Back in late October, I was preparing for a Halloween party at the apartment of one of my sisters. The night before the party, we went grocery shopping and sat down with some friends to do some other decorating and prep work — a pretty chill night, all told.

That same night, the night before my sister’s party, my sister’s downstairs neighbors threw their own party. The mostly nondescript, predictable dance and hip hop beats reverberated through the walls as we cut out bats from posterboard. We mostly paid it no mind — but there was one song that was so instantly recognizable, even though only its rhythm and baseline were clearly audible, that we had to stop and remark on it.

That week in late October, the song we remarked on hit number 1 on the billboard charts. It has gone on to become one of the most ubiquitous popular “rhythmic contemporary” dance tracks of day, “Like a G6” by a posse of Asian-American electro-hop artists from Los Angeles, Far East Movement:

“Like a G6” was the first ever mainstream #1 song by an Asian-American musical group (as with C&C Music Factory, the women singing in the video aren’t formally in the group — all four formal members of the group are Asian-American. It is a song of illusions, “not-quite-there”s and unrealities. Like much electronic music, it is both within and preoccupied by the debiologicization (which was not a real word, UNTIL NOW) of human artifice —  the sense that what people make is made by automatons with interchangeable parts, appealing on teleological grounds to the relationship between song and dance (and the club experience in general) as the fulfillment of industrially and technologically admirable qualities of the human body.

It also talks about a whole bunch of stuff that is just totally out of place, which, if you’ve read my Musical Talmud entry on Ke$ha, you may know I see as characteristic of contemporary popular music as part of an effort to make the music more memorable and more likely to go viral as it creates tension and disruption in consideration and interpretation.

It strives to be less predictable by being less correct, and, in doing so, tells us something about celebration and cultural influence.

More on this and on Far East Movement’s nonce definition of “gangsta” (which matches no definition I have ever heard) after the jump —

Like a WHAT?

The first point of interpretation that usually comes up in this song is exactly what a G6 is. While, when researching this article, I found a number of interesting interpretations, I’m pretty sure Far East Movement is not talking about the six largest nations of the European Union or the G6 Rhino howitzer, the South African artillery vehicle:

But is in fact talking about the Gulfstream G650, a private jet that is so fancy that it hasn’t even been sold to the public yet and is already been touted as the fanciest private jet in the long, fancy history of fancy private jets:

This isn’t a controversial interpretation – the plane appears at the end of the video. So, to the question “What is a G6?” the answer is “A specific model of airplane.” Thus, to be “so fly, like a G6,” means to be both fancy and airborne, two qualities bound up quite nicely in the business of executive aircraft sales.

However, prior to this song coming out, not a whole lot of people knew what a Gulfstream G650 was, and I’ll venture to say that most of the people who hear the song will never know. The song doesn’t depend on people knowing what a G6 is – it’s fine if people stay ignorant of it – otherwise, they’d explain it. It’s not like the song is being crushed by a surplus of words. But they don’t, and I think that’s on purpose.

My own opinion on this, which is a little speculative, is that “G-6” is meant to create an impression of technology so advanced and fancy it hasn’t come out yet, in line with cell phone and mp4 player terminology, which is something very much in the wheelhouse of the demographic this song is reaching out to (the word “wheelhouse,” by the way, is not in the wheelhouse of this group). In cell phones, we have G-1s, G-2s, 3G, and 4G. IPods now have 4G models. Even though these are all different things, it’s notable that nobody has a G6. G6s are beyond the pale. It’s like when somebody used to put the number “2000” after something to make it awesome.

So to be “Like a G6” is to be:

• Like a very fancy luxury airplane
• Like the experience of flying on a very fancy luxury airplane
• Technological and futuristic in a sleek and designed way, like a very fancy cell phone (indeed, the first object to show up in the video is an iPad, and the last is an airplane)

Note of course that, in a electronic song (yes, it is somewhat hip hop as well, but I do thing this song seems more techno-futuristic than Afrofuturistic), it is pretty common to draw comparisons between people and machines. So this is pretty par for the course.

Like a WHO?

Poppin bottles in the ice, like a blizzard

When we drink we do it right gettin slizzard

Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6

Now I’m feelin so fly like a G6

Like a G6, Like a G6

Now I’m feelin so fly like a G6.”

Most of “Like a G6” is about going out on the town and drinking a lot of champagne in an ostentatious manner. That’s pretty much it. It’s conspicuous how little actually happens in the lyrics of the song and how few different things are described. But there’s one note it keeps hitting that gives me pause: its invocation of Southern Hip Hop, and things Southern Hip Hop is known for doing that don’t really seem characteristic of this sort of musical act at all – or of the presentation of this song, or its aesthetic.

Are we really to believe that, as Far East Movement prepares for its evenings opening bottles of champagne in fancy electronic dance clubs and their own homes where, lest we forget, they keep the company of:

sober girls around me, they be actin like they drunk

They be actin like they drunk, actin-actin like they drunk

When sober girls around me actin-actin like they drunk.”

Are we really supposed to believe that Far East Movement, on the way to their third club of the night, celebrating their wealth with relatively responsible people, launching a contagious atmosphere of fun, where they prize nothing so much as the expensiveness and proliferation of their champagne and luxury goods (and fancy electronic devices) — Are we really supposed to believe that Far East Movement — wait, it’s even worse than that — are we supposed to believe that the 20-something girl singing lead vocals who is hanging out with Far East Movement and being all impressed by all their access to fancy stuff — that she is drinking prescription cough syrup?

And are we really, really to believe that, Far East Movement, while doing all this, as they claim, resembles in any but the most superficial way, Oscar-winning  Tennessee hip hop group Three 6 Mafia?

Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6″

I guess they both do dance-oriented hip hop with produced electronic elements, but I don’t get a similar sense of aesthetic or lifestyle from these two groups at all.

This is the song that won Three 6 Mafia the Oscar, from the movie Hustle and Flow (In their defense, most of their presentations do not involve quite so much interpretive dance):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfD2PWx3WHg

This is the song that won Far East Movement its first big taste of mainstream exposure, from Fast and the Furious, Tokyo Drift:

Well, I guess they use samples and references in similar ways sometimes, and they make similar appeals to past musical genres sometimes, but Three 6 Mafia seems to care a great deal that what they are doing be considered seriously. The stakes are higher – Three 6 Mafia sings a lot about dying, while Far East Movement does not. Three 6 Mafia lives as ostentatiously as it does for socioeconomic reasons that they talk about in their music. Here’s a really good example of a self-conscious Three 6 Mafia song:

There’s a lot of superficial discussion of fashion and drinking and having fun, but it is in opposition to poverty and difficult living – compensating for a bleak existence with posturing and showing off, and finding in the riches that come from professional success and inspire respect compensation and comfort from a bleak existence. This is the kind of attitude that has multiplatinum recording artists drinking prescription medication for fun.

Lest we think today’s hip hop stars have no edge because their music is so heavily produced, remember that Li’l Wayne was raised by a (mostly) single teenage mom in New Orleans, that he was constantly involved in all sorts of trouble and poverty-inspired hardship, and that he accidentally shot himself when he was 13. It makes sense he’d self-medicate with opiate cough medicine.

Far East Movement met as kids, graduated high school together, and blog together, do world tours and start websites — nothing I can find by any of them talks about why they make music independently of how much they love it, their very mature and well-developed commitment to the Asian-American musical community in Los Angeles and their aesthetic perspectives on dance clubs and DJs.

This is fine, of course (far be it from me to demand trivial backstory), but what it means is Far East Movement as musicians are a lot closer to, say, the Neptunes than they are to Three 6 Mafia, so it seems odd they would draw the comparison. Why are they talking about drinking sizzurp and getting slizzard, which is a Southern Hip Hop aesthetic, in an electro-hop song that bears very little at narrative or philosophical similarity to a Three 6 Mafia song outside of drinking a lot of champagne?

Enter Sexy Bitch

To answer this question, I turn to one of the most ironic songs in contemporary popular music, “Sexy Bitch,” by David Guetta, featuring Akon. This is the radio edit, but the video is still very, very racy, with lots of women in bikinis and stuff, so be careful where you watch it:

(actually, it looks like the still that the video shows when embedded is women in thongs, so I’m going to do y’all a SFW favor and just link to it here rather than embed it)

I really enjoy this song for the following lines:

She’s nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before

Nothing you can compare to your neighborhood hoe

I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl

Without being disrespectful

The way that booty moving i can’t take no more

I have to stop what I’m doing so i can put on my clothes

I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl

Without being disrespectful

Damn Girl

Damn Girl You’se a sexy bitch, a sexy bitch, a sexy bitch.”

You are trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful? Well, you are not trying very hard! “This woman is amazing. I mean, she’s so amazing, that she doesn’t resemble the prostitutes in our neighborhood at all! She’s not even a little bit like a local prostitute.”

See, thing is, I believe Dave and Akon. I believe they’re trying to figure out the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful, but all the words that they allowed to use in this sort of song to describe women are disrespectful, so they have a problem.

Songs for professional corporate distribution and public consumption are so tightly produced and marketed that there is a real lack of discursive space to expand what they are talking about past the strictly held and much-repeated conventions of their genre. There is a ton of influence from the way these pieces have been done before that partially dictates how they will be done again.

Now, when I say “allowed” – I don’t mean “there’s a guy in a suit who is going to show up and force them to use these words,” I mean that they commit themselves to making this kind of music and frame the discourse of that project in such a way that they appear to have no other choice – the discursive space it occupies is really restrictive by the nature of the kind of speaking they are doing, not because of the rules of the company.

Are you a dude talking about a girl in a dance song? You have to talk about her booty moving on the dance floor in some way. Has to be her booty. Has to be too much in some way. From the repetitive way contemporary hip hop dance tracks talk incessantly about the torture of moving booties, you’d think they were all riffing on Petrarch (and actually, they are, but that’s not important right now).

What does this have to do with “Like a G6?” At this point, it seems as if, to make a song like this, the inclusion of the rote images — the bottles, the ice with multiple meanings, being in a club all the time – these are all in the song because they have to be in songs like this. Other hip hop artists constantly name-check each other for reasons that have become at this point almost entirely dependent on habit and the norms and marketing dynamics of the industry, so of course Far East Movement does it as well, tossing in some Southern hip hop conventions that is only southern insofar as much as it is way down Highway 1 from Mendocino County.

It is almost as if other words that might be in a song like this simply do not exist. The restrictions here are staggering.

Has anybody actually stopped and thought about how many songs are about popping bottles in the club? Like, thousands, at least. Tens of thousands if you count amateurs and up-and-comers. It’s absurd. Popping bottles in the club is not a fundamental part of human experience. Most people in any country or city with maybe five or six exceptions in the world, don’t even go to clubs for recreation. It’s bizarre that it’s so ubiquitous, but you can’t blame Far East Movement for it — like most good electronic artists, they’re not growing the tree, they’re carving and recarving the wood.

Most perplexingly, Far East Movement seems to think that:

Girl i keep it gangsta, poppin bottles at the crib

This is how we live, every single night.”

That’s pretty funny, because I don’t recall being gangsta involving drinking champagne at home. As I recall, being gangsta is a little more like this:

Gangsta rap tends to either glorify stuff like this or cite it as a tragic reality — unpleasant, awful even, but necessary to endure if born into the wrong circumstances. Even Tupac had many not quite flattering things to say about the gangsta lifestyle, and tended to think that leisurely drinking of champagne was something gangstas did not get the chance to do nearly as often as they might like, at least in this world:

I would venture to say if you drink champagne at home every single night, you are quite thoroughly failing to keep it gangsta. Unless you turn the champagne sideways before you drink it, I guess.

The 808 bump

The last piece of the close reading is the bridge:

Its that 808 bump, make you put yo hands up

Make you put yo hands up, put yo, put yo hands up

(You can’t Touch this)

Its that 808 bump, make you put yo hands up

Make you put yo hands up, put yo, put yo hands up

(You can’t Touch this)

Hell Yeaaa, Make you put yo hands up, put yo put yo hands up

Hell Yeaaa, Make you put yo hands up, put yo put yo hands up”

This is the part where they tell you to put your hands up, which is similar to the part where they talk about popping bottles, or the part where they rifle off images from Southern Hip Hop – it’s all part of the recycled aesthetic. (I’m not going to touch the can’t touch this part.)

The “808 bump” probably refers to flying their fancy airplane to the main area code for Hawaii, as well as perhaps to the TR-808, an early 80s drum machine that was notable for being affordable when it came out (about 1/5 the cost of other models) and thus very influential in the production of electronic dance tracks. But yeah, given the litany of hip hop imagery, when you hear a three-digit number, it usually refers to an area code, and going to Hawaii makes sense in the context of the song.

Conclusion

For all this stuff about this song that is so familiar and rote, the song really isn’t familiar and rote as a final product. It certainly felt new and distinct when my sister and I heard just the bass line through the wall. Part of what makes it memorable is that it takes these symbols and words it has to use to fit into its genre, and it stretches them to within an inch of their lives.

Are they drinking sizzurp? Of course not!

Are they like Three 6 Mafia? Of course not!

Are they flying in a G6? Of course not! The plane isn’t even out yet.

So “Like a G6” takes a bunch of familiar and unfamiliar stuff and laces it together into a club narrative that is very much a fantasy, a shattered echo remixed and redesigned from previous influences and genre constraints. It sometimes seems as if it is being sung from very close up and sometimes from very far away. This all makes it more memorable than yet another straight-up dance track about popping bottles in the club might have been. #1 hits always have to be more than a little weird to work.

It’s also notable how much this is put together from parts rather than an organic description of a single night. Because, in the end, to be like a G6 is to be like a machine – a very expensive, very fancy, very precisely engineered machine meant to do something a whole lot of other people already do in a slightly fancier way than anybody else has done before.

A note on ethnicity

You’ll notice I’ve sort of danced around the issue of Far East Movement’s ethnicity. The group is Asian American, whereas most of the professional practitioners of this sort of work are Black.

It would be foolish to say this doesn’t have an effect on how they make their music (they are certainly very aware of their ethnic identity, and I think the anxiety of it works into their music), but it would also be foolish to say that, as audience, our own perceptions are unaffected by their ethnicity. Far East Movement’s ethnicity definitely contributes to the disjuncture between their use of Southern Hip Hop language and the aesthetic priorities and themes the group seems to pursue in its work, but I am not sure how much of this is really them and how much of it is really me, and I want to be fair. What is clear is that there is “otherness” all over this thing of a number of different forms.

So, I’ll ask this — for those of you who have heard this song before, how many of you knew it was sung by Asian Americans, and how many of you didn’t? How do you think this colored your experience of the song and its place in political discourse, independently of what is actually part of the art object?

I look forward to responses in the comments!