LMFAO - Sorry for Party Rocking

First, a little back story. The first time I ever heard of LMFAO was three days ago when a teenaged kid's mom asked me to help him find a costume. He described a robot, dressed in a golden suit and kept insisting "You know, from that LMFAO video?" At this point, I thought he was referencing some new, viral Internet cartoon. Thinking I was hip, I went along with it, figuring I could chuckle along with this generation's "End of Ze World." Turns out, I completely forgot about it until today, when I remembered what it was all about, and I asked one of my cashiers if she knew what LMFAO was, she gave me a look that I hope to never receive from my children. It transcended "Are you kidding me?" and went way past "Have you been living under a rock?" It was the look you would give to someone when you suspect that they may, in fact, just be a highly developed earwig who has somehow managed to take over a human being's body.

So, figuring that she was being a douche, I asked another cashier, this one much closer to my own age if I was really missing the boat or if the first girl was exaggerating. He, too, now thinks I'm an earwig.

So, I solemnly made myself a promise that I would find out what this whole LMFAO thing was about. And, after listening to it, I feel more like someone's cantankerous old dad than ever before.

At first, the album sounded like a bunch of nonsense sputtered on top of randomized sounds. I was very resistant, feeling a strong disconnect from the harmonies, melodies, and general sense of cohesion that generally create responses to music.

Then I got really angry, and I started jotting down notes like "this is the soundtrack of trash" and "you don't have to lower your standards, you have to forget what standards are." During the song "Party Rock Anthem," the line "No Lennon or Zeppelin" gets tossed in somewhere around the middle, so I wrote down "you're not fucking kidding."

But then, possibly due to tons of saturation, after listening to it for way longer than the intended 3 minutes at a time, I started to kind of sort of get the appeal. These are guys who are talking about texting (which Blogger's dictionary doesn't recognize as a word) and beer pong and does start to feel like music that is specifically crafted for the rising generation.

What's so strange, for me, about this album is that the worst tracks have become thing singles. "Party Rock Anthem" and "Champagne Showers" represent the worst that LMFAO is offering up. In my notes, I described "Champagne Showers" as being "dumb as fuck, with a listenable rap in the middle." It makes absolutely no sense that these are the big club tracks. The album's best songs, "One Day," "Take It To The Hole," and "All Night Long" have the same heavy-beat appeal but without any of the rampant stupidity. Instead of cramming college-life ideology down your throat, these tracks trust in their own right to exist without making anyone dumber for listening to them.

That being said, I feel strange having now experienced an album that spawned a track that lasted two months on Billboard's Hot 100. I thought I would feel cooler, having listened to this new, insanely popular music. But, like so many times before, the most-loved music of this generation is also pretty damned terrible.

Rating: 0.6 stars