song also features a harmonica throughout. I have never been more ashamed to play the harmonica...
You better move,
you better dance
Kesha giving me orders to dance. I have had that very nightmare.
Let's make a night,
you won't remember
Oh, look, Kesha promoting a lifestyle of meaningless hedonism. What a radical change of pace.
(Moment of seriousness:) She is currently in rehab for an eating disorder. I wish her a speedy recovery and I hope she's able to straighten her life out for 2 reasons. 1, most importantly, Kesha's a human being who deserves compassion and a shot at living a long and healthy life, getting her off a path that has claimed far too many of her musical peers. 2, more selfishly for me, if she straightens out she might stop making such horrible songs. Back to attempted humor!
I'll be the one,
You won't forget.
No offense, lass, but I think that a one night stand from an evening that the guy can't fully recall probably ends with you in a vague memory as "that girl who kept me from drowning in the toilet."
This line is followed by a lot of vaguely on-key "ooh"-ing. Because in a 3 minute, 33 second song, you have time to waste 15 seconds 4 times over the course of the song. And then, the rapping starts.
[Pitbull:] The bigger they are, the harder they fall
These big-iddy boys are dig-iddy dogs
OK, first off, what? I assumed "It's going down" was a reference to a party "going down." But now it's a reference to big guys falling? That...doesn't appear anywhere else in the song? And that segues extremely poorly into the next line?
Also, for a dude named Pitbull to derisively refer to his rivals as "dogs" sort of defeats THE WHOLE BLOODY POINT OF HIS FREAKING NICKNAME, doesn't it?!
I have 'em like Miley Cyrus, clothes off
I'll be charitable to Mr. Bull and his team of writers (more on that in about 5 lines of the song), and assume that we're now talking about women and not the "big-iddy boys" referenced in the previous line. Even being charitable, I'm pretty sure that there are almost no women who would enjoy being compared to Miley Cyrus right now.
Miss Cyrus is either going through a personal meltdown or (and this is far more likely:) is the product of a carefully calculated publicity stunt to capitalize on meaningless "controversy." Either way, this line isn't gonna generate much sympathy amongst the crowd with two X chromosomes. The only people I know who admire Miss Cyrus or find her attractive are high schoolers, and that's a subtext that I really don't want to put on this already awful song.
Twerking in their bras and thongs, timber
Ah. A reference to the thing that happened at the VMAs as a part of a flagrantly manufactured "controversy" (which was reaching a fever pitch around the time this song was written, I assume). A thing so repulsively shallow and meaningless that I won't provide links to the incident. In fact, what incident am I talking about? Incident? Huh? Doesn't ring a bell. This line is just silly.
Adding "timber" to the end just makes it sillier, unless Pitbull just felled an oak that was wearing lingere.
Face down, booty up, timber.
Pitbull has never actually seen a tree.
That's the way we like to *what*, timber.
One of the things that really irks me about rap music is the propensity amongst performers to reuse lines from older, more well-known songs. In this case, Mr. Bull is using these two lines to reference a song by 2 Live Crew called "Face Down, A** Up," which was released in 1990. You'll never guess what word Pitbull replaced with "what" in his version of this line...
I'm slicker than an oil spill.
Then don't swim in the Gulf of Mexico.
She said she won't, but I bet she will, timber.
Borrowing a line from Lil' Wayne and Drake?* I can't say anything here that will make the previous sentence funnier or sadder than it already is.
Now, dear readers, having almost reached the 1 minute mark of this...thing, I'm going to ask you to play a game with me. I want you to help me decide which of this song's writers crafted the following lines. If you don't know the writers' names, I'll give them to you in this section.:
Swing your partner round and round,
Was it Kesha Sebert?
End of the night,
Or Armando Perez?
It's going down.
Could have been Lukasz Gottwald.
One more shot,
Perhaps Priscilla Hamilton?
Another round,
Maybe Mr. Jamie Sanderson?
End of the night,
Though this line hints of Henry Walter.
it's going down.
Could be Kesha's mom, Rosemary Sebert.
Swing your partner round and round,
I have my doubts about Lee Oskar.
End of the night,
And this Greg Errico character is unlikely, too.
It's going down
And this Keri Oskar guy doesn't even have a wiki page for me to link to.
One more shot, another round
Nor does Breyan Stanley Isaac...
So, does everyone see my point in that little list? This song has a blog-record breaking 11 writers! Now, the Oskars and Greg Errico can be forgiven, as they merely provided the sample music for this garbage. (Lee Oskar is the actually-really-talented former harmonica player for the band War.) Everyone else is culpable, though, meaning that the worst lumberjack metaphor in history took 8 people to write.
I could keep posting to the end of whatever part of the song this is supposed to be (Chorus? Hook? Songwriter suicide inducer?) but you've already read it. This thing is that repetitive.
Kesha comes back in to hack her way through a few already-mocked lines, which gives me the rare opportunity to critique a song's video. Namely my critique is this: what the heck is going on in this thing?!
The video has a "country" theme, with some farm animals and a country bar. I guess it's to continue the trend of hybridizing all genres of music into one gelatinous mass of suck. But the song isn't being played on country radio. And it shouldn't be, this isn't a country song. Heck, the only thing that could make it "country" is the harmonica part, which was written by a guy from Denmark. So, if the harmonica's what inspired this insipid video, shouldn't they pay tribute to Mr. Oskar with a Viking themed video? Kesha in a horned helmet caterwauling whilst Pitbull raps with a burning peasant village in the background? No? OK.
Back to the song: the chorus is inexplicably repeated twice this time, followed by the last "original" (I am feeling charitable) lyrics in the song:
Look up in the sky,
it's a bird it's a plane.
Let the statement about "originality" in my previous lines be stricken from the record.
Nah, it's just me,
Ain't a damn thing changed.
Pitbull can fly? I mean...that's the logical conclusion here. That, or some devoted fans can recognize his private plane from the ground, but because they're Pitbull fans they're stupid and don't realize that they've already said "it's a plane," which is a correct statement.
Live in hotels,
swing on planes.
Well, I guess that answers that question. Maybe. I'll give him the "hotel" line, provided that he (and you, dear reader) promises to never explain what the line "swing on planes" means.
Blessed to say,
Money ain't a thing.
Oh, a rapper bragging about his money? Will wonders never cease?
Club jumping like LeBron,
Voli
Hey, did you know that Pitbull is from Miami, where LeBron James plays? Did you know he's the spokesperson for Voli Vodka, something I had never heard of until I wrote this stupid post? Well, now you know both of those things. All because they were unnecessarily dropped in as a bit of self-promotion 2 minutes into a song that is utterly destroying my will to keep doing this. There is graffiti in high school bathrooms that is deeper than this song. And that graffiti usually only took one lazy student skipping class to write it--this song took 8 of those same people, but grown up!
Order me another round,
homie.
Is this Pitbull asking his friend to do the ordering? That seems uncharacteristic of a rapper, especially 2 lines after bragging about his monetary wealth. It's far more logical to conclude that the line is being directed to a bartender. I assume, then, since we have seen no other shift in who's being addressed, that this whole song is being sung/rapped at a very confused mixologist. I think it's funnier to imagine just Kesha and Pitbull at the bar, performing for just the one guy, who's mad because he won't be getting a good tip with such a small crowd.
We about to clown.
Clowns?! I hate clowns. Why would Pitbull want to do this? I mean, with the makeup and the hair in this video, Kesha already looks like a clown, so seeing Pitbull in the cake makeup and a red nose would send this song into full on horror mode.
No, I don't care if that's not what he meant.
Why?
Yes, please tell me why you would make me think of clowns.
Cause it's about to go down.
So...you're about to "clown" because "it's about to go down?" It took 8 people to write this? To make a nonsensical statement and follow it with another, equally meaningless line.
And, 2 minutes into the 3 minute, 33 second long song, we're done with lyrics. Pitbull's Hook/Suicide Inducer loops again, as does Kesha's chorus, but nothing new is said or done for the last 1/3 of the song. But there are a few shots of a pig swimming in the last minute of the video. You may insert your own joke in the comments.
Recommended Alternative Listening: This is a tough one for me. I don't think you should listen to Kesha or Pitbull. Maybe try the original harmonica part played at its original speed? Or, you could look up one of the other songs featuring a female singer and a male rapper. There's only been a few billion of those made in the past few years. If you're a die-hard Pitbull or Kesha fan, you should sit down and try to add some meaning to your life. Allow Monty Python to help.
*--1:44 if you'd like to limit your exposure to profanity, idiocy, and large amounts of undeserved egotism.
