Yet more Ibiza headrush pop. I predicted a spell ago that this kind of fare might be on its way out. This was pretty stupid of me; pop trends don't run to neatly burn out and disappear like that; they cling around, and get phased out and supplanted, very gradually. 'Give Me Everything' feels like a completely cynical embodiment of the current zeitgeist, a by-numbers bit of "in the club/party/on the floor" sexual hedonism.
The ingredients are all there: 'I Got A Feeling' hands-in-the-air build, 'drop' into a four-to-the-floor Eurohouse beat encircled by serpentine synthlines, a general air of heightened mania. As far as these things go, it's executed relatively well. Pitbull, obviously, says some idiotic things, and his inelegant grunting on the verses is pretty out of tone with the music. But he does better on the 'Dynamite'-copping bridge, actually attached with the thrill of the dead and contributing one of the song's melodic earworms ("I might drink a little more than I should"). Ne-Yo comes on like a big-lunged rave diva with his massive chorus, which anchors the whole thing. His back-and-forth with Nayer is likewise a well-worked moment; overall, this matter is a better construction than 'Party Rock Anthem', its elements better integrated into a dynamic whole.
I've written around this form of song so many times, I'm apt to repeat myself. In point of a considered essay, then, here's a compendium of thoughts:
Party like it's the end of the world
It's difficult to understand the song's titular phrase as anything other than a supplication for sex, but its implications in the mode of the call are certainly wider than that. "We might not get tomorrow," both Ne-Yo and Pitbull warn; so the song feels like an invitation to only throw everything, to deliver "all of you" to the immediate moment. That's a recurring topic in these recent 'in the club' songs - a wilful blinkeredness to the universe beyond the horizons of the society and the night out, an insistence that we be like this is all there is. I lately heard 'Give Me Everything' on the radio back-to-back with Jay Sean's '2012 (It's Not The End)', and was smitten by the coincidence - invoking apocalyptic urgency as an apology to party like there's no tomorrow.
No future for you
It's a well-worn idea that the sexual revolution of the sixties was at least part fuelled by a dread of nuclear apocalypse - the mind being that people were pretty keen to fulfill their urges in as immediate and simple way as possible since, as Ne-Yo sings here, "for all we know, we might not get tomorrow". What's interesting about the co-opting of this approximation by the current crop of party pop is that, musically, songs like 'Give Me Everything' are tapping into the humour of rave music, an optimistic and future-oriented music that coincided with the end of the Cold War, with the lifting of the constant terror of Armageddon, and which peddled a totally different - and, importantly, largely non-sexual - sort of hedonism. The gush of the late '80s promised that there would be a future, and the immediate rush of sex was muffled in favor of an en masse, drug-fuelled sense of pseudo-political community. The rave-pop that dominates today's charts is quite the opposite, its hedonism more shallow, more narcissistic, more wilfully narrow in its horizons, its overall mood one of heightened mania that refuses to dissolve itself into anything.
Born to survive
Of course, one of the masses who kick-started this all 'in the club' business, Lady Gaga - who, at the sentence of writing, is just sit to force in at the top of the album charts, opposite 'Give Me Everything' in the singles - has done something pretty interesting on this score. Since the wider world came knocking at the club door on 'Telephone', she's let it come flooding in, and made a party-pop album about homophobia, identity politics, religion and death.
Me, not working hard?
And there's a connection I didn't see before - Lady Gaga's telephone and that of Bruno Mars; she sings "you can ring if you want, but there's no one home, and you're not gonna reach my telephone"; he declares "don't look like pickin' up the phone, so provide a substance at the tone". For all that 'The Lazy Song' feels like it might be positioned against shiny plastic rave-pop like 'Give Me Everything' - slovenliness versus slickness, staying home versus going out, weed versus pills, langour versus adrenaline, Jamaican guitars versus Ibizan synths - the two actually have plenty in common. Both promote a self-serving, narcissistic hedonism, both spurn the complex pressures and duties of the external world in place to be in the sheer physicality of the moment.
Pitbull rhymes 'Kodak' with 'Kodak' in the foremost two lines of this song
Now that's product placement for you.
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